The Books of My Life: We'll Always Have Casablanca

I can no longer recall when it was that I first saw the Warner Brothers film Casablanca (1942). It was probably sometime in the late sixties and I probably saw it on TV. In the 1960s and 1970s one could, after all, see Hollywood classics on the television, particularly on independent TV channels, late at night and on the weekends. Needless to say I have seen Casablanca many times since and I never grow tired of it.

Like so many others who have talked about Casablanca and what it meant to them I became enamoured of Casablanca and Bogart. I grew up in the cinephilic and countercultural sixties and seventies after all and saw as many classic Hollywood and Bogie films as I could throughout my teenage and twentysomething years. I marveled at Bogart's acting and identified with his character Rick Blaine and that characters romanticism masquerading as cynicism. I marveled at Ingrid Bergman's acting, beauty, and commitments. I wanted to kill Nazis when the refugees haunting Rick's Café Américain sang La Marseillaise during a musical war against the Nazis at Rick's, a scene that proves to be a turning point for Rick and for the film.

Noah Isenberg's We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie (New York: Norton, 2017) takes readers on a nostalgia tinged excursion through the writing process, casting decisions, legacy of, and meaning of the film to many, undermining several myths and legends that have grown up around the film since it was made in the process. Isenberg's book, which is aimed at a broad audience, will appeal to those interested in cultural history and in Casablanca. I hope some academic will, at some point, build on Isenberg's work on the meaning of Casablanca to film goers over the years and do a more extensive systematic and analytic exploration of the meaning of Casablanca across time and across space. Recommended.