One of the key things in Casablanca are those two stolen visas that allow the bearer to leave Morocco without any problems. They’re damned valuable on the black market, and the Nazis are trying to get hold of them before they’re used.
Now I have two questions regarding Nazi behavior in the movie:
(1) Why are the Nazis so keen on finding the visas? They could certainly declare them void and order the border police to arrest anyone who’s coming up with them.
(2) Why don’t the Nazis simply arrest (or have the pro-Nazi French police arrest him) Laszlo if they’re so keen on keeping him in Casablanca? They even know his exact whereabouts.
I understand the true answer to those questions would be “To keep the story running.” But is there anything inherent to the plot itself that would explain it, which I didn’t get when watching the movie?
It’s stated that the “letters of transit” are signed by Himmler himself, and cannot be rescinded. Meaning that there’s probably no way that they can get them declared void, without calling Himmler and telling him that they lost the letters. Now, would YOU want to be the guy who did that?
Not Himmler, Tuckerfan, but General Weygand, the leader of Vichy Franch.
And it’s known that the letters have been lost, because the two German couriers who had them were killed, so if Himmler had signed them, he’d gladly have repealed them.
It’s not a bad question, since clearly Renault and Strasser had told the airport authorities to look out for Laszlo; notwithstanding the letters of transit it took Rick and a gun to get Victor and Ilsa onto the plane.
So the only remaining gates where the letters could have mattered were the pilot of the plane and the authorities in Lisbon.
I doubt the pilot would have cared much about his passengers’ paperwork, as long as they’d paid their airfare, and it seems unlikely that officials in neutral Portugal would care one way or another about letters signed by General Weygand. Unless they could use them as an excuse to let the two famous refugees pass through Portugal but still maintain their neutrality:
(Portugal to Nazy Germany): Hey, they had these letters signed by your “ally!” We didn’t think it was a big deal!
“To keep the story running” is probably the best answer you’re going to get.
Fiver, it’s been a number of years since I’ve seen the movie. IAC, I don’t think that it would have been “healthy” for anyone to report up the chain of command that such papers had gone awry. Remember, we’re talking about the folks who inspired the prototypical movie “bad guys” for the next 50+ years, here.
Additionally, the papers would have been valuable to Lazlo and Ilsa, since they could potentially find their plane diverted some place, or might encounter the random Nazi wanting to score “Brownshirt points.”
Of course, it is most likely a device to drive the plot. After all, the play that it’s based on Everybody Goes to Rick’s (think that’s the title), is vastly different than the movie.
No, the letters of transit are supposedly signed be General De Gaulle. Which is what makes them so nonsensical - as leader of the Free French, who opposed the Nazis, De Gaulle had absolutlely no authority in Vichy France or areas controlled by it.
(There’s a theory that what Peter Lorre says is that the letters are signed by Vichy General Weyland, pronounced in the French manner – but if you look at his lips, Lorre clearly starts the name with a “D” and he audibly enunciates an “L” at the end of the name as well.)
So the letters of transit make no strictly logical sense: you just have to accept them as a plot device.
As for the why the Nazis don’t just arrest arrest Lazlo themselves, I think it’s pretty clear Strasser doesn’t want to make a martyr out of him. (Plus the Nazis technically do not have jurisdiction, because the area is under the control of Vichy France.)
Actually, I believe the script called for Weygand, and Peter Lorre arguably muffed the line.
Now I’m gonna have to pull out my DVD and listen to that scene again (side note: now I’ve gotta decide if the new edition is worth buying the film again. If it weren’t for Roger Ebert’s commentary track – he did an excellent job on the Citizen Kane DVD – I wouldn’t even be tempted. Is the track alone worth it? Hmmm…)
In the published script for Casablanca, Ugarte says “General de Gaulle”. Next to it is written, in brackets, “[Marshal Weygand]”, which I take to be a latter-day interpolation by one of the scriptwriters (possibly Howard Koch, who oversaw the publication of the script), after realizing how absurd it was to have the letters of transit signed by De Gaulle.
I ran the DVD a bunch of times, and I have to admit that I no longer hear the “L” sound I claimed to hear earlier. However, I’ve listened to Lorre say that line so many times it doesn’t sound like either “de Gaulle” or “Weyland” any more. It just sounds like gobbledegook.
Given that it’s a 60 year old recording of a German pronouncing a French name in English, I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising.
I have the DVD and have watched it with the closed captioning turned on. I hear “Weygand” and the captions agree with me.
Tuckerfan, what I’m saying is that it’s an acknowledged fact that the letters have gone awry. Renault and Strasser are talking about it openly, and everyone at Rick’s and the Blue Parrot is abuzz with the news. If heads were gonna roll over it, they’d roll.
It’s just a big ol’ Maguffin and we have to learn to live with it – IRL there actually were no such things as unquestionable letters of transit no matter who may have signed them. The important thing is simply that Ugarte established them as inviolate within the context of the story and, as such, they are obviously of importance.
As for why Maj. Strasser simply did not arrest Laszlo, it is again because he had no jurisdiction. Morocco, as a French colony taking its orders from Vichy, was technically not an occupied territory but an ally of the Reich. It was important for the Germans to recognize the sovreignity of their allies or they would suddenly find themselves harried by internal dissent. Remember the scene where Laszlo conducts the Marseilles? Everyone in the bar starts to sing along, much to Strasser’s chagrin. The french in Casablanca were afraid of the nazis and therefore submitted to Vichy’s direction, but they all considerd the nazis enemies and were hoping for the day when freedom was restored to all of France. They were willing to play along with Vichy to assure their own freedom, but if they were to lose that freedom anyway due to direct rule by the Germans, they would not be so docile.
Everybody Comes to Rick’s is very much like the movie in characters, plot, individual scenes, and even dialogue.
BTW, to add some fuel to the fire, in the play Ugarte says the letters of transit were signed by Marshal Weygard. My hunch is that Weygard’s name meant nothing to Americans, and so it was changed to De Gaulle for the movie.
Okay, I just watched the relevant scene on my DVD player again and had these findings:
Peter Lorre, being German, would’ve pronounced “Weygand” as “Vay-gone,” which sounds quite similar to “DeGaulle.” And in fact I can hear it as either one, depending on what I’m listening for.
The captions do indeed say “De Gaulle.” I must have been smoking crack before when I thought otherwise. However, the captions were produced in a very slipshod manner; listening in other places there are whole phrases and lines left out.
My player has a “zoom” function, and I blew up Lorre’s lips to 32x size and replayed “signed by General _______ himself” several times over. Reading his lips, I saw very plainly his lower lip go against his teeth to form the “V” sound. He did not make a slight pucker to produce a “D.”
Therefore, I conclude the name was “Weygand” and that that’s how Lorre said it.
Not necessarily. Remember where they are. Berlin is thousands of miles away, and communication wasn’t exactly instantanious in those days. So they could talk openly about the letters, since they didn’t have to worry about the folks back in Berlin hearing about them until after they had been found. (Not that that happened, but being optimistic sorts, they would have felt that they would be able to recover the letters, before any spies could have reported the information back to Berlin. Remember the time span of the film is only a few days.)
