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.
*****
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.
*****
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