As Time Goes By, More Thoughts On, "CASABLANCA"

Yes, yes, yes, I know, you know all about it, all there is to know and you're getting sick of it already.    Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not!  This film endures, and, like that ticking clock you cannot see in a stranger's home, it's always there, in the background, somewhere, even when you don't hear it, you do.  And it never leaves you.

So, it struck me, upon last viewing the film, that at the conclusion of, "Casablanca," we here the strains of, "La Marseillaise," and NOT "As Time Goes By," which I always thought much more appropriate to the events of the film.   After all, our hearts have just been torn out of our chests by the look on Ilsa Lund's face as she realizes she will never see Rick again, and by the look on Rick's face as he realizes the outcome of his choice is about to be played out in reality.  Ilsa will soon be on that plane and never heard from or seen again. 

And we are devastated. 

So, why, then, did the director, or the producer, or whoever the hell makes those choices, choose the French National Anthem to end the film, and not, the song of the two lovers?  

Perhaps the answer lies in so many answers concerning questions pertaining to that film.   They didn't know what they were doing at the time.    Surely, had they known the finale sooner, had time to ponder the high melodrama of the script's end, they would have realized that, "As Time Goes By," played during the final, "The End," would have left the crowd in bits and pieces of emotional wrecks.  

Yes, that could be the answer.   I could be.   But it's not.  It cannot be.   Why?   Because so much of what is RIGHT with this film was made under the same circumstances, and ALL of those choices were right.    The "collective unconscious," of the crew, the writers, the director, instinctively, I'm convinced, made right decision after right decision.   So, maybe this one was right too?  

After so many years is it possible that I've been wrong all along?   Me?   Wrong?   Those two words just do not go together.  

Now, I have re-thought it.   "La Marseillaise," was the right damned choice, after all.  The film, it's power, it's success lies not in the tragedy of these two lovers.   As Rick rightly points out they don't amount to a hill of beans.   Recall that the song occurs at the pivotal moment of the film (which points to the same answer).   When the crowd "invades" the German's occupation of the piano, and triumphs, we are ecstatic.  At that moment we ARE French, we are an occupied people, yearning to be free, and showing our captors that they will never vanquish us.   It is the song of all oppressed peoples of all times, and we know it, in our  blood, and we rejoice.   

Consider, that in addition to that, all those other fabulous characters, thrown together in a great big mess, -- the Carl, the waiter,  Captain Renault, the French Maitre d', the soldiers, German, French, whoever, Ugarte, the Ferrari, Yvonne, Major Strasser, and the rest, that make this film such a joy.  This was THEIR story, in essence a story about the world, and all it's people, now, stretching back deep into all our pasts, and projecting far into the future of the world.  

And the creators of the film made us love them all.  Admit it.  You love Strasser.    How could you not?   He's so despicably bad and Conrad Veidt is so wonderfully good.

So when we hear La Marseilles at the conclusion of the film, we are uplifted, not made to weep, because the human race, we wish to believe, is full of hope, and willing to fight for justice.   WE, THE PEOPLE, are what "Casablanca," is about, our worst fears, our greatest hopes.