The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  In his autobiography, The Name above the Title, Frank Capra wrote that he “let the scene stealers run wild; for the actors it was a mugger’s ball.” There was no reason to stick to the script “word for word with actors [who] were so much better than the script.” He often kept the cameras rolling, just to see what would happen. “There’s one scene especially where Peter was telling Raymond Massey what a beautiful face he was going to give him if he could find a place to do it, and that’s what they were going to do upstairs…. I just let them go—Peter telling him how beautiful he was going to make him look, how different he was going to make him look, a face that nobody would recognize…. ‘I’ll do it by cutting here and there.’ That one scene went about three or four minutes beyond the scene and it’s all in the picture.”

  Capra let Lorre and Grant ad-lib “because they were both very good at it.” In one scene the two come down the stairway as Einstein tugs on Mortimer’s arm and tries to warn him about his brother (Raymond Massey) “and Cary says, ‘Don’t touch me. What are you doing, doctor? What kind of a doctor are you?’ And then the frustration of not being able to make this guy understand that he is in danger. All this was happening while they were coming down a stairway in the Brewster manor.” Lorre stayed in character, but Grant sandwiched a friendly jibe between the rapid lines of dialogue: “Speak up, sonny, I can’t hear you…. Will you stop underplaying, I can’t hear you.”

  When Lorre had an idea, he didn’t tell Capra, “I think I’ve got a great idea for you.” He respectfully offered, “How would you like this?” Before filming a scene in the cellar where Dr. Einstein tries to dissuade Jonathan from using the gruesome, bloody “Melbourne” method to kill his brother, Lorre suggested, “Would it be good if we would just play part of it in the shadow? I don’t see anything, just the shadow doing some terrible things and I can react to it.” Capra thought this “very professional” and also “a very wise thing to do because he had himself a scene.” So Lorre sat on a cellar step and played opposite Massey’s hideous profile in shadow, creating a macabre scene to match the grisly dialogue of murder.

  Capra considered Lorre

  fully one-third of the show. He was a remarkable innovator, also a remarkable maker of his part, a man who built his part—he, himself, built his part with little tricks that were almost indiscernible, with his eyes, with his face, with his body, and with a little look at the right time, a little shrug of the shoulder. Each of these built a character and built up a love in the director for that person who’s thinking of things that he should be thinking of. You’re so grateful to him that his part just grows because he is making it into a real character. That is acting before your eyes!

  Capra shot Arsenic and Old Lace between October 20 and December 16, 1941, bringing the picture in one day over schedule and $99,825 under the $1,220,000 budget. Previewed by servicemen around the world in 1943, Arsenic and Old Lace did not receive its theatrical release until September 1, 1944.

  Testing Lorre’s versatility in a small way, Warner Bros. next cast him as a romantic playboy in The Constant Nymph (1943), based on Margaret Kennedy’s best-selling novel. In the book, the stage play, and two earlier film versions, the character of Jacob Birnbaum, played by Lorre, smacked of anti-Semitism. For the Warner feature, however, writer Kathryn Scola reworked (and renamed) the part, eliminating any hint of ethnic overtones. Certainly Kennedy’s description of the “fat little Jew” did not draw casting to Lorre, who looked boyishly handsome and elegantly at ease in the role. Unfortunately, the editors trimmed his already small part to little more than a cameo. Even though the studio had dared to cast against type, it did not catch on to the possibilities of the actor’s potential.

  Not bound by contract, Lorre was free to come and go, and in May 1942 he punched in at Universal, where he was set to play Baron Ikito, a diabolical agent in Invisible Agent (1942). The face looked familiar; it was Mr. Moto behind the round glasses, but without the ingratiating smile. Toying with a paper cutter, he casts an eye on its utility for torture and purrs with sardonic mirth: “This is really a very useful machine. You know, if a person weren’t careful, it could cut off his fingers, or his whole hand. Very handy machine, huh? Handy, isn’t it?” Out of character for Ikito, it fit Lorre perfectly.

  Cast opposite Lorre is Jon Hall as Frank Raymond, the grandson of the Invisible Man, who uses his grandfather’s formula to spy on the enemy. Geared for wartime audiences, Invisible Agent trades in racial stereotypes, depicting the Japanese as inhuman fiends and the Nazis as brutes and buffoons.

  “Your kind doesn’t just kill men,” denounces Hall. “You murder their spirits. You strangle their last breath of hope and freedom, so that you, the chosen few, can rule your slaves in ease and luxury…. You’re drowning in the ocean of blood around this little barren island you call the new order…. killing your own, dog eating dog, until only the biggest and hungriest are left.”

  Americans swallowed it, in a big way. Produced at a modest $322,291, the picture grossed $1,041,500 in 116 weeks, making it one of the most successful pictures featuring the “invisible” special photographic effects by John P. Fulton.

  When his uncle died and left him ten thousand dollars, Murray Burnett realized his “romantic dream” of sailing to Europe on an ocean liner. “I was married to a girl whose parents lived in Antwerp,” said the New York teacher and playwright, “and I always wanted to go there. We were going to spend the summer (of 1938) with my wife’s relatives—and we were going to have a marvelous two weeks vacation in the south of France. But by the time we reached Belgium, Hitler had invaded Austria and Anschluss had taken place.” His wife’s stepfather offered to underwrite their trip to France if they would pass through Vienna and help other relatives smuggle money and valuables out of Austria. “I was a kid and said, ‘Well, great, wonderful,’ and off I went to the American Consul, who said to me, and I quote, ‘Mr. Burnett, we don’t advise this trip. If you get into trouble, there’s nothing we can do to help you.’” By that time the “City of Dreams” had become a nightmare. Only the Hotel de France took Jews, which was more than could be said of the taxi drivers. In the Opernplatz a monstrous sign pictured a hook-nosed Jew above the caption “Murderer, Thief.” Real-life tragedy played on crying faces.

  “I was excited about it and very angry about it,” he later recalled. “I felt at that time and I still feel that no one can remain neutral in a world like that. You had to take sides, no matter how cynical you might have been, no matter how much you wanted to be uninvolved. You had to side with the refugees. You had to.”

  At Cap Ferrat, a resort town on the southwestern coast of France, Burnett and his wife took in a nightclub whose black pianist knocked out the blues and jazz tunes of the day for enthusiastic tourists.

  “‘What a setting for a play!’ That’s all I said to my wife,” Burnett mused some forty years later.

  The nightclub was a great contrast to the tragedy and tears. It was a gay, happy atmosphere…. Here was Hitler and there was no question they were on the brink of terror, not only anti-Semitic terror, but terror and war, and no one gave a damn…. By the time I had come back to New York, I had solidified all the experiences with the refugees and then it was a fairly simple matter to write the play [Everybody Comes to Rick’s] …. Everybody in Casablanca came to Rick’s, but everybody must come to a decision. Now that’s pretty abstruse, but that’s why I titled it, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s.” It was a double meaning.

  Burnett and his writing partner, Joan Alison, wrote the stage play in six weeks. Their agent, Anne Watkins, sold it in one. Theater producers Martin Gabel and Carly Wharton optioned Everybody Comes to Rick’s for Broadway, but artistic differences of opinion—Wharton could not accept the idea that Lois would sleep with Rick to get the Letters of Transit—spelled trouble. Burnett and Alison said no to a rewrite. The option was dropped. Watkins finally suggested they sell it to Hollywood. Contrary to reports that every studio in Hollywood turned it down, Burnett clai
ms that within three weeks of its availability, Warner Bros.—which paid $20,000 for the screen rights—outbid Paramount for Everybody Comes to Rick’s and retitled the play Casablanca.

  Nazis had become an “obsession” for European émigrés, noted writer Henry Pachter. “It is no exaggeration to say that at that time we needed the Nazis as our raison d’être.” For actors with Continental accents, Nazis also meant a reason to work. Casablanca‘s credits read like a European refugee list. Executive producer Hal Wallis, who went to elaborate and costly lengths to assemble an ideal cast, conscripted nearly seventy-five émigré actors, not only for the rank and file parts, but for three of the principal roles as well. They formed a motley troupe whose mingled accents and cosmopolitan flair gave Casablanca a sense of shared past.

  Austrian actor Paul Henreid had refused to sign with UFA after learning that an additional agreement would bind him to join the National Socialist Actor’s Guild and uphold Nazi ideology. He originally turned down the rather flat supporting role of Victor Laszló, Casablanca’s Resistance leader, in what promised to be a “flagboiler,” but reportedly changed his mind in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Conrad Veidt, a native German, freely advertised his hatred of the Nazis, but never more so than as the sardonically malignant Major Strasser. S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, who played Carl, the head waiter at Rick’s Café Américain, had fled Europe after building up a screen reputation for comedy in Germany and his native Austria.

  Lorre came late to the cast of Casablanca and was nearly passed over because of his prior commitment to Universal for Invisible Agent. After coaxing Ingrid Bergman from David Selznick, freeing Lorre from Universal—which had lent his services to Warner Bros. for $2,500 per week—seemed almost too easy. Now Lorre was back at Warner Bros. and earning $1,750 per week for what turned out to be one and one-third weeks’ work, a total of $2,333. For sheer publicity, Lorre was invaluable. In his telling, he had rebuffed Hitler, scoring a high spot on the Nazi hit list. His reinvented past even placed him at a Nazi rally, where he made sport of a monograph on poison gas written by a party member. These and other apocryphal odds and ends trickled down into the studio biographies and press releases.

  Success has a thousand fathers. Murray Burnett conceived Casablanca and embellished it with “As Time Goes By,” a bittersweet ballad written by Herman Hupfelt for a 1931 Broadway show called Everybody’s Welcome, which flopped. Irene Lee, head of the story department at Warner Bros., persuaded Hal Wallis to buy the play and assigned Julius and Philip Epstein to write the screenplay. The Epstein twins adapted the play for the screen, rough-drafting the master script, simplifying the plot, tightening the structure, and working in character types; they brought Rick more in line with Bogart’s screen image and saturated the film with memorable dialogue. Howard Koch revised and polished the screenplay, developing the Paris flashback and sharpening the political focus, then anxiously delivered scenes to the set on the morning they were to be shot; Casey Robinson shaped the love story. Wallis perfectly cast the picture and rode shotgun every mile of its rough ride; Michael Curtiz stamped it with the Warner Bros. style.

  The cast also left its mark. In its “character analysis,” the story department described Ugarte, a dealer in black market visas, as “mean, sneaky, is generally despised.” It supposed he might be from Hungary or the Balkans. Concerned about the fragile foreign market, Jack Warner and Hal Wallis wanted to know for sure. Carl Schaefer assured the Front Office that Ugarte “could be Italian rather than Spanish so as to avoid the possibility of offending Latin America.” Still not convinced, Wallis wrote Curtiz on May 25, the first day of shooting, that “‘Senior Ugarte’ should also be Italian, and if the name ‘Ugarte’ is definitely Spanish, then we will want to change his name.”

  The thumbnail sketch only hinted at the enhancement worked by the Epsteins and Koch on Everybody Comes to Rick’s. More catalyst than character, Guillermo Ugarte crystallizes out of “an impalpable air of sophistication and intrigue” only to fade back into the hum of voices and the soft serenade of “Stardust” after initiating the action.

  The finished screenplay describes Ugarte as “a small thin man with a nervous air. If he were an American, he would look like a tout.” Beneath the veneer of respectability, he is deferential and deadly, a human jackal in dress clothing. “With his round baby face and wide, bulging eyes,” wrote Koch, “Peter could mask his deviousness under a self-mocking innocence. Like his partner in crime, Ferrari, played by Sidney [sic] Greenstreet, he is a natural to be involved in black-market operations.”

  Rick Blaine and Ugarte’s stage dialogue crawls at an expository pace. The Epsteins rewrote most of it. In a low-key verbal duel, Rick’s wry candor and Ugarte’s predacious conceit face off in a cross fire that crackles with tension:

  Ugarte: You are a very cynical person, Rick, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.

  Rick: I forgive you.

  Ugarte: Er, thank you…. You despise me, don’t you?

  Rick: Well, if I gave you any thought, I probably would.

  Lorre had his own way with Ugarte. “Directors didn’t direct him much,” said Koch, “because they wanted what Peter himself could do with the role.” Like a blanched weasel, he whisks into view, fawning and fulsome, oozing greasy charm and puffing on a cigarette, turning even the simple act of smoking into a menacing art. His long delays are highly charged and followed by a softness of speech that explodes as if another man had yelled. In putting the finishing touches on Ugarte, Koch admitted letting Lorre’s screen past guide his brown Eagle Number One pencils. Four days of shooting (May 28–29 and June 1–2) translated into only about four minutes of screen time, but thanks to Michael Curtiz, who seemingly enjoyed letting character actors get the better of leading men, Lorre dominated his scenes. Bogart’s self-containment is no match for Lorre’s nervous animation. With well-integrated bits of business—corrugating his forehead, expressively gesturing with his hands and body, lighting a fresh cigarette from an old one, and milking his dialogue—Lorre captured the camera and gleaned a virtuoso performance from leftovers.

  “One of the troubles was that we had to get rid of him so early in the picture,” recalled Koch. “I liked his acting so much I would have liked him throughout.”

  In early November 1942 Allied forces landed on the North African coast and captured Casablanca. Capitalizing on the headlines, Warner Bros. launched its own offensive to put Casablanca into theaters as soon as possible. The picture opened in New York on Thanksgiving Day, 1942. On January 23, 1943, one day before Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wrapped up their “Casablanca Conference,” it went into general release. Casablanca garnered eight Academy Award nominations that March, taking home Oscars for Best Picture, Best Directing, and Best Written Screenplay.

  For all the hoopla and backslapping in the Front Office, no one was more surprised by Casablanca’s success than those who made it. “Peter told me that nobody wanted to make it,” recalled television director Buzz Kulik. “Neither Bogart, nor Bergman, nor anybody. They thought it was a horror, an awful thing. But they made it, almost sloughed it off. He was telling me that the greatest thing that he and Bogart looked forward to was to slip out and go get a couple of boozes as quickly as they could. Apparently, nobody really knew what they had, even when they had finished making it. From his point of view, they were just going through the motions, and were absolutely stunned by the reception.”

  Lorre best remembered Casablanca for what went on between takes. In Casablanca, the spinning of the roulette wheel in Rick’s Café Américain symbolized a refugee’s chances of securing exit visas. For the cast members, it meant recreation. The actor claimed that his gambling winnings totaled more than his paycheck.

  Some thirty-one years later, Howard Koch conceded that “none of us involved in its production could have foretold that Casablanca was to have an illustrious future—or, in fact, any future at all. Conceived in sin and born in travail, it survived its precarious origin by some for
tuitous combination of circumstances to become the hardiest of Hollywood perennials, as tough and durable as its anti-hero, Humphrey Bogart.” For whatever reason—its timeliness, its topicality, its idealistic self-portrait, its immutable values, its flight into nostalgia, its perfect cast, its repertory spirit—or perhaps the magical combination of all of them, it was, as film critic Andrew Sarris put it, “the happiest of happy accidents.”

  On March 5, 1941, Variety had announced that Boris Karloff would take a hiatus in June from the smash Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace to return to Columbia to costar with Peter Lorre in The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942), a “comedy-horror yarn” by Robert Andrews. With the stage hit breaking boxoffice records and the film version contractually locked up until the play completed its Broadway run, what better way to capitalize on the Bodies in Our Cellar angle than to offer a cheap imitation? Reluctant to release their star attraction with the production in full swing—Karloff eventually gave more than fourteen hundred performances as Jonathan Brewster between 1941 and 1944—Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay won a rain check from the studio, which agreed to postpone filming until the following March. Meanwhile, the producers promised to recompense Lorre for the delay.

  In a mere four weeks, Edwin Blum, better known for his Alice Fay and Tyrone Power vehicles, turned out a screenplay about a mad scientist who lures lonely traveling salesmen to his basement. Irving Briskin’s B unit took it from there. Decked out in cowboy hat and six-shooter, Lorre played a hit-and-run entrepreneur—his first of only several roles as an American—with his finger in every paying pie in town. He wheels and deals as local sheriff, justice of the peace, physician, coroner, and loan shark.

  “The secret of Lorre’s indelible and unforgettable power lay, of course, in absolute innocence,” said Blum. “The sweeter he smiled, the softer he spoke, the more dangerous he became. Karloff had this quality in his lisp and sweet gentleness, but Lorre faced the great master off in Boogie.”