Self-Sacrifice in ‘Casablanca’: Not Just for the Men

Thank goodness for Casablanca, an unquestionable answer to give when asked the loaded question “what’s your favorite movie?”

As Roger Ebert put it, “Casablanca is The Movie. There are greater movies. More profound movies. Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance…” but it doesn’t matter. I’ve never met a person who doesn’t love Casablanca, and I’m not sure I care to.

Casablanca is one of those movies that “has it all”: sweeping romance, scathing political commentary, pristine dialogue (every third line is a famous quotation), surprising amounts of humor (“What watch?” “Ten watch.” “Such much?” “You will get along beautiful in America”).

But what stands out among all this entertainment, what makes Casablanca feel like a better movie than say, Raiders of the Lost Ark, are the stirring emotions of self-sacrifice. And discussions of the capital-G Greatness of Casablanca are often centered on masculine concepts of nobility. Despite all his regular protests that he won’t “stick his neck out,” Rick Does the Right Thing and gives the letters of transit to his love Ilsa and her husband (and major player in the Czech resistance) Victor Laszlo. For the good of the world.

And perhaps as a feminist I should take issue with how Rick appears to decide for Ilsa what she is going to do with her life—where to live, which man to be with. But throughout the movie, Ilsa chooses to be with Laszlo, from abandoning Rick at the train station in Paris to threatening him with a gun to get the letters of transit. Rick’s big speech at the end just reconfirms the rightness of her own decisions.

It’s not just, as Sally Albright puts it, a practical decision, choosing “to be first lady of Czechloslovakia” over “living in Casablanca married to a man who runs a bar.” Ilsa chooses to be the proverbial Great Woman behind Great Man Victor Laszlo, even though it means choosing an admiring love over a passionate one. She knows, well before Rick tells her, that she is what keeps Laszlo going. Ilsa’s self-sacrifice shouldn’’ be swept away by focus on Rick’s sudden shift back to acting noble.

A minor subplot also sees Rick’s goodness overshadowing hard choices made by women. One of the first times we see Rick act nobly is when Annina, a Bulgarian newlywed, considers having sex with Captain Renault in order to obtain the exit visas they cannot afford. Annina is distraught by the idea of breaking her marriage vows and exchanging sex for escape, but is desperate enough that she’s nearly decided to do it as she seeks Rick’s absolution. Rick chooses to make it irrelevant by letting her husband win at his roulette table. Again, Rick’s minor intervention distracts from the great personal sacrifice a woman makes in the face of the horrible circumstances of Nazi-occupied Europe.

It’s all right that Rick’s noble actions get the most attention, as he is the main character. I just wish to highlight that the women of Casablanca also choose to set aside First World Problems to address World War II problems. We must celebrate the nobility and selflessness of Ilsa and Annina alongside Laszlo and Rick.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who must keep in mind she is not threatened by Nazis as she waits, and waits, and waits for a visa extension.