THE TOPIC of Man’s conscience is not necessarily restricted to stories of remorse, penance, or guilt for negative or harmful actions in the past. Man’s conscience, or the human conscience, can also act as an inspiration towards benevolent, educational and intellectual actions and activities, especially where such goals release people from attitudes and habits which stifle their mental growth and personal development.
Claude Rains explored several aspects of the human conscience in his two dozen or so film roles. These roles, by never being leading or starring roles, help to make us serious and true believers in cinematic art, since we are no longer engrossed in groomed and handsome trendy youthful lead stars, but concerned with the exceptional idiosyncrasy of the Rains’ role; the sort of roles by Rains, whose name when mentioned by veteran film buffs, would produce ‘Who?’ from novice dilettantes of film culture.

Now Voyageur

In 1942, Rains made two films, back-to-back, which bring to life the issue of Man’s conscience as the precursor of a developmental shift in attitude to, or conception of, oneself. The first film was ‘NOW VOYAGEUR’, directed by Irving Rapper and starring Bette Davis’ brilliant portrayal of the stiff young spinster dominated by a possessive mother, until her encounter with Rains as the cool, erudite doctor of psychology who unlocks her repressed potential as a woman and person fulfilling her inner libidinal desires and human potential.
Indeed Davis’ role as the premature ‘old-maid’, Charlotte, is really an example of conscience denied and submerged beneath adopted sterile social mannerisms, until liberated by Rains’ unravelling linguistic conversations. ‘Now Voyageur’, of course, became one of the great film classics of women’s issues, its power residing not simply in its narrative content, but in the semiotics of visual film language.

Casablanca

On the other hand, we cannot think of ‘CASABLANCA’ without remembering Rains as the French gendarme authority in this French Moroccan colony. Indeed, ‘Casablanca’ is one of the greatest Hollywood classics concerning the topic of the human conscience. This topic forms a common thread running through the roles of the film’s four leading characters:
(1) Humphrey Bogart as Rick, the owner of Rick’s Café, he is a self-reliant expatriate loner representing American values of individualism, muttering repeatedly: “I stick my neck out for nobody!” But we come to see this as untrue, as Rick obeys his benevolent conscience in a war-time colony of diverse people in need of help.
(2) Ingrid Bergman is gorgeous as the European refugee Rick met earlier in Paris, until German troops approaching the city cut short the couple’s romantic reverie, and she never honours her pledge to meet him at the last refugee train fleeing a threatened Paris. Why? Because her conscience was secretly committed to another man Bogart knew nothing about.
(3) Rains, of course, as already said, is the gendarme chief representing France’s early war-time collaborative Vichy government with the invading Nazi; but how long will his conscience be suppressed in telling him what are the right values to exercise?
(4) Dooley Wilson is the Afro-American pianist/singer in Rick’s popular café; when asked to work for higher pay by a competing café owner in Casablanca, his conscience makes him refuse because of the human relationship and friendship with Rick he prizes before money.
So, all these characters reflect aspects of the human conscience. But it is Rains in his role as the gendarme caught between loyalty to a spineless French colonial regime collaborating with Nazism, and his own conscientious ability to know that his job has corrupted him, which electrifies this film.
This is Claude Rains at his best, combining his wit, charm, erudite tone of voice and diction in subtle interactions with others. Rains’ conscience is subtly aroused by his fascination with Bogart as the odd individualistic but accommodating American expatriate in a remote place like Casablanca.
In one scene where Rains interrogates Bogart about missing papers of transit, he asks what brought Bogart to Casablanca in the first place.
“I came here for the waters,” Bogart says with poker-face seriousness.
Rains replies: “What waters! There’s no water here! Casablanca is in a desert!”
Bogart answers coolly: “I was misinformed.”
In another scene, Rains brilliantly defines the privileges of his corrupted power when a junior gendarme informs him:
“Another passport problem has arisen, Sir.”
Rains immediately goes over to his mirror, adjusts his tie and checks his appearance, then says: “Send HER in.” The scene implies that he customarily uses his official power to take advantage of women trapped in Casablanca with immigration problems.
The dominant theme of Man’s awakening conscience in ‘Casablanca’ is juxtaposed with the film’s aesthetic value of eclipsed definitions, where ‘losing’ actually becomes ‘winning’, and vice versa. Bogart loses Bergman in Paris, but wins her back in Casablanca, where she suddenly turns up with her lover, a famous French Resistance leader whom she tells Bogart about late one night when she secretly returns to him at his closed café, and it is implied that they make love, after which she is willing to abandon her heroic lover for Bogart once again.
But by this time, Bogart’s conscience tells him that her lover’s cause of French freedom from Nazism is the correct path to take, and Rains, too, follows him in the grand finale of the film, where everyone’s human conscience wins out.

Loser-takes-all aesthetic

Ingrid Bergman leaves Casablanca with her lover at Bogart’s insistence, but his loss of her is really his winning back of his social conscience. This eclipsed style is a modernist French continental aesthetic philosophy which ‘Casablanca’ introduced to Hollywood filmmaking and American artists in a manner which exposes the bows ‘success’ often takes before  benevolence attached to another’s good or bad conscience. Rains represents this aesthetic of ‘loser-takes-all’ in his relationship with Bogart as they walk into the misty night of an airstrip, and Bogart says: “You know, Frenchie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Rains went on to master complex roles, where what is socially accepted as a prestigious convention often conceals Man’s debased moral conscience. This occurs in Hitchcock’s ‘NOTORIOUS’ of 1946, where Rains is a sensitive, cultured Nazi organizing his cronies in Brazil, yet is strangely capable of genuinely loving the beautiful Ingrid Bergman much better than Cary Grant, the manipulative spy she falls in love with.
Rains often explores the contradiction within the façade of self-righteous poses. In ‘THE UNSUSPECTED’ of 1947, a brilliant Film Noir directed by Michael Curtiz again, Rains is amazing as a popular radio personality who uses his profession to disguise the twisted logic of a dead conscience in a cultural area one would least suspect harbours such contamination of social and aesthetic values.
The roles of Claude Rains often foresaw problems of self-images obsessed with successful reflections of themselves. Later, as he aged, came more public authoritative roles, whether in ‘LAWRENCE OF ARABIA’ of 1962, or as Herod in the biblical ‘THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD’, his last film in 1965.
The cinematic oeuvre of Claude Rains remains to date one of the greatest explorations of Man’s conscience by a complex and fascinating star of the classic screen.