Casablanca's Conscience

"Casablanca is an epic tale of love, betrayal, and sacrifice set against the backdrop of World War II. Yet decades later, it continues to capture the imagination of filmgoers. In Casablanca's Conscience, author Robert Weldon Whalen explains why it still resonates so deeply. Applying a new lens to an old classic, Whalen focuses on the film's timeless themes--Exile, Purgatory, Irony, Love, Resistance, and Memory. He then engages the fictional characters--Rick, Ilsa, and the others--against the philosophical and theological discourse of their real contemporaries, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Albert Camus. The relationships between fictional and histori-cal persons illuminate both the film's era as well as perennial human concerns. Both the film and the work of the philosophers explore dimensions of the human experience, which, while extreme, are familiar to everyone. It's the themes that resonate with the viewer, that have sustained it as an evergreen classic all these years."--

List of contents

Prologue: Everybody Comes to Rick's | 1

1 Exile | 13

2 Purgatory | 27

3 Irony | 44

4 Love | 56

5 Resistance | 78

Epilogue: You Must Remember This | 95

Acknowledgments | 105

Notes | 107

Bibliography | 127

Index | 137

About the author

Robert Weldon Whalen is Professor Emeritus of History at Queens University of Charlotte. His publications include Murder, Inc., and the Moral Life: Gangsters and Gangbusters in La Guardia’s New York (Fordham); Sacred Spring: God and Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna; “Like Fire in Broomstraw”: Southern Journalism and the Textile Strikes of 1929–1931; Assassinating Hitler: Ethics and Resistance in Nazi Germany; and Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War.

Product details

• Authors: Robert Weldon Whalen, Whalen Robert Weldon
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.02.2024
• EAN: 9781531504793
• ISBN: 978-1-5315-0479-3
• No. of pages: 160
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 240 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Ethics & moral philosophy, Ethics and moral philosophy, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism