Pamela Robertson Wojcik reviews Immortal Films

Barbara Klinger. Immortal Films: "Casablanca" and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic. Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2023. 368 pp.

6 July 2023

Review by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

In a recent article in The Telegraph, film critic Robbie Collin argues that classic films should be studied like William Makepeace Thackeray, with mandatory film courses on the national curriculum. Claiming that “great films speak the same universal truths that all great art does,”[1] Collin leans on two films that may feel as remote from contemporary schoolchildren as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) is: Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles) and, especially, Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz). At the start of his article, he notes the importance of remembering director Michael Curtiz, “a director whose name means something, regardless of who can recall it” (“C”). At the end, he invokes the famous ending of Casablanca to describe the possibility of school-age children finding new pleasures in older cinema: “As one man once said to another on a foggy north African runway, it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship” (“C”).

Collin’s argument for mandatory film studies aside, what interests me here is his use of Casablanca as an obvious and inarguably valuable example of “the cinematic canon” to anchor his case (“C”). As Barbara Klinger discusses in her terrific new book Immortal Films: Casablanca and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic, “Casablanca belongs to a species of classical-era Hollywood films—films produced by studios roughly between 1917 and 1960—that have enjoyed a particularly sustained and visible public presence since their theatrical debuts” (p. 2). However, where Collin assumes that Casablanca’s canonical status relates to some inherent quality of greatness akin to great literature, Klinger asks us to consider why and how Casablanca, along with Citizen Kane and others, has come to be preserved as what she calls a “popular immortal” (p. 3).

Rather than assume Casablanca’s enduring appeal as survival of the fittest or as a testament to its innate superiority to other less-lauded or forgotten films, Klinger takes seriously Charles Darwin’s notion of adaptation as “‘modification of an organism or its parts that makes it more fit for existence under the conditions of its environment’” (quoted on p. 11). This pliant understanding of adaptation, when applied to films, leads Klinger to view various modifications and reiterations—abridged radio plays; theatrical rereleases; pan-and-scan, edited, or colorized versions for TV; VHS, Blu-Ray, and streaming versions; and other mutations—not as degradations of the originals but as survival strategies that enhance their vitality, make them more broadly accessible, and expand their influence. Klinger focusses on various aftermarkets for films that create the horizon of possibility for them to be “memorable or be forgotten, to rise or fall in canonical rank, to find or lose audiences, to persist . . . or disappear” (p. 10).

Klinger begins her analysis of Casablanca’s aftermarkets with a discussion of the many radio versions produced in 1943 and 1944. Performed not only by the film’s original cast but multiple other ensembles, these radio plays necessarily compressed and streamlined the narrative, highlighting certain characters (Rick, Ilsa, Sam) while downplaying others (Ugarte, Ferrari, Yvonne, Annina), maintaining certain moments—such as when Rick asks Sam to play “As Time Goes By”—while cutting others and eliminating various subplots. This streamlined narrative creates the condition for the film to be remembered nostalgically as being about romance and wit. As the film goes into rerelease and then repertory theatres, and especially in the decades-long tradition of showings at exam-week festivals at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Klinger notes that the film has been elevated to cult film for youth that becomes even more disentangled from the war, and is taken as an ahistorical instance of Humphrey Bogart’s cool, masculine star image. While the romantic reading of the film lends itself to being packaged as an “excusably anachronistic” Valentine’s Day special on VHS, a parallel series of anniversary rereleases on physical video between 1986 and 2016 construct the film as a classic, celebrated in various best-of lists and packaged as a historical document of Hollywood’s golden age (p. 178). As Klinger notes, such canonization not only repeats and reinforces the importance of Casablanca, but also ties it more broadly to the history of Hollywood and props up the whiteness and conservatism of the canon (a point underscored by Collin’s linking it to Thackeray). The persistent iteration of Casablanca’s timeless appeal and links to tradition ignores the ways in which it was shaped by the time-bound historical circumstances of a segregated Hollywood and displaces films by Black, woman, and other marginalized directors and/or independent films from attaining the status of classic.

As Klinger’s final chapter indicates, the era of streaming may, in its democratizing plurality, “operate against a significant place for older classic films in its economy of exhibition and viewing” (p. 244). It remains to be seen whether Casablanca and other popular immortals will continue to adapt as “content,” or whether the ecosystem of the aftermarkets will no longer provide the condition for their continued existence. Perhaps Casablanca will shift from being a fun Valentine’s Day ritual or beloved classic to belabored viewing for bored highschoolers.

[1] Robbie Collin, “Why Casablanca Must Be Taught Alongside the Brontës in Schools,” Telegraph, 8 June 2023, www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/children-taught-film-schools-national-curriculum/; hereafter abbreviated “C.”