ilse.

rick at last reunited with ilse, i think r ingrid bergman reminds her of the last time they saw each other in paris. i remember every detail, he says. the germans wore gray. you wore blue. okay. the color scheme is important i think. it tells us who was fighting for freedom and who was not but it doesn't directly say the confederates were not the cause of freedom. it is more subtle than that. but the central theme in "casablanca" was not a simple divide between freedom and slavery but the evolution from indifference to commitment. and in this case it is the process by which rick dedicates himself to the anti-nazi cause. in some ways in fact rick's journey is meant to reflect a larger american journey at this moment. how it became necessary to break with the isolationism of the interwar period and accept the need, again, to fight this new war. one critical step in that journey involved giving the new war a strong, moral overlay to make clear that the new fight in europe was about principles not about material gain. and as i've suggested, no figure better symbolized deep, moral convict