Is Casablanca Really a Western?

To effect this displacement from the global to the individual, Casablanca, like so many of Classic Hollywood's most popular movies, employed a reluctant hero story, clearly derived from the western, and perfectly tailored for the film's ideological project: the overcoming of its audience's latent anxiety about American intervention in World War II. The narrative traced Rick's progress from self-centered detachment to active involvement in the Allied cause, with the plot turning on whether he would choose to help Laszlo, a major underground leader escaped from a concentration camp.

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This mythology's effectiveness derived from its strategy of reducing national ideological tensions to the manageable size of outlaw hero-official hero conflicts. Within this pattern (which typically developed around the western conventions summarized by Shane), the self-determining, morally detached outlaw hero came to represent America itself. The town's claims on that hero, by contrast, stood for those historical developments (domestic or international) that required collective action. The importance of the reluctant hero story lay in its ability to preserve for the whole ideology both possibilities: individual autonomy and communitarian participation.

As Classic Hollywood repeatedly demonstrated, the western conventions proved adaptable to an enormous number of issues confronting the national ideology: the Depression, class divisiveness, conflicts between the family and personal ambition, or between active and contemplative lifestyles.

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Having established Laszlo's dependence on the law, however, Casablanca used the stock western depiction of the legal system's ultimate inadequacy as a guarantor of the official hero's safety. As in most westerns, the villains in Casablanca could control the legal mechanism to their own advantage. "The Germans have outlawed miracles," Ferrari warned Laszlo, and Renault used the flimsiest legal pretext to close Rick's cafe: "I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on here!" he proclaimed, pocketing his own roulette winnings. Unlike Laszlo, Rick recognized the Germans' eagerness to manipulate the law. His proposed scheme to deliver Laszlo into the Gestapo's hands offered an apparent certitude of legal proof: Laszlo would be apprehended in the act of purchasing the stolen letters of transit, thereby making himself an accessory to the German couriers' murder.

While Laszlo relied on the law, Rick, like all western heroes, took it into his own hands, replacing an insufficient, corrupt system with his individual standards of right and wrong. His willingness to operate outside the law preserved Laszlo, who, left to his own devices, might never have escaped Casablanca.

Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (1985), 91-92, 102