Barker’s Classic Movies #8: CASABLANCA *****
Stuck at home on a Saturday night in the middle of winter? Well, melt some butter, pop some corn, turn out the lights and press “play”on…
Casablanca (1942)
running time: 1hr., 42m. / original studio: Warner Brothers
produced by Hal B. Wallis; directed by Michael Curtiz; screenplay by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, from the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
director of photography, Arthur Edeson; edited by Owen Marks; music by Max Steiner
with: Humphrey Bogart (Rick), Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa), Paul Henreid (Victor), Claude Rains (Louis), Conrad Veidt (Maj. Strasser), Peter Lorre (Ugarte)
French Morocco, just before America’s entry into WWII: a mysterious Yankee is drawn into political intrigue when the only woman he ever loved shows up, escorted by a famous Czech resistance leader.
Currently the most beloved film from Classic Hollywood (circa 1930 to 1960), Casablanca is also one of the most talked about and written about movies of all time. Everyone has an opinion on why it works, everyone who contributed to the script or the production claimed credit for its diverse charms, and both sides of the Art/Commerce debate point to it as the exception to a rule.
For the Commerce crowd, Casablanca is the supreme evidence that filmmaking is collaborative (meaning, not an art) and that all great films are accidents, a view often leading to the conclusion that popular success equals quality. Students of cinematic Art, meanwhile, grudgingly acknowledge Casablanca’s right to the label of High Entertainment, but generally find a way to dismiss it as a guilty pleasure (because at bottom, pop success is a clear marker of inferiority). For art mongers, Casablanca is an efficient piece of wartime propaganda, saved from sentimentality by its undeniable flashes of wit.
One thing is indisputable: you can’t claim to be a movie fan without knowing Casablanca. The quintessential masterpiece of the studio system, or in the faint praise of sixties critic Andrew Sarris, “the happiest of happy accidents,” it is indeed a success no one could have predicted, born out of collaborative turmoil and unforeseeable chemistry.
On the other hand, it’s not so much of a miracle on close examination. The studios were in the business of making great entertainments, and they made many in the thirty years during which they dominated the mass media. It’s just that Casablanca is a wee bit extra-special. To paraphrase its main protagonist Rick Blaine — all movies try, Casablanca succeeds.
Maj. Strasser: You give [Rick] credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.
Capt. Renault: We mustn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.
A lot of myth encrusts the history of making Casablanca, some of it containing germs of truth, most of it laden with wild exaggeration and passed on among generations of fans as gospel. Perhaps the most egregious nonsense circulated about Casablanca is the rumor that Ronald Reagan was considered for the lead role, as well as several others, before Humphrey Bogart was chosen at the last minute.
This myth started because an unknown reporter came across a Variety press release from early 1942 that named Reagan and Ann Sheridan as the stars of the film. But such press releases were common, and commonly spun from fantasy, without consulting anyone who actually made decisions, their sole purpose being to keep the names of second-tier stars circulating in the press between B-pictures.
The truth is, although Bogart had struggled for respect in the recent past, his struggling years were over. Just two months before Casablanca started pre-production, Bogart had given his breakthrough performance as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and he was as hot as movie stars ever get. The notion that anyone in Hollywood would have overlooked him in 1942 is patently ridiculous, let alone Casablanca’s mastermind Hal Wallis, who was at that moment the most powerful producer in town, and possibly the world, the bull moose at a studio where America’s new favorite actor was under contract.
Wallis had been the production chief at Warner Brothers for over a decade, managing the entire Warners production schedule, his name turning up at the front of a staggering number of great entertainments from the era (including The Maltese Falcon). But at the start of 1942, he’d signed a new agreement which made him, in effect, an independent producer flying the Warners banner, with complete creative control over his own projects, first choice on all the studio’s resources, and an unprecedented ten percent of his films’ profits. From here on, Wallis’ attentions would be focused on one movie at a time; Casablanca was the second production he greenlighted under the new contract.
It only seems like a miracle that Casablanca came together if you factor out Hal Wallis. When the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s came to his attention just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he knew two things for certain: 1) with hard work, this overheated melodrama could become another smash topical entertainment of a kind that he, and Warners, were famous for making, and 2) Humphrey Bogart was going to play Rick Blaine.
He assigned one of the smartest writing teams in the business to the script, the Epstein twins, Philip and Julius, with orders to revamp the play into a more palatable stew; then he filled the rest of the cast with the best character actors from every other studio in town. In particular, he negotiated tirelessly to secure Ingrid Bergman’s services from Selznick International, when a dozen less expensive starlets were at his disposal right there in Burbank. Far from serendipitous, the cast of Casablanca was one of the most expensive and intentional of the era.
And the Wallis touches never stopped. He brought in Arthur Edeson, well known at the time as one of the most important pioneers in American cinematography, to make sure Bogart and Bergman looked fabulous in every shot, and he called on his most trusted collaborator, director Michael Curtiz, a renowned bully and hit-maker, to ride herd on everyone and crank out the best possible footage every day, no excuses. When other writers were needed for this or that aspect of the story, Wallis didn’t hesitate, and he was on the set all the time, giving notes in person, when he wasn’t supervising the writers or looking over the editors’ shoulders.
This was business as usual in the studio system. Stars like Bogart and Bergman didn’t care for it much and they complained often, because it was an awful lot like real work, only with millions riding on the outcome. But it insured a prolific output in the days when decision makers loved movies as much as the audience did.
Rick: I don’t buy or sell human beings.
Ferrari: Too bad, that’s Casablanca’s leading commodity. In refugees alone we could make a fortune if you’d work with me on the black market.
– first line by Howard Koch, deepening Rick’s character; second line by the Epstein brothers in a later revision, keeping it real (that is, funny)
Casablanca is the great popcorn movie of all time, a kaleidoscopic swirl of surefire ingredients — humor and pathos, love and war, idealism, desperation, hope and fate — richly blended and set in motion at a relentless pace for one hour and forty-two minutes. There’s not a wasted moment, a shot missing or out of place, nor so much as a single, extraneous plot twist breaking its spell. Accident or not, entertainment or art, it’s everything we hope for from the movies even yet. Casablanca is special because it has everything, and it all works, more than sixty years after its debut.
It’s an indelible showcase for the greatest character actors of Classic Hollywood, among them: the inimitable Claude Rains, making his thirty-second feature film in nine years, as the charmingly corrupt Captain Louis Renault; bug-eyed, cherubic Peter Lorre, a diminutive master of the vivid character sketch who manages to be unforgettable in just two brief scenes, as the dapper black marketeer Ugarte; and towering Conrad Veidt as the creepy, smug Major Strasser. Like nearly everyone in the cast, Veidt was an expatriate European escaping the Fascist menace. A star in his native Germany since the silent era (he was the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), Veidt was now content to portray Nazi-after-Nazi in Hollywood just the way he’d seen them in action — as snide, arrogant sociopaths.
Each of these actors has their moment — along with Dooley Wilson as Sam, Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari, S.Z. Sakall as Carl the waiter, and many others — sometimes more than one, in a film that seems made entirely of outstanding moments. In part, this is due to a script by four different hands (see Notes), an approach which layered many points-of-view on top of the original material; in part it’s because of Casablanca’s moment in history (as the film entered mid-production, there had been 44,000 U.S. casualties in just seven months), a terribly uncertain time which lent urgency and conviction to the performances whenever the camera rolled; and finally, it’s director Michael Curtiz, who mercilessly drove his cast and crew, and knew how to capture a moment once he’d forced it.
In fact, if Movie Moments were parsed into different genres, Casablanca could serve as your one-stop encyclopedic source. Some of the moments are so corny they break the corn barrier. There’s the obvious, like the shaky special effect of an airplane flying over the city, its clumsiness immediately saved by a cutaway to upturned refugee faces underscored by Max Steiner’s yearning music, and then there’s the shameless big stuff, like Rick using his own crooked roulette wheel to rescue a Bulgarian girl from dishonoring her marriage, a short scene filled with exquisitely timed close-ups that are themselves little moments.
Other moments are hysterically funny (Sakall’s entire performance), or so witty they defy all ten commandments at once (“I don’t mind a parasite, I object to a cut-rate one”). Some are simply pitch-perfect exposition, such as Curtiz’ opening tracking shot through Rick’s Café, unveiling the irresistible pull of classic cinema’s best floor show — Sam on the piano, wooing the house with “It Had to Be You” — before dropping down to sample the desperate conversations in dark corners, where frightened people barter their life savings for an escape to freedom that will never come.
These small moments are the glue fusing together larger passages that are among the most exciting and affecting ever put on film: Bogart’s endlessly pleasing banter with Claude Rains, one of the movies’ all-time great friendships between equals; the entire flashback sequence, book-ended by two scenes revealing Rick’s ferocious, unforgiving dark side; and the gloriously convoluted finale, in which every note rings true, yet the wisecracks keep on coming.
And there is no scene in any film quite like Casablanca’s patriotic singing match, when the customers of Rick’s Café rise to their feet at the Nazis’ rendition of “Watch on the Rhine” to answer with a deliriously impassioned version of “La Marseillaise,” a scene that never fails to arouse an audience. Lifted verbatim from the play, the scene evokes an eternal hope for the triumph of righteousness over evil, thanks to the sheer greatness of the French tune as a marching song. But more important, nearly everyone in the scene except Bogart was an actual refugee from the war in Europe — no one was acting. The tears brimming in the eyes of extras, supporting players and the stars were real, and the complex energy they give to the scene is utterly infectious, as authentic as cinema gets.
This blending of reality with movie magic and strongly felt romance is at the heart of Casablanca, and the reason it endures where other classic films recede. It’s almost universally remembered as a lightning fast melodrama with a last minute uplift, but its most salient passages describe the deep furrows of loss that scar its characters, and by extension, the world. There’s the unexpected moment when the film suddenly stops and the camera holds for a breathless thirty seconds on Ingrid Bergman’s face as she listens to “As Time Goes By”; Casablanca’s frantic visual world narrows to an uncomfortable, enigmatic stillness and the viewer can see, without knowing any plot specifics, that her character, Ilsa, has been damaged in some unavoidable psychic mishap. Just like everyone else in Casablanca.
The moment sets a surprisingly melancholy tone that the film never quite shakes, and doesn’t really want to. The landscape of loss only widens from here.
Later on, during the Paris flashback, Ilsa tells Rick “With the whole world crumbling, we picked this time to fall in love,” an awkward line that, taken out of context, seems boilerplate romantic — all wars disrupt people’s life plans, baby, and all lovers must face obstacles and separation or there is no story. But in context, it’s the insistent minor key of the film, the ambiguous note that never stops vibrating under the sparkling humor and the brilliant character bits. While there is an oft-noted ideology at work on the surface of Casablanca (will Rick realize no man is an island? Or will he continue running from his responsibility as a human being?), the film itself digs deeper, to ask how we can forgive a seemingly disinterested universe for moving against our will.
A tall order for a mere escapist entertainment, but Casablanca is more than up to the task, repeatedly indulging the audience in an almost soothing bitterness over life’s unfairness. “My dear Mademoiselle,” Major Strasser tells Ilsa, “perhaps you have already observed that in Casablanca human life’s cheap,” a chilling moment because he might as well be talking about the whole world in 1942.
By the time events start to turn hopeful, Casablanca has given us a luxurious bath in all the sinful stuff that keeps us coming back to the cinema, wallowing in sardonic wit and cynical repartee, missed chances, lost loves and misunderstandings, Nazi invasions and secret trysts in dark rooms. Nothing that happens in the final ten minutes, where reversal piles upon reversal like a Jersey freeway accident, can suppress the welter of grown-up emotions which have passed before.
This was a frequent unintended result of Classic Era films that used this structure; i.e., giving the audience all kinds of things they’re not supposed to have, such as crime-in-action or illicit lust, before offering redemption and rebirth in the closing moments. Frank Capra did it as a matter of course, refining it to a science by squeezing out every ounce of misfortune a plot could hold, all the way to the final seconds of his movies. They may have ended happily, but it was the wrenching drama of standing at the brink that audiences remembered.
Casablanca does it with a supremely sophisticated maneuver, far ahead of its time, by dangling the ultimate forbidden fruit in front of us — the fantasy of misty-eyed Ingrid Bergman hooked-up forever with Bogart at his most dashing and worldly — before bringing us all back to earth with the ultimate selfless act. Never before or since has a movie made doing the right thing so appealing, and it’s not because the right thing symbolizes America’s belated entry into a global conflagration. It’s because, in this one case, the right thing touches the rarest and most protected of nerves for just a moment, showing us what forgiveness looks like when it’s done well, and sends us on our way thinking we might be able to forgive, too.
But only after we’ve been treated to a Dickensian panorama of skullduggery and heartbreak. In Rick’s famous climactic speech to Ilsa, he tells her that “…the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” but we know it’s not true, not as Casablanca unfolds moment-by-moment. In this film, there’s nothing more important than three little people, crumbling world and all, and there never will be.
NOTES:
THE MAESTRO: Max Steiner (1888-1971) was one of the greatest composers of the movies’ first century. Born in Vienna, a child prodigy who studied with Mahler and had his first professional conducting gig at 16, Steiner began writing film music at the beginning of the sound era and scored over 200 movies in his career, about half of those for Warners. Like everyone else in the studio system, he worked his magic on assignment, creating hundreds of melodies to order, some of which became classic standards.
He did not write “As Time Goes By,” however. It was a nearly forgotten pop song of the previous decade by Broadway tunesmith Herman Hupfeld, and Steiner lobbied hard to insert his own song in its place, which would have meant greater residuals for him. But a new song would’ve required retakes with Bergman, and she’d already shaved her head for the role of Maria in Paramount’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“As Time Goes By” stayed in Casablanca by default, and Steiner did his usual magnificent job, creating complimentary themes and weaving the Hupfeld tune throughout the film like a wisp of regret trailing Rick and Ilsa wherever they go. He also turned snatches of “Watch on the Rhine” into a theme for Major Strasser, and “La Marseillaise” into a theme for Victor Lazlo.
IT HAD TO BE YOU: Dooley Wilson (1894-1953) was a singing drummer who had toured Europe with his own band in the twenties, then switched to acting on Broadway in the thirties. He couldn’t play the piano at all; look closely and you’ll see his arms are simply keeping the beat of the music. But his vocal on “As Time Goes By” remains the once-and-future authoritative version.
The piano accompaniment was played off camera in real time by studio musician Elliott Carpenter, the only other African-American on the Casablanca set.
EIGHT HEADS NOW BETTER THAN ONE!: The journey of Casablanca from play to screen is its own labyrinthine tale of intrigue, fully described by Aljean Harmetz in her excellent book The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman and World War II (formerly Round Up the Usual Suspects; 1992, Hyperion).
Here is a bare bones summary: the script was written between January and July 1942, the last two-and-a-half months while the film was in production. Wallis first gave the assignment to a couple of novice contract writers, but he quickly hired the Epstein twins to take over in February. While the Epsteins wrote their first draft, Wallis brought in radio veteran Howard Koch to revise their pages, balancing the twins’ mischievous wit with Koch’s political awareness. Koch and the Epsteins always worked separately.
But Wallis also turned the Koch/Epstein drafts over to Casey Robinson, the most experienced screenwriter of the bunch. Robinson edited, made many suggestions to the others, and generally provided the finished gloss.
Most of the individual contributions are a hopeless tangle, and finally moot. Much dialogue and action from Burnett and Alison’s play survived intact; the Epsteins invented the Letters-of-Transit subplot, many humorous twists, the camaraderie between Rick and Louis, and the line “Round up the usual suspects”; Koch tightened the drama, clarified the politics at stake, and wrote the “three little people” speech the night before it was shot (and a full month before production wrapped); Robinson transformed the play’s slutty American heroine into the far more sympathetic Ilsa.
Everyone contributed parts of the film’s now-famous dialogue.
THE LAST WORD: Humphrey Bogart ad-libbed “Here’s looking at you, kid” during the first week of shooting and it was left in, the writers inserting it at other strategic moments.
Hal Wallis constantly ordered retakes during shooting, often with his own last minute additions, often nixing other Bogart ad-libs, and he penned the film’s legendary final line, one of the great closing moments in movie history, at the end of post production. Always dissatisfied with the finale, Wallis scribbled down several alternative “kickers,” chose one he liked, and brought Bogart back in to dub the replacement dialogue just weeks before the film went into theatres. Luckily, Curtiz had filmed coverage of Bogart and Rains walking away from the camera, making the overdub seamless.
THE MILKMAID: At 5’10”, Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) was an inch-and-a-half taller than Bogart, so he wore lifts during their romantic clinches. At other times, the two performers are either shot in perspective to hide the height difference, or Bergman is seated.
Born in Stockholm, Bergman was an orphan at the age of 12 and the top movie star in Sweden at 20. She was brought to the U.S. by producer David O. Selznick, who was famous for loaning out his contract players to other studios at a considerable personal profit. Casablanca was Bergman’s fourth loan-out in two years, but it transformed her from high priced starlet into one of the most popular headliners of the decade. A consummate actress and one of the all-time great screen beauties, she thought she looked like “a milkmaid.”
In 1949 she suffered an appalling backlash when she left a loveless marriage with her first husband for director Roberto Rossellini, a scandal that provoked national outrage in the U.S., including denunciations in the Senate chamber. Given her role in Casablanca, there was more than a little hypocrisy at work here. It was seven years before Hollywood “forgave” Bergman and risked casting her again, but her days of pursuing stardom for its own sake were over.
Essential Ingrid Bergman: Intermezzo (1939), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight and Spellbound (both 1945), Notorious (1946), Anastasia (1956), Indiscreet (1958), Autumn Sonata (1978).
She was nominated for an Oscar seven times and won three, placing her in elite company: Best Actress for Gaslight and Anastasia, and Best Supporting Actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1975).
AWARDS: Casablanca took home Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. Casey Robinson, who had fifty films on his resume when he worked on Casablanca, also had a clause in his contract stipulating that he never shared screen credit. Though Wallis and the Writers Guild offered him full credit as a fourth writer on the film, he declined, cheating himself out of his only shot at an Academy Award.
Among the first 25 films chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1989;
Voted #2 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Movies.
THE DVD: Turner and Warner Home Video released a 2-disc set in 2003, with a fine transfer simulating the silvery texture and glow of Classic Era black-and-white film stock. Unfortunately, most of the special features promise more than can be delivered on a film from this era.
Tops are the commentary by Roger Ebert on disc 1, underlining numerous aspects of the film that most people miss, and the disc 2 documentary “Bacall on Bogart,” a candid look at the whole of the actor’s career, by a person who might be called his biggest fan. The feature marked “Production Research” is a fascinating shuffle through inter-office memos between Hal Wallis and the entire crew.
It’s $18.99 at Amazon (list price $26.99), but they also have the original, single disc released back in 1998, which is all that most collections really need. Second Spin has even cheaper, used copies of the single disc.
For Luddites still holding onto their VHS, Facets Multimedia keeps copies of the 50th Anniversary tape in stock.
Or, you can catch it on Turner Classic Movies twice more during the New Year: January 10th at Noon, and February 1st at 10:00 p.m. (EST).
Here is your
CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CLASSIC MOVIE THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH:
“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time — or even knew selflessness or courage or literature — but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.” — Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
Barker’s Classics #7 was Bonnie and Clyde
