Though the picture was studio-bound, the set was placed on hydraulic lifts that made it shift to and fro like a ship at sea. The actors seemed on the edge of mal de mer all through the filming. Just before Across the Pacific wrapped, Huston received his commission as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Vincent Sherman was assigned to finish the film, and Huston, with nothing but mischief in mind, invented a story that he continued to tell for decades afterward. In the Huston version, the outgoing director arranged a climactic scene in which Humphrey was tied to a chair, surrounded by heavily armed Japanese soldiers. “There was no way in God’s green world that Bogart could logically escape,” maintained John. “I shot the scene, then called Jack Warner and said, ‘Jack, I’m on my way. I’m in the army. Bogie will know how to get out.’ Bogie didn’t know how to escape. Neither did Sherman. The entire scene had to be rewritten and shot so that Humphrey was guarded by only one soldier, whom, of course, he quickly overpowered.” The reality was somewhat different: the final scenes were actually written two days before Huston donned his uniform.
Across the Pacific did well enough at the box office. The heat and cohesion of Falcon was missing, but Arthur Edeson’s cinematography gave the film a documentary feel, and the anti-Japanese sentiment in the country did the rest. As usual, Times critic Bosley Crowther led the cheering: “Mr. Huston has given the Warners a delightfully fear-jerking picture.… Mr. Bogart is as tough and sharp a customer as ever faced the world with bitter eyes.”
In Hollywood it is not enough to succeed; your colleague must have failed. So it was not without schadenfreude that Humphrey read his own good notices, and then heard about George Raft’s grumbling reference to Falcon: “There but for the grace of me, go I.” Raft was, in fact, on his way out; he would make one more film for Warner Bros. and then move on to diminished parts at other studios. Humphrey, on the basis of his newest triumphs, had just broken into the top rank of Warners stars, with a guaranteed salary of $2,750 a week. It was a strange time for him. An iconoclast since childhood, a rebel on the theatrical and sound stages, he was currently in favor with everyone important—and something of an icon in the making. Louis Sobol, a widely syndicated Broadway columnist, went so far as to call Bogart the “white-haired boy of Hollywood.” On one hand, Humphrey cherished his reputation as a complicated and difficult man, ever ready to do battle with father-figure directors and studio chiefs. On the other hand, he had experienced more than his share of disappointments and setbacks; he had worked with great diligence to reach this new peak. Why not enjoy it to the full?
But somehow he couldn’t. It was not in him to drive ahead without peeking in the rearview mirror. No one knew more about the hazards of show business than he did. No one was more aware of the way luck could change for an actor, up one day, down the next, like all those pathetic silent-movie guys who used to own the town, and now had a rented convertible and nothing in the bank. Even with all the adulation he could still wind up like Raft, making wrong choices, ceding good roles to some careerist with better luck and shrewder advisers. So he moved warily. Like a lot of writers and actors, he bore in mind “Provide, Provide,” the Robert Frost poem published only seven years before:
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
iii
While Humphrey was pondering his next step, an unproduced play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, came to the attention of Warner Bros. The co-author, Murray Burnett, had visited Vienna at the time of the anschluss; he saw the open hatred of Jews and the terror apparatus being put in place. Moving on to the south of France he watched desperate refugees attempting to flee the Hitler-backed Vichy regime. Just before returning to America he dropped into a nightclub in Juanles-Pins, where a black singer enthralled an audience with pop tunes. Burnett melded the scenes and, with his more experienced writing partner, Joan Alison, wrote a straight play about an expatriate American who owns a casino in Casablanca, surrounded by Nazis and their French collaborators, as well as a swirl of refugees stranded in that still-neutral area. Irene Lee, head of the Warners story department, thought it might have a new life on film. To make sure, she asked one of her low-level readers, a thirty-five-year-old named Stephen Karnot, to appraise it. Karnot would leave the following October for a job in a defense plant—it was the patriotic thing to do, and besides, Warners was paying him all of $1.12 an hour. His judgment was remarkably prescient nonetheless: “Excellent melodrama. Colorful, timely background, tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum. A box office natural, for Bogart, or Cagney, or Raft, in one of the out-of-the-usual roles, and perhaps Mary Astor.”
Warners bought the script and set about finding the right team to turn it into a movie. As Aljean Harmetz remarks in her luminous study, Round Up the Usual Suspects, “No one could have known that the central—though serial—collaboration [of screenwriters] would produce a script with more memorable lines than any other Hollywood film.” Thus far, the screenplay Everybody Comes to Rick’s had no new dialogue, just a working title. Warners called it Casablanca.
iv
Several teams had a try at adaptation and then withdrew. Nobody knew how to lick Casablanca’s central problem. The romantic duo, Rick Blaine and Lois Meredith, had been lovers before the war. She was married; he was a solitary adventurer. The Production Code, set up by producers in 1930 to avoid government censorship, specifically forbade mentions of sexual misconduct. Yet without that amorous experience back in Paris, why would Rick be so upset when she shows up at his nightclub?
The thirty-four-year-old Epstein twins were assigned to the film. Philip and Julius were New Yorkers who had prospered in Hollywood. Julius went there in 1935; Philip joined him in 1936. For a couple of years they worked independently, then joined forces in 1939, collaborating on a series of hits that included The Strawberry Blonde, The Bride Came C.O.D., and The Male Animal. Thin, bald, fast-talking wise guys, they were good enough to get away with impudent remarks that would have finished other writers. When Jack Warner saw them coming to work for the first time at 1:30 p.m., he bawled them out. “Railroad presidents get in at nine o’clock, bank presidents get in at nine o’clock, read your contract, you’re coming in at nine o’clock.” That afternoon they sent Jack a note: “Dear J.L., have the bank president finish the script.”
Jack knew that they were industrious and that they were first-class. Aside from his customary eruptions he stayed out of their way. Hal Wallis would produce Casablanca, and that winter he began putting the pieces in place. Despite many rumors that George Raft, Ronald Reagan, and others were considered for the role of the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, Wallis had Humphrey in mind from the start. He hired scenarist Howard Koch, who had written dialogue for the Bette Davis hit The Letter, and for the Gary Cooper vehicle Sergeant York. Koch would oversee the Epsteins’ work, and they would then correct his corrections. Rarely did the trio write in the same room at the same time, but somehow the arrangement worked. Koch made no secret of his leftist views; the Epsteins were more interested in wit than in geopolitics. And yet when Koch wrote Rick’s cantankerous line, “I don’t buy or sell human beings,” it was the Epsteins who made it immortal with the riposte: “That’s too bad. That’s Casablanca’s leading commodity.”
Wallis wanted Michael Curtiz to direct. The Hungarian was not a pleasant man; many actors hated him. Once Bette Davis established herself in the late 1930s, she refused to work for him. Fay Wray, the screaming blonde in King Kong, spoke of the way the director fired an extra in front of a crowd of onlookers. “He kept saying, ‘Move to your right. More. More. Now you are out of the picture.’ ” But Curtiz had also made a series of major swashbucklers with Errol Flynn—Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Sea Hawk. His brisk, animated style seemed right for a film with so many interior shots and, at least thus far, with so many holes in the plot. (“Who cares about character?” Cur
tiz once inquired. “I make it go so fast nobody notices.”) And his mangling of the English language amused all but his worst foes. In his study, Casablanca: As Time Goes By, Frank Miller tells the story of Curtiz demanding “a poodle, a black poodle” for one scene. The prop man feared to question his boss, and set about finding the proper canine. Within an hour he presented a panting animal to Curtiz. “Very nice,” he said, “but I want a poodle.” When the “poor technician tried to explain that’s what he was holding, Curtiz exploded. ‘I wanted a poodle in the street! A poodle of water! Not a goddamn dog!’ ”
In the play, the female lead is something of a wanton. That would never do. Her virtue could be restored by some crafty writing, but what were two Americans, Rick and Lois, doing in Casablanca in the first place? Wallis mentioned the problem to Casey Robinson, a scenarist and friend. Robinson asked why the lady had to be American. Why not make her a foreigner? It would add to the exotic nature of the movie. Films like the romantic tragedy Intermezzo showed that the camera loved the twenty-six-year-old Ingrid Bergman, and the horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde demonstrated that she was more than just a pretty face. Lately, though, she had been out of the business, living with her husband in Rochester, New York, where he was studying to be a neurosurgeon. She felt out of things, ignored and melancholy. She wrote to her friend, dialogue coach Ruth Roberts, “Having a home, husband and child, ought to be enough for any woman’s life. I mean, that’s what we are meant for, isn’t it? But still I think every day is a lost day. As if only half of me is alive. The other half is pressed down in a bag and suffocated.” When the script arrived she said yes without bothering to question any of the story details. The part and the name would be changed, that was the important thing; Lois Meredith was now Ilsa Lund.
En route to May 1942, when Casablanca went into production, other members of the cast were signed. Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet came aboard; Lorre would be Ugarte, an underhanded dealer in passages of safe conduct; Greenstreet, Signor Ferrari, owner of a rival nightclub. Leonid Kinskey would play Sascha, a bartender; S. Z. Sakall, Carl, a waiter; Marcel Dalio, a croupier. Claude Rains would be Renault, the corrupt Vichy captain always looking out for Number One; Conrad Veidt, a German movie star forced to flee the Nazis because he had a Jewish wife, but whose piercing glare would condemn him to play Nazis in film after film, would be the imperious Major Strasser.
The third element of the love triangle that haunts Casablanca is Victor Laszlo, leader of the anti-Nazi underground. Warners considered a long roster of actors, found them all unsatisfactory, and hired thirty-four-year-old Paul Henreid at the last minute. A tall, distinguished Viennese with stage experience in Europe, Henreid had actually fled the Nazis in 1935, working in Britain before trying his luck in Hollywood. His breakthrough came with Now, Voyager, in which he co-starred with Bette Davis. She plays an overweight, dowdy spinster, completely dominated by her mother. On a cruise, the ugly duckling meets the unhappily married Henreid, and under his ministrations turns into an enchanting and self-assured swan. The film had two indelible moments. In one, Henreid puts two cigarettes in his lips, lights them both, and hands one to Davis. That was to become one of the most imitated (and parodied) gestures of the 1940s. But the film’s last line was what made it a classic weeper. No longer lovers, just friends, they look up at the night sky. He asks if she’s happy. “Oh,” she murmurs, “don’t let’s ask for the moon … we have the stars.”
Henreid not only had the stars, he was a star. He told Harmetz that he had been destitute in four countries and now, overnight, he was rich. “I had been paid by Warner Bros. $32,000 for Now, Voyager. A fortune. A bloody fortune.” Anxious to keep playing a hot hand, he accepted the role of Laszlo, hoping to parlay it into bigger parts in better pictures. When he signed on, he knew only the barest plot outline because the script was undergoing intense revisions: on the run from fascist enemies, Laszlo and his young wife, Ilsa, are marooned in Casablanca. The only person who can save them is Rick, the man whom she deserted in Paris. How it all turned out was a mystery to Henreid—and to everyone else, including the writers.
If chemistry is a vital part of filmmaking, particularly when a love story lies at the center of the narrative, Casablanca got off to an unpromising start. Off-screen, Humphrey had his hands full with Mayo; he wanted no part of a romance, even a platonic one, with his co-star. Nor was Ingrid attracted to either of her leading men. Paul Henreid bored her, and Humphrey Bogart seemed so distant it was hard to think of him as a lover. “I kissed him, but I never knew him,” was the way she put it. She also repelled the advances of Curtiz, a notorious womanizer.
On the second level, much the same applied. Claude Rains had come a long way from his Cockney origins; he carried himself like an officer—he had been a lieutenant in World War I—and made no attempt to hide his distaste for Southern California. Not that he wanted to return to his native England. He and his fourth wife owned a 380-acre farm in Pennsylvania, and between takes he read agricultural brochures. Rains respected Humphrey and spent some time in conversation with him. But he had no real interest in cultivating friendships, only vegetables. Sydney Greenstreet was a merry soul, but he was on the set for very few scenes and never appeared with Lorre, with whom he had been so effective in The Maltese Falcon. As for Lorre, the little man with large, expressive eyes possessed extraordinary skills, accompanied by a quirky temperament. In the role of Ugarte, the black marketer who dealt in souls, he almost stole the film; as his admiring biographer Stephen D. Youngkin observes, in Casablanca Peter “captured the camera and gleaned a virtuoso performance from leftovers.” He did it with nervous gestures and a mobile forehead, and by chain-smoking cigarettes as he appraised the world with a wary, feline gaze. This was not Sam Spade versus Joel Cairo. As an actor, Humphrey was continually outpointed by the devious Peter. All he could do was rely on dialogue to strengthen his position. “You despise me, don’t you?” asks Ugarte. “Well,” Rick responds, “if I gave you any thought, I probably would.”
As able as Lorre was, he had no idea what Casablanca would mean to him professionally. Since he got only a few weeks’ work before his character was knocked off by the Germans, he regarded the role of Ugarte as just another job—worth doing, but not worth exalting. He clowned around the set, taking a mischievous joy in hiding an eye-dropper full of water and releasing a single bead on Curtiz’s cigarette when the director looked the other way. Otherwise he could be abstracted and asocial. Only a few people knew the reason why. In earlier years he had suffered from acute gallbladder problems. Morphine was prescribed, and in a situation eerily similar to Belmont Bogart’s, he’d gotten hooked.
Whatever their strengths or shortcomings, Lorre, Bergman, Henreid, Rains, Greenstreet, Veidt, Kinskey, Dalio, Sakall, and almost all the others shared one characteristic, and it gave Casablanca an authenticity and texture no scriptwriter could have provided. They all had European or English accents. They knew the mind-set of the refugees; they were those refugees—except that they happened to be the fortunate ones who ended up in the movie business. Rick was supposed to be American and sound American. So was the club’s African American piano player, Sam (Dooley Wilson). But among the other key players only the heavyweight doorman Dan Seymour and seventeen-year-old Joy Page (not coincidentally Jack Warner’s stepdaughter) were born in the United States, and both were encouraged to speak with foreign intonations. Page played a young Bulgarian whose husband (Helmut Dantine, another Viennese refugee) keeps losing at roulette. Her virtue is at stake; they need money to purchase a contraband visa. Captain Renault might help—if she trades her body for his goodwill.
Rick’s interventions save her, even as he maintains, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Koch and the Epsteins understood that Rick had to show the public a Sam Spade—like façade: hard-nosed, indifferent to women, and resistant to authority. They also knew that the attitude had to be a carapace. It was meant to cover the psychic injuries of a decent man trying to forget the past. A
nd so, in a scene between Captain Renault and Rick, the café owner’s credentials pass in review. As it develops, Rick not only aided the troops fighting Mussolini’s Italian troops in Africa, he also showed up in the losing cause against Francisco Franco, the fascist leader whose soldiers won the Spanish Civil War. “I happen to be familiar with your record,” states Renault. He points out that in 1935, Rick ran guns to Ethiopia. The following year he fought in Spain on the Loyalist side. Cornered by facts, Rick retreats to his customary cynicism: he was amply compensated on both occasions.
Hints and innuendos haunt the script. The days when Ilsa and Rick carried on in Paris could not be made explicit in 1942. Flashbacks show the young widow, whose husband has recently perished. She drives through the city with her new amour, Ilsa radiant, Rick lighthearted. They toast each other with champagne, and Bogart utters yet another immortal line: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Plans to go away together are enthusiastically made—but she never shows up at the railroad station. Sam brings a message. Her “Dear Richard” is fraught with pain and mystery: “I cannot go with you or ever see you again. You must not ask why.” Humphrey was formidably equipped to play this kind of scene; and his agonized response needed no lines of dialogue to put it across. Rick and Sam go off to North Africa, leaving Ilsa forever. Or so they think, until one evening, “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world” she walks into Rick’s Café Américain with Victor Laszlo, the husband she thought she had lost. The recriminations begin.
Save for the exotic locale and wartime circumstances, this was the classic woman-forced-to-choose-between-two-men situation. Moviegoers had seen it a hundred times. If Casablanca was different it was because three elements separated the film from all the previous romances.
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