by Hank Davis
“The cars are huge!”
A yellow Nash coup cruised by, rain water running off its long hood, the silhouette of a couple, visible for just a moment in the front seat. Packards, Olds, Mercurys, Studebakers, Plymouths, De Sotos, Grahams, Fords, and others he couldn’t identify splashed through the shallow pools. A car twice as long as any he’d ever driven in glided on broad whitewalls, a covered spare tire mounted on the running board behind the front wheel. A Cadillac, probably, or a Rio. He whistled in appreciation.
Hoffman walked several steps ahead, hidden beneath her umbrella. What I need, thought Earle, is something she wants. I need a Ugarte to give me letters of transit. A passport to her heart. Ugarte, Peter Lorre in a beautifully done small part, said the letters were “signed by General DeGaull. Cannot be rescinded. Not even questioned.” Ugarte killed a pair of German couriers to get them.
Earle shook his head. How did Bogart get Bergman back? He practically called her a whore, but she still loved him. Casablanca started as a story of a jilted lover’s bitterness. Bogart wanted to punish Bergman for leaving him, but the vengeance went awry. Instead of hurting her, he drew her in. Bergman said, “I can’t fight it anymore. I ran away from you once. I can’t do it again.”
“Tell me about the movie,” Hoffman said.
Earle sped up so that he walked beside her.
“Casablanca is a pivot point for Americans’ attitudes about themselves and the war. They didn’t think that at the time. It was just another movie, but when cultural historians look back now, they see it. It’s a slice of the times. Go in with an open mind; maybe you’ll get more out of it than you believe. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll see all sorts of gender attitudes.”
Hoffman peeked from under the umbrella. “These gloves aren’t very warm either. December in New York is cold,” Hoffman said. She jammed her free hand under her armpit. “So what should I be looking for?”
He smiled. “Start with Yvonne. It’s implied that she and Bogart have a relationship, but he dumps her in an early scene. She says, ‘Where were you last night?’ and he says, ‘That’s so long ago I can’t remember.’ It’s a classic demonstration of Bogart indifference. The really interesting moment is with a Bulgarian girl later in the film. She wants Bogart’s advice on love and sacrifice. I don’t want to spoil it, but her quandary reflects on what’s going on between Bogart, Bergman and Henreid.”
“Henreid?”
“Victor Laszlo in the film, Bergman’s husband.”
“Right. Sorry. I got him mixed up with Greenstreet.”
“He owns the Blue Parrot. Another big actor doing a nice turn in a small role.”
Hoffman lifted the umbrella so she could look at him. Her eyes caught the oncoming car lights. “Just how many times have you seen this film? You never talked about it a year ago.”
“Maybe a hundred.”
“Heavens! So you’ve been a Casablanca fan your whole life?”
They crossed 49th. “No, not really. I saw it the first time in January.” He blushed. “Well . . . um . . . I was doing a lot of other things too. Have to keep busy, you know.”
“It’s just hard to believe that a piece of film could be worth the trip.” She kept glancing at the traffic to her side, but didn’t say anything else as they approached the theater. Her silence was disconcerting. A hundred times, he thought. She’ll think I’ve spent all my days watching romances. How pathetic. But he did watch it a hundred times, reclining in his academic’s cubicle, the film playing on the ceiling. Sometimes, while walking on campus, he had edited the world into black and white, and Sam playing “As Time Goes By.” University noir, he had thought.
The line into the theater was short. Earle fingered the unfamiliar paper cash in his pocket. Seventy-five cents each for admission. For a moment he panicked when he couldn’t remember if dollars were more than cents as he handed the woman at the ticket window a five. She smiled and pushed back a pair of quarters and three dollars.
In the lobby, Hoffman folded the umbrella, after fumbling with the mechanism for a moment, then looked at the change. “Is this any way to run an economy? It’s so clumsy, passing around metal and paper. How many people do you think touched this? Yuck.”
“You sound like Durance,” he said.
She laughed. “Sorry. He can be a bit overwhelming. Infectious cynicism. Most of the time I edit him down. I’m going to mingle a bit before the show. See what I can learn.”
Earle moved to the edge of the room so he could survey the area. Like the Edison, the lobby was opulent, more like a museum than a theater. He laughed to himself. Experiential research always affected him this way, and it was hard to shake the idea that the world he was walking through was virtual and augmented instead of being actual. This was the real world. 1942. A paranoid world at war, although, as someone once told him, it isn’t paranoia if they’re really out to get you. All kinds of history happened in ‘42. The Japanese captured Manila, Bataan fell, Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans, MacArthur left the Phillipines, an oil refinery in California was shelled by a Japanese sub, the civilian draft began. The war hit close to New York too. In June, the FBI arrested four German saboteurs after a U-boat landed them on Long Island.
The people waiting to see Casablanca didn’t look nervous. They chatted in the low murmur people use when in public. He wondered if the first audiences for Romeo and Juliet were the same way. No idea what awaited them inside. It is just another play, they would have been thinking. An idle way to spend a few hours. But the world was different afterwards. Those first audiences were there at the beginning, like people standing in a mountain meadow, unaware that the tiny stream starting at their feet was the progenitor of the Mississippi.
A handful stood near the coatroom. A couple leaned close together under a buy war bonds poster. Others entered a door into the theater.
“Shall we?” said Hoffman.
They took seats near the front. The room smelled of plush and colognes, and the wet street on people’s shoes. Earle eyed the curtain at the front of the room apprehensively. It stretched nearly the length of the stage. “We could be too close. The image might not hold up when you’re near the screen.”
“They wouldn’t have chairs here if it wasn’t good.” Hoffman sat, then squirmed a bit. “You wouldn’t believe what I’m wearing under this,” she said. “It’s all seams and scratchy cloth.”
Earle surveyed the theater. Casablanca had its opening night three days earlier. Now, fewer than half the seats were filled, almost all folks in their twenties or older. He breathed deeply. His record of the experience would be clearer if he stayed focused and calm. Hormonal imbalances could throw it off. He tried to forget that Hoffman was sitting next to him, her arm against his on the armrest. Slow breaths. Calmness.
The house lights dimmed, and the ceiling to floor curtains drew aside, revealing the screen.
“Very dramatic,” said Hoffman. She settled deeper into her seat.
Behind them, a ratchety noise clicked into being, then a beam of light cut through the air to illuminate the screen. Earle turned. Through a small window high on the wall at the back of the theater, the projector glowed as the first film rolled. He nodded. The clicking would be the film pulling through the sprockets and the shutter flicking in front of each frame to give the illusion of movement. That’s what I’m here for, he thought. All the reading about Casablanca had never told him how loud the projection equipment could be. He faced the screen. Movie Tone News, the title said. Reading hadn’t told him that the floor would be sticky, or that watching a film in a huge room in the company of strangers felt so . . . well . . . so theatrical. No wonder people went to movies by the millions. This was the era before television, before computers and home theaters and specvids or tactiles or any of the entertainments he was used to. Black and white images of battleships at sea filled the screen.
The narrator’s voice boomed through the theater. “Brave sailors on the USS Dakota shot down a record thirty
-two enemy planes in a valiant effort in support of the South Pacific campaign.” A shadowy plane raced across a grey sky, chased by tracers.
A woman a few seats to his left sat with her hands up to her mouth. Did she know someone in the navy? She might have been twenty, hair curled below her ears, a crucifix dangling from her throat, and she wore a long white skirt covered with a floral pattern, her coat folded on her lap. She appeared to be alone.
In the row in front of them there were three couples, all with the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder. More than half the people in the theater were coupled up. It’s a social occasion, Earle realized. Going to the movies wasn’t just about seeing the story, it was, oddly enough, in the darkness of the theater and the noise of the movie, a way to be with someone. Granted, the communication was nonverbal, but the people must have come together to be together.
Hoffman sat beside him. He could put his arm around her. How would she respond? Her hands lightly gripped the armrests. Her legs were uncrossed. Nothing about her body language gave him a clue one way or another about what she was thinking. If he just raised his own arm, he could reach around her. Would she move in close? Her violet perfume filled his nose. From the corner of his eye, in the flickering light of the Movie Tone News, he could see the curve of her cheek, the reflected shine in her eye.
Earle’s arm twitched. It would be so easy to make the motion to hold her. He could tell her that it was part of the experience of seeing a movie in 1942. He leaned to the left so he could raise his arm.
Something bumped the back of his chair. Earle turned. It was Durance, his forearms resting on their chair tops. “I figured I could catch Tiny Hill’s Orchestra’s late show. Thought I’d better see what this Casablanca fuss was all about. I had a tough time finding you in the dark!”
A sibilant “Shh!” hissed from a row back.
“It’s not etiquette to talk in a theater,” whispered Hoffman. She didn’t appear happy to see him.
“Why not?” Durance said, his voice still too loud. “It’s not a live performance.”
“Shh,” said Earle.
The Warner Bothers’ theme trumpets and drums theme filled the auditorium, and the film began.
Earle slid down in the chair until his head rested against the plush. The opening credits played over a map of Africa. He trembled. An arrow traced its way from Paris, across France, through the Mediterranean to end in Casablanca where all refugees without exit visas “wait and wait and wait.”
He’d seen the picture a hundred times before. The rhythm of it was familiar—the report of the dead couriers and the stolen letters of transit, the roundup of suspects, the English couple talking to the pickpocket—but he’d never seen the movie like this, in a huge theater, and the atmosphere was different. The people sitting all around him had no idea that they were in the presence of greatness. Earle felt the same way he had at the Hindenberg. 1937. The ship was ridiculously large, only eighty-seven feet shorter than the Titanic. Earle had stood with a crowd to watch the docking. The people oohed and ahhed at her girth. They didn’t know. They didn’t know, but Earle did. To the unprepared, great moments felt like common ones until they were over.
On the screen, a model airplane flew over a crowded Moroccan street. The people stared hopefully. Hoffman leaned into him. “That’s not a very realistic looking airplane.”
“Production costs,” he whispered back. “Almost everything you see was done in the studio or back lots. No computer help.”
She wrinkled her brow. “It’s distracting.”
“The story is not about the plane.”
Scenes flicked by: Germans stepped onto the runway where Renault waited. Bogart played chess by himself at Rick’s. Ugarte bragged to Bogart about selling exit Visas cheap. “I don’t mind a parasite,” said Bogart. “I object to a cut rate one.”
Earle craned his neck to see other patrons in the theater. What were they feeling? How did the movie affect them? The woman in the floral print dress leaned forward, but he could see nothing in her or the rest of the audience’s attentive faces. For a second, Durance met Earle’s gaze, but he looked back to the screen.
Earle turned around. Within minutes, Bergman entered, saw Sam. She had to know right then, Earle thought. Rick was back in her life. The bar was called Rick’s and Sam was Rick’s best friend. Sam knew too the heartache she brought. Earle could see it in Sam’s face. Sam must have been thinking, “run, boss!” Later he would beg Rick to leave. “Please, boss, let’s go. There ain’t nothing but trouble for you here. We’ll take the car and drive all night. We’ll get drunk. We’ll go fishing and stay away until she’s gone.”
But Rick waited for a woman. He made Sam play, “As Time Goes By.”
Earle’s hands rested on his knees. Hoffman had taken the armrest. She stared at the screen, the changing light brightening then shadowing her features.
Bergman walked into Rick’s. “Can I tell you a story?” she asked Rick.
“Does it got a wow finish?” he said.
“I don’t know the finish yet.”
I don’t know the finish either, thought Earle. He felt Bogart’s pain in his loss of expression. Despite his tough-guy posturing, it was all there beneath. And the film played on, uneditable, inevitable, like history, Earle thought. He wondered what the script of the evening held for him. Was there an inevitable crash coming? Was his Hindenberg moving toward the docking tower, with him on board instead of those poor, doomed people? But, gradually, as the film clicked on, he forgot about Hoffman sitting next to him and Durance behind. He forgot about the other people in the theater. They were all in Casablanca, holding letters of transit close to their hearts, bargaining with bitterness for love. Ignoring the Nazi Major Strasser and his arrogance. Ignoring the pain in the world around them, until the passion became too much. Laszlo led the café’s band in “La Marseillaise,” overwhelming the Germans’ singing of “Die Wacht Am Rhein.” Even Yvonne, Bogart’s spurned lover who came to the bar with a German officer on her arm, joined in, tears on her cheeks. Bergman looked at her driven husband across the room, who was not thinking of himself or her or of love, but of his occupied France and the German heel in its back. It was an instant where Earle often paused the film to look at Bergman’s eyes. The world was in them, filled with respect for Laszlo’s courage, with admiration. Anyone would give a lifetime to earn the look that Bergman considered him with, and Laszlo didn’t know. He sang the song to its end, the expatriates in the café on their feet, for a moment joined in emotion.
But Earle couldn’t pause the film. It rolled on. “Viva la France!” they roared. “Viva La France!”
Like he had a hundred times before, Renault closed the café under Strasser’s orders. Bogart said, “How can they close me up? On what grounds?” Renault said, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here.” Just then the croupier handed Renault a handful of cash. “Your winnings, sir.” The audience laughed, which woke Earle to his mission. He broke his gaze from the screen. The woman in the floral dress didn’t laugh. Her posture was tense. Earle could see she was mesmerized. What’s going to happen next? she must be thinking. Her life was involved now, like the audience to any worthwhile story. What’s going to happen?
In a few minutes, Bergman would wait for Bogart in his apartment. She’d plead for the letters. Finally, she’d pull a gun on him. “Go ahead and shoot,” he’d say. “You’ll be doing me a favor.” She will put the gun down. “Richard, I tried to stay away. I thought I would never see you again, that you were out of my life.” She’ll weep. “The day you left Paris, if you knew what I went through. If you knew how much I loved you, how much I still love you.” They’d kiss.
Why didn’t Bogart see what she was doing? Earle thought. The Bulgarian girl not ten minutes earlier in the film had said, “If someone loved you very much so that your happiness was the only thing she wanted in the world, and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”
But that was the beauty. Bogart didn’t. He couldn’t replay the Bulgarian girl’s words. He couldn’t edit what Bergman said to him, nor could he tinker with his own heart. Maybe by the end of the film he figured it out, but right then, Bogart went with his own emotions. He forgot his anger and held her, Bergman, with her luminous eyes and high cheekbones and smile like a sunrise.
Hoffman whispered. “You didn’t tell me the film had a sense of humor.”
Earle felt her breath in his ear, her hand on his arm. “It has irony,” he whispered back, keenly aware that Durance sat behind them. Did Bogart send Bergman off with Henreid at the end of the film because he knew she didn’t love him? Was he that keen-sighted? And how did he know?
What was Hoffman thinking? Did she care for him in the least?
Earle forced himself to look away from the screen again. He was here to experience Casablanca in a world where it hadn’t existed before. He had a job to do.
The woman in the floral dress held a handkerchief to her cheek, not moving. Her face was wet with tears. Henreid asked Bergman about the time she thought he was dead. “Were you lonely in Paris?” he asked. “I know how it is to be lonely,” he said. Was Henreid forgiving Bergman for the affair with Bogart without even knowing about it? The woman in the floral dress sobbed silently. What was her story? Was her husband at war? Did she believe him to be dead? Even now, was there a lover?
Earle watched, awed. How seldom had he been able to feel the world through someone else. The bend of her wrist. The handkerchief’s dangling end. The quiet, wracking sobs that shook her sides. How privileged he felt to be a part of her moment. What a moment of trespass on his part. Everything he hoped for in coming to see Casablanca was encompassed by this scene. This would be bigger than his Hindenberg experience.
He looked away, blinking against a momentary sting. It didn’t take much to see that his problems didn’t amount to—he sought for a comparison, then smiled—a hill of beans. It was Bogart’s line. Whatever the woman in the floral dress was going through, his own anxieties couldn’t measure up. Earle couldn’t know Hoffman’s mind any more than Bogart knew Bergman’s, and in this time he couldn’t edit in messages from her or create pictures of the two of them at romantic vacation stops, or even replay their times together. He was a time traveler stuck in the ever-present and always receding now with the people around him an enigma, like the woman in the floral dress.