Casablanca
Clip | 4m 36sVideo has Closed Captions
Host Mikayla Daniels details some of the creative production techniques employed by this film.
Host Mikayla Daniels details some of the creative production techniques employed by this classic film. We also discuss some of the major themes happening, including American Isolationism.
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SATURDAY NIGHT CINEMA is a local public television program presented by KSPS PBS
Casablanca
Clip | 4m 36sVideo has Closed Captions
Host Mikayla Daniels details some of the creative production techniques employed by this classic film. We also discuss some of the major themes happening, including American Isolationism.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Welcome to my web comments on the Saturday Night Cinema broadcasts of “Casablanca” from 1942.
I'm Mikayla Daniels here to share a bit more about the film.
Casablanca is a well known film and is talked about in film schools and movie clubs for decades.
It's both a love story and a story about war created during wartime.
As you can imagine, that can have a lot of effects on a film's production.
For Casablanca, because the film was made during World War Two, the production was not allowed to film at an airport after dark for security reasons.
Instead, it used a soundstage with a small cardboard cutout plane and forced perspective to give the illusion that the plane was full size.
They used little people to portray the crew preparing the plane for takeoff.
Now, this is actually one of the things I remember from film school about this film.
I saw a whole presentation that showed this technique.
It's such a creative and cheap way to achieve that effect.
I do worry that the more we get into digital effects on film, that maybe some of the creativity like that drops away.
Now everyone talks about the love story theme of this film, but what about how the film serves as a theme of American isolationism?
Rick takes pride in the fact that he's an American expatriate, almost to the point that it's in an entire personality.
Even the cafe he runs, it's called Rick's Cafe Américain, which ultimately is a capitalist business intent on serving drinks and entertainment to anyone, including Nazis.
He tried to act as though he's neutral to it all and just some guy running a business.
But it doesn't work like that in reality.
Or in this film, he finds himself becoming involved unintentionally when a young refugee comes to him, desperate for a way to make enough money to pay for her and her husband's escape.
Rick quietly has one of the men, rig the roulette table in the back, so she wins.
There are several other instances in this film that mirror America and its policies.
At the start of World War Two.
Again, remember that when this film was in production, the United States was committed to isolationist foreign policy in regard to World War Two, World War One, and the Great Depression had collapsed the American viewpoint into one of self-preservation.
Set on noninvolvement in European and Asian conflicts and non entanglement in international politics.
And then Pearl Harbor happened in December of 1941, which made it all very real to the American people and changed the position of the United States.
It was shortly after that when the script for Casablanca started to be written.
Writing started in early 1942 and was finished on set while the film was in production in May of 1942.
So while this film was in production, it was newly wartime in the US, and yet films were still being made.
People were still going to work and society was changing.
But even before Pearl Harbor, this story was in the works.
Playwrights Joan Allison and Murray Burnett co-created the character of Rick and his cafe, along with the characters of Sam, Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund for a play called Everyone Comes to Rick's in 1940.
Having watched the political change that was sweeping through Europe, the pair intended it as a cautionary tale about the perils of fascism.
The play was meant for Broadway but never made it, and instead Warner Brothers bought the script and all the rights, including character rights, for $20,000, which was record breaking at the time.
For context, the studio only paid 8000 for The Maltese Falcon.
So in times of war or great social conflict, look to the artists to see the reality.
Remember that art doesn't live in a bubble and that movies, books, and other forms of art are reflections of what is happening around the creators at the time of creation.
I hope you enjoyed my extended comments on Casablanca, and be sure to look around our Facebook page and KSPS.org for more blogs, polls, and trivia from all the hosts and Movie Maverick Mike.
And don't forget to tune in to Saturday Night Cinema on KSPS PBS.
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