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."--