THE MARSEILLAISE SCENE FROM CASABLANCA
TAKING DOWN THE NAZIS WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC
NATIONAL ANTHEMS SUCK. They’re tubthumping, militaristic and usually include naff pleas to some god or king or, in the case of the UK, both. But every so often you get one that’s so genuinely rousing that it inspires passion far beyond its homeland. That’s the case for ‘La Marseillaise’, the French national anthem, and it rings out around the world at least partly due to Casablanca’s most uplifting scene.
It starts, as so many shouting matches do, with a knees-up down the pub. A few visiting Nazis are living it large, and have a sing-song to ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (‘The Watch On The Rhine’), an old German patriotic number. They’re so loud and obnoxious (the latter probably goes without saying) that Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) hear them from Rick’s office upstairs. Laszlo can’t stand idly by — and his reaction becomes one of the great defiant stands of movie history.
Laszlo orders the house band to play ‘La Marseillaise’ — banned in Nazi-occupied and Vichy France at the time and by default only sung by the Free French Resistance. They look to Rick, who gives just a tiny nod. Victor, his face fervent, leads them as every patron in the café stands up and joins in, singing so hard it looks like their lungs might burst and entirely drowning out the Nazi song. One man punches the air, almost involuntarily. You suddenly see why Victor might really be a leader of men
— even as his wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) despairs because she knows that their escape from Casablanca just became ten times more difficult.
Director Michael Curtiz personally cast many of the extras for the scene, using European refugees from World War II, a conflict the US had not yet joined when Casablanca went into production. Henreid himself was an Austrian Jew who had fled the regime, as had Conrad ‘Major Strasser’ Veidt, who played Nazis but refused ever to portray them positively.
Really, it’s Yvonne (Madeleine Lebeau) who takes us through the scene. Lebeau and her Jewish husband had also escaped to the US via Lisbon just like every hopeful refugee in Casablanca, but there the resemblance to the weak-willed Yvonne ends. We first see Yvonne early in the film as Rick’s jilted ex, then starting a fight when she enters the bar on a Nazi’s arm. As she weeps her way through her national anthem, however, you can see the Frenchwoman rediscovering her backbone. “In her own way, she may constitute an entire second front,” quips Claude Rains’ dissolute Louis Renault when she arrives with the Nazi — but it might just become true. By the end she shouts, “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” and you hope she’s set for better things.
Casablanca wasn’t the first to use ‘La Marseillaise’ to express defiance and hope in wartime: Jean Renoir had already done so in
La Grande Illusion a few years before. Still, this is a miraculous scene, enough to move you to tears, and it hit wartime audiences like a train — though it was by no means a foregone conclusion. The original plan was to use the Nazi anthem ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, but that was still in copyright and Warner Bros. didn’t want any trouble about paying to screen the film in neutral countries. The War Department, meanwhile, worried that the film would harm relations with Vichy France, were unsure whether they could rely on the Free French or if they should try to win over the collaborators. Eventually, of course, the US would follow Renault and Rick, who set off to join the fight back in Brazzaville in the film’s final moments.
“If Laszlo’s presence in a café can inspire this unfortunate demonstration, what more will his presence in Casablanca bring on?” snarls Strasser as the anthem wraps up and he orders the closure of Rick’s Café Américain. But he is too late: the soaring song has worked. Rick has rediscovered his idealism, as has Yvonne. Laszlo has lived up to his promise. Ilsa has realised the danger they are in, and resolved to ask Rick for help. And the Nazis have shown their weakness. They can be defeated if everyone else pulls together instead of singing from different hymn sheets. As Laszlo says to Rick soon after, in the film’s final scene, “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.”