Page 352 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 32: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and
Intertextual Collage’ (Intertextual Analysis)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
32.1 Intertextual Analysis
32.2 Oedipus in North Africa
32.3 “Here's Looking. . .”
32.4 “. . . at You, Kid”
32.5 “Moonlight and Love Songs Never Out of Date”
32.6 America Dreaming
32.7 Summary
32.8 Key-Words
32.9 Review Questions
32.10 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss Umberto Eco's Casablanca.
• Analyse Casablanca's intertextual history.
Introduction

In Casablanca the world is a movie set (with a few newsreel cutaways) and America is shown as
the universal refuge -- or at least Hollywood is. Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson are just
about the only Americans in the cast (another version of Huck and Jim). The rest are all foreigners
-- Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet -- lucky to be spending the war in Culver
City. Most of these were even actual refugees from fascism -- Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Marcel
Dalio, S.Z. Sakall, Curt Bois, and, of course, Conrad Veidt as the villainous Nazi, playing out his
own version of From Caligari to Hitler by climaxing a career that began with the role of Cesare the
Somnambulist.
That Lorre, Sakall, and director Michael Curtiz were all born in Hungary can't, of itself, account
for the movie's popularity in that country where, I'm told, it is traditionally telecast on New Year's
Eve. This casbah is universal. If any Hollywood movie exemplifies the "genius of the system," it is
surely Casablanca -- a film whose success was founded on almost as many types of skill as
varieties of luck. (It's ironic that aspiring screenwriters take Casablanca's script as a text; rewritten
many times, the film was virtually made up as its makers went along.) Mixing genres with wild
abandon, Casablanca became a cult film precisely because as Umberto Eco put it, "it is not one
movie. It is movies." All Hollywood movies that is, with a soupçon of the French cinema of the late
'30's. In other words, Casablanca was the culture of the West, everything we were fighting for in
World War II, brought together in one neat package.
It is because Casablanca is "movies" that it continues to haunt Hollywood. The film was replicated
throughout the '40s and into the Cold War -- reaching its nadir with the 1951 Hong Kong in which
Ronald Reagan (once, according to a Warner Bros. press release, a candidate for the original cast)
plays the cynical American adventurer with the secret heart of gold. Ten years later, Casablanca

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