Dear SCREEN-L Subscribers,
We would like to announce a new publication from Fordham University Press, which we hope will be of interest.
Casablanca's Conscience
Robert Weldon Whalen
https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781531504809/casablancas-conscience/
Receive a 20% discount online*:
LLF23
*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30th June 2024.
Discount only applies to the CAP website.
A new look at a beloved classic film that explores the philosophical dynamics of Casablanca
Celebrating its eightieth anniversary this year, Casablanca remains one of the world’s most enduringly favorite movies. It won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director,
and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is still commonly quoted: “We’ll always have Paris” and “Here’s looking at you, kid” And who can forget, “You must remember this…a kiss is just a kiss.” Yet no one expected much to come of this little film, certainly not its
blockbuster stars or even the studio producing it. So how did this hastily cranked-out 1940s film, despite its many limitations, become one of the greatest films ever made? How is it that year after year, decade after decade, it continues to appear in the
lists of the greatest movies ever produced? And why do audiences still weep when Rick and Ilsa part? The answer, according to
Casablanca’s Conscience, is to paraphrase Rick, “It’s true.”
Much has already been written about the film and the career-defining performances of Bogart and Bergman. 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 historical 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.
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-SieÌcle Vienna; “Like Fire in Broomstraw”: Southern Journalism and the Textile Strikes of 1929–1931; and Assassinating
Hitler: Ethics and Resistance in Nazi Germany; and
Bitter Wounds. German Victims of the Great War.
With all best wishes,
Combined Academic Publishers
Fordham University Press
| February 2024 | 160pp | 9781531504809 | PB | £21.99*
*Price subject to change.