In our imperfect world, many of us escape the complexities of everyday real world life and find ourselves enveloped into cinematic masterpieces. One such masterpiece is the movie Casablanca, in which we have love and betrayal at the root of the film, giving it its life source. .
Casablanca has the stigma of being a propaganda movie. However if that were the case, Casablanca would have been forgotten just like the last time a French army won a war, or battle. The film has transcended time because of the romantic sacrifice, and that is where the main interest of this film remains today. Stripped of the political surroundings, the inevitable ending tells us that some things cannot be repeated, that we must make do with only our memories of what was good, as love cannot always last forever. Just because we may love a certain person does not always mean that we will be with that person for the rest of our lives.
As I watched this, I was struck with the feeling that this movie was meant to be something else entirely, and that time has changed the original origins of the film into something more or less a romantic movie. During its time however, Casablanca was made during the middle of the war, and knowing this fact colures much of the movie's content. In a sense, the film is expert wartime propaganda, meant to direct our emotions toward something larger, and more demanding, than silly love affairs. The story was a unique way to make the point that there are things larger than our petty personal concerns, and that is echoed in Rick's (Bogart) famous final speech to IIlsa (Bergman). Rick's point is that the problems of three people don't matter a hill of beans in this crazy world - and the message was as much for the audience as it was for IIlsa. By succumbing to love, these people will create damage upon that free world by ignoring the threat. And at the same time, we must push away our own petty concerns and think of the people who are trying to bring good to the horror that is the war against Germany.