Your weekly break-down of a popular movie or television episode to see what a screenwriter—or any writer—can take away from what’s on screen: what worked, what didn’t, and how you can use what’s popular to craft better stories.

We’re changing it up this week, digging into the vaults to examine a classic film through a modern lens. After all, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

Casablanca, the classic, romantic crime drama that adorns nearly every “Greatest” movie list in existence. More has been written about 1942’s Casablanca than possibly any other American film, so I can barely scratch the surface of a such a treasured and studied piece of cinema. 

Still, after watching this iconic story with an eye towards screenwriting takeaways, I was floored to find that this movie has aged much better than I remember, echoes chilling modern parallels to our current state of the world, and is just way more fun than cinema’s stuffy reverence towards it would suggest.

*WARNING: Spoilers Ahead!*

1. We learn about someone before meeting them.
   This is an old trick, almost to the point of being cliché. I said almost. But this takeaway is classic, because it works. In Casablanca, we quickly learn that everyone goes to “Rick’s”. It’s the place to be seen and to get what you need. It’s legendary; a neutral spot for warring factions, a safe haven for even the crooks. This leaves us with the question, who is this Rick, that he could wrangle this menagerie of characters? While Sam (our Greek Chorus) sings “It Had to be You” as we enter, we still have no sign of this illusive Rick fella. Then, we find out Rick won’t drink with his customers—just one of his many rules. What’s this guy’s deal? Even before we see his face, we see a half-empty bottle with a drink clutched in hand. Finally, we lay eyes on Rick. Now, Rick hasn’t said a word yet, but we’ve already learned so much about him—and we have even more questions. Folks, that’s how you introduce a main character that movie stars will be climbing over each other to play.

2. The setting makes the movie.
   Mos Eisley and its wretched hive of scum and villainy. Fargo and its use of ‘Minnesota Nice’. The Shining and the curse of The Overlook Hotel. Breaking Bad and the heartless New Mexico Desert. These great stories are defined by their setting. But they owe it all to Casablanca, the granddaddy of setting as a character. Often imitated, never duplicated. This ancient port city in Western Morocco is filled to the brim with crooks and naïve city slickers, hype men and pickpockets, slave traders, sex traders, street hustlers, refugees, floozies, gamblers, disgraced bankers, Czech revolutionaries, Norwegian freedom fighters, French murderers—and that’s all before the Nazis even show up. It isn’t so much a melting pot as a teeming cauldron ready to boil over. Don’t ever underestimate setting; it’s easy to forget or forego with all the modern talk of character and conflict these days. But just remember, the city of Casablanca is so important to this movie we spend nearly seven minutes of the movie winding through it and watching it live, breath and kill before even setting our sights on a hero or villain. That should tell you how important setting is. Before we see Bogie or Bergman, we spend plenty of screen time in the city itself.

3. Actions speak louder than words.
   “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “We’ll always have Paris.” "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” "This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." “Play it again, Sam.” Yes, that last one is apocryphal and not exactly in the movie. Those are just a few of Casablanca’s iconic lines; sayings that have become part of our culture’s fabric. It’s funny to write this next takeaway, because Casablanca is perhaps the most quoteworthy movie in all of cinema. But in spite of its legendary status in terms of dialogue, Casablanca is a textbook example of actions speaking louder than words. Throughout the film, characters are constantly saying one thing and then doing another. Remember, your audience judges what they see a character do and not what they hear a character say. Rick says he “doesn’t stick his neck out for anybody” and that he’s just a “simple saloon keeper.”  Seems pretty straightforward, right? Yet we see him tearing up German checks, cheat at gambling so he loses money to help a poor young couple, and even sacrifices his own safety to help the escape of a resistance fighter. This isn’t just about how a character acts and reacts—it’s about how they view the world. Casablanca sets a high bar, distilling character worldviews down to the very lines they speak. We learn that “Rick doesn’t drink with customers.”  This tells us all we need to know about Rick and that way, when he breaks his own rule, we immediately know how important Ilsa is to Rick. Tell your reader one thing, but show them another and they’ll be hooked on your every word.

4. Old tricks for a new era.
   Casablanca does so much right. But it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t point out what parts of the movie haven’t aged as well, or where the film’s storytelling style is no longer as relevant as it once was. In the beginning, we open on a huge prologue filled with narration, intercut with actual newsreel footage and a clinical explanation of the state of the Nazi expansion upon the world. Modern screenwriters don’t do these big prologues much anymore. Sure, Star Wars does its screen crawl and Lord of the Rings did plenty of prologues, but those are archaic forms (let’s remember, A New Hope is no longer a modern movie and Middle Earth is hardly fresh IP). That being said, it would be interesting to see a modern film tackle a classic, Casablanca-style prologue. Another area where the storytelling feels like something from a bygone era is the use of a huge, momentum-stopping flashback in the center of Casablanca. The movie all but stops to revisit Rick and Ilsa’s final days in France as the Nazis invaded; a leisurely stretch of movie that ends with Rick’s heartbreak. If this were a modern movie, chances are good these events would be seen in brief images and quick flashes tied to items and sentences spoken by the characters—if we even did a flashback at all. Heck, if Casablanca were made today, they would probably try to do multiple timelines à la Westworld.  Even though storytelling takeaways like prologues and big flashbacks don’t “work” in a modern sense, it doesn’t mean they won’t come roaring back. Hollywood is cyclical, and anyone who works in Hollywood will tell you, the old tricks don’t work only if they’re done poorly. Hang tight—soon the wordy prologue and the massive midpoint flashback will be everywhere on next year’s Black List.

5. The Bittersweet Ending.
   Casablanca isn’t a clear-cut story. The bad guys do good things, the good guys do bad things. Infidelity, lies, murder and betrayal are the order of the day. Casablanca was a pro-American, pro-wartime film that functioned as a call-to-arms with a heavy theme of personal sacrifice. While some of that resonates still resonates today, Humphrey Bogart is no longer the epitome of cool, most of us would have to look up who the Vichy were and probably couldn’t even find Casablanca on a map. But what does still work in our 21st Century is Casablanca’s complexity. Idealism, pragmatism, heartbreak and patriotism battle for supremacy in the desert of North Africa. Ilsa escapes with Laszlo and Rick doesn’t get the girl. That’s not a happy ending. At best, it’s bittersweet. This is a film where not everyone who behaves like a villain gets their comeuppance: Renault walks away unscathed for plenty of unseemly behavior, while Ferrari buys Sam and Rick’s Place even after admitting to being the local crime boss. Ilsa is an adulterer and Laszlo is a workaholic zealot. I could go on, but the point is that this is a movie of complex behaviors and moral tightrope walking. And if this movie were made today, Rick and Ilsa would escape, they’d have killed Hitler somehow in the process, and Laszlo and Renault would’ve been edited from the final cut (after all, there’s not much room for ambiguity anymore). Therefore, perhaps what we love best about Casablanca is not what it is, but what it is not. This isn’t an easy movie. The more you watch it, the more endearing it becomes. It is a cynical story with a heart of gold (just like Rick). Casablanca defies simple definitions; it is complex, like the era it was made in (and not unlike our modern world of politics, war and immigration). As a screenwriter, it’s important to remember that complex characters resonate long beyond the shelf-life of your plot.

Final Takeaway: Casablanca deserves its place among the classics, delivering equal parts cynicism and sentimentality in glorious black and white. Writers (new and old) should take note—there is a reason we all keep coming back to Rick’s Café.