I was talking to a teenager about great movies this week, and I brought up Casablanca, which I’d first seen at his age. I remarked that we were struck by the incredible number of trite aphorisms in the movie, which of course it created. (“Here’s lookin’ at you kid”, “We’ll always have Paris”, “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”, “Round up the usual suspects”…)
However, Casablanca is also a movie with a resonance today that shook me on recounting it. When I watched this movie as a teen I didn’t understand the subtext of the movie. The movies captures the plight of refugees victimized by a war of aggression and the fight against fascism. Even more poignant, most of the cast was international, and many were refugees of the fascist regime of the day, either because of their ethnicity, sexual orientation or other reasons.
I now think of this scene as one of the most moving in cinema, not just because it sets the whole movie’s conflict in a musical number scarcely two minutes long in a way that’s almost a short movie in itself encapsulating the essence of the conflict into a music video, but also because the “refugees” in a movie about refugees aren’t “just acting”. Most of the people in this movie are international citizens, and many were themselves refugees and victims of a fascist war of aggression.
In particular, Yvonne, who has two close-ups in the clip below, is played by a Jewish refugee from occupied France, having escaped by the skin of her teeth less than two years earlier. Many of the others have similar stories.
The tears she sheds while singing the national anthem of her occupied homeland are genuine, and the words fit those who have lost everything, but stand against wars of aggression:
Let’s go children of the fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny’s
Bloody flag is raised! …
Grab your weapons, citizens!
Form your battalions!
Let us march! Let us march!
May impure blood
Water our fields!