The film is headed for an airport that has sound-stage written all over it. When they get there, three people will work out the allotment of two letters of transit. They all wear hats, which cast stylish noir shadows of longing and regret on their starry faces. The story goes that the film-makers hardly knew what the final arrangement was going to be.
The set-up reminds us that not too many Hollywood films of the golden era explored the deal romance might make with life. Most lovers are shrugged off at movie's end to live "happily ever after". But no love is stronger than the type that endures separation, frustration or problem. People looking at each other are more palpably in love than those in each other's arms. After all, the uncinematic thing about an embrace is that you can't see the faces. So the cross-cut close-ups of Bergman and Bogart at the end, in the fog, are among the most enduring images of Hollywood romance.
At a more inward level, the cross-cut close-ups rhyme with another fond gaze – ours for the screen. If the movies are the dream of enhanced sight (looking past surfaces) then nothing is more brimming with love than faces looking at each other. It may follow from this that the real object of films like Casablanca was not just that we love Rick and Ilsa, or even that we fall for the issue of the war, but that we are in love with the movies, and their practice of desirous looking.
Of course, the last scene is more than that: it's the opportunity to put a bullet in Major Strasser (that generous villain – because he always does the stupid thing, not always a Nazi trait). And the film then ordains the necessary marriage of two fatalists – Rick and Louis, Claude Rains' Vichy policeman. When Louis presides over Strasser's removal, he is signing his own letter of transit. Thus the film ends with another romantic promise – the start of a beautiful friendship, as the two men stroll off together. You're going to say that in 1943 no one in Hollywood would have dreamed of that implication. Maybe, but this is north Africa and many romantics ended up beneath its sheltering sky after the war.
The wonder in Casablanca now is that you can see what a fabrication it is while realising that if nonsense is put together with love, care and aplomb the silliness hardly matters. Rick and Ilsa meet again over the piano like a broken marriage reunited in a heaven where there is no touching. Or is it hell?
Watch it here: bit.ly/casablancaending
