Some thoughts on your interesting take on Ilsa:
First, she breaks up with Rick by sending him a letter that raises more questions than answers, instead of showing up at the train station and telling him the truth in person. In the letter, she never apologizes for abruptly dumping him.
This is explained later on: Victor had escaped from the prison camp, was sick, in hiding, and she had no time to show up at the very crowded and chaotic train station. She also explains to Rick that her marriage to Victor was a secret even to their closest friends, because of Victor's position in the Underground. By saying nothing, she is adhering to the needs of her life with Victor.
She is probably in a state of shock and panic because she had been under the impression that Victor had been killed. In retrospect, I respect the fact that she was even able to find the time and presence of mind to write the letter. Remember too, that she's young. In the Paris section, she says that ten years before she was having a brace put on her teeth. She would have likely been between 10 and 12 years old then, so she's about 22 or so in Paris (and not much older in Casablanca).
Second, when she shows up at Rick’s Cafe years later and encounters him as he is immersed in alcohol-soaked emotional pain and lingering bitterness from the break-up, she never apologizes for hurting him. Instead, she falsely claims that “I can understand how you feel” and launches into her fairy tale about meeting Lazlo. When Rick angrily interrupts, she again invalidates his feelings by leaving in a huff.
The timing is bad. But she hasn't come to launch into a fairy tale, but to tell him about her relationship with Victor, and why she hadn't been able to meet Rick at the station. Rick is not a condition to hear her out. She doesn't know how to respond to a person in his condition. He finishes the encounter by implying that she is a loose woman ("Who was it you left me for? Was it Lazslo, or were there others in between? Or aren't you the kind that tells."). This is when she leaves: it's clear that neither of them is in a position to communicate clearly.
Third, when Rick and Ilsa encounter each other the next day in the outdoor marketplace, it is Rick who apologizes for his behavior the night before. Ilsa fails to accept the apology, fails to apologize for her own bad treatment of Rick, and then invalidates his feelings once more by lecturing him about his bitterness.
Given how that last remark went, Rick is correct to apologize. At this point, Ilsa and Victor have just come from a nerve-wracking interview with Strasser and Renault, and about to try their luck with Ferrari. Ilsa is the one on edge now; I don't get a lecture from her response to Rick. She says he is no longer the man she remembers, that she knows they didn't know each other very well in Paris and that maybe it's better to just remember those days and not last night. And when he implies again that she'll leave Victor, she reveals that they are husband and wife (which is actually a huge move toward trusting him rather than lecturing him).
Fourth, Ilsa stays on the low road by playing nice to Rick only because he has something she wants. When she confronts him in his living quarters, she still doesn’t care about Rick and how she’s hurt him, instead bullying him to turn over the letters of transit. When Rick refuses to cave in, she pulls out a gun and turns on the tears.
Well, this road is no lower than Rick's in this scene. Here, neither of them brings out the best in each other. She is desperate to save her husband; he is drowning in the last bits of the poison he's been drinking since Paris. But Rick's radar for certain things is high right now, and if she didn't care about him, he'd pick it up, especially after they spend hours together, and he finally hears what she wanted to tell him at the bar. It has a positive effect on him. It clears that poison; he knows *why* now. If there had been no truth in the telling and the feeling, he would have finished even more bitter; but he finishes as a human being again.
My conclusion is that, among the four main characters, there are no cowards or weaklings (if anyone, Renault comes the closest to that definition, but I say he's trying to survive and tread water till the end). They are four lost people who find themselves in Casablanca, who change each other's lives, and forge bonds of understanding under the extreme pressures of World War II.
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RobbieCalifornia
7 years ago
ilsa said, referring to Sam: " Who is that boy playing the piano?" I know it was a different time. Rick treated Sam pretty much as an equal, considering Sam was his employee.
So did they have to have Bergman refer to a grown-ass black man as "boy"? She could have said fellow, person, or even MAN.
I love the movie, but this bugged me. I've seen the movie many times and this is the first I noticed it. Not to get all PC, it just seemed so asinine.
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brux (14666)
3 years ago
I think everyone sees that. Why did they do that I have wondered. I think it was to show the hierarchical nature of the world, and the fact that Rick was better than the average man in society, which allows him to be a man that is redeemed at the end of the movie.
It is also a concern that despite what Rick says Sam is in a way sold off to Sydney Greenstreet, even though this salary is doubled.
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Owlwise (1485)
10 months ago
It is the one false note in the film, because Ilsa is European & most likely would never use such an expression. Whereas an American, even a basically decent American, more than likely would at that time without giving it a thought.
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Ace_Spade (9334)
10 months ago
I always find it fun seeing those little notes of difference between characters written to be - in this case European - clashing with their - usually American - screenwriters' idiosyncracies.
The way casting worked in film, I sometimes wonder if Sam was written to be much younger. They still do often cast people well out of the age bracket so they can get a better actor in a younger role, but in Old Hollywood in-particular there were a lot of characters who were meant to be teenagers being played by people who were clearly in their late 20s (or older).
Could that be the case?
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brux (14666)
10 months ago
What else could she have said? "Man", "Gentlemen", "musician", "person" ... it was a sign of the times and France had an empire at the time that America did not really have until after WWII, and France was very brutal to their colonies.
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Owlwise (1485)
6 months ago
She might simply have said, "Who is that playing the piano?"
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TrentnQuarantino (8391)
2 months ago
But they are trying to set her character up, and I think they did this for a reason to tell us about Ilsa. That is, she is a flighty little girl who though naive is trying to better herself and that's why she is in tow with Victor Laslo.
She has a reason to care more about Laslo than herself now that she sees the world for what it really is. Her time with Rick, not that it could not have grown into more for both of them, was girlish escapist fun, which of course she was yearning for after thinking Laslo was dead.
This movie has a depth that only a very few other movies really have and it takes a while and a few viewings to realize that appreciate it.
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Owlwise (1485)
2 months ago
Point well-made & taken. :)
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TrentnQuarantino (8391)
2 months ago
The thing is that it is missed by most viewers, or debated.
It is very easy to read a lot of things into this movie, and not
ridiculous stuff like it was a dream, or an alternate universe,
like today's movies.
To his credit, Bogie, Rick, realizes this and puts things in
perspective at the end, and does something just as noble
as Laslo, which will, or might, never be seen or appreciated.
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