The Books: The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, by Aljean Harmetz

Next book on the Hollywood shelf:

The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, by Aljean Harmetz

The book was first published under the title Round Up the Usual Suspects, which I like better, but that’s neither here nor there. Harmetz’s book is exhaustively researched, from shot numbers, to producer Hal Wallis’ memos, to casting choices, to rehearsal days, and by the end of it you may think, “Well, I may actually know too much about Casablanca now to even enjoy the movie anymore.”

Never fear. The movie works if you don’t know one damn thing about it. And it still works if you know so much behind-the-scenes stuff that it threatens to drown what’s onscreen.

Casablanca is, obviously, legendary, and there are legendary stories attached to the shooting, which differ depending on who you talk to. But the reality is that Casablanca was not being primed to be a “Great Film” or an “Eternal Beloved Film” or anything like that. It was a melodramatic Warner Brothers release, meant to tap into the anxieties of the war, and to capitalize on the stardom of Bergman and Bogart, and make a nice chunk of cash, and let’s all move on with our lives. The resonance it has had for generations was not something anyone anticipated. And now, of course, in retrospect, you can see the elements that elevate it above other more pedestrian anti-Nazi war movies, but still: it’s hard to quantify exactly where magic lies.

Is it the script? The romance? The exotic setting? Sure, all of these have something to do with the story’s success. But it’s all quite hokey on one level (one of the best parts about it): the set is the same as the set in so many other Warner Brothers films. Move out one movie, move in another – NEXT! The script is very witty. And there is a lot of interest, from the get-go, in the situation of the refugees across Europe trying to get the hell out through France and Morocco, a situation that was just starting to get a lot of nervous press at that time. You could say that the real magic lies in the final moment, Ilsa’s choice on the airport runway, or Rick’s choice made for her – and that is what turns the film into an eternal statement, a symbol of self-sacrifice and unrequited love. Certainly, if Ilse had thrown over poor Paul Henreid and stayed on in Casablanca with Rick … well, you wouldn’t have that satisfying ACHE at the end of the film that is so much a part of its story. It seems that it HAS to end that way, because then we all get to feel noble (even though it’s no use being noble, right?), and good, and honorable, and – because of that – it fills Americans with the strength to go on and fight those damn Nazis, because, dammit, they’re on the good side, with Rick, who gave up his only love! Melodramatic stuff, but it’s primal. That final airport scene in Casablanca touches a couple of deep primal strains in the human character (and while Titanic is pooh-poohed, it touches the same primal strains in humanity: hence, its overwhelming success).

Stanley Kauffman writes:

Bogart absolutely encapsulates permissible romance. In this disillusioned, disenchanted world here was a romantic hero we could accept. I think that that disenchantment began with World War I and the emergence of what could be called the Hemingway — the undeluded — generation. And I think that that revulsion with the romances and the lies of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century has persisted. There have been plenty of representatives of the lovely bucolic strain of American life on the screen. Bogart was someone urban — in a sense more jagged and abrasive than Cagney — who you felt was suffering. Cagney was triumphant. Bogart was tough, but he had sensitivity. Certainly the epitome he stood for was in Casablanca. I was misinformed. That’s the twentieth century.

And so where does magic lie? Where does power reside? I think that the movies that last, the ones that end up becoming classics, elude that question, and that is why audiences keep going back to them, and that is why new generations keep discovering them. You can talk about the movie endlessly, and argue about what makes it so great. It’s got something for everyone. Men, women, cynics, romantics, pro-America Americans, bitter realists … all are represented. There are details that add up to the whole. Claude Rains’ character, Captain Renault, who has some of the best lines ever written. They still reverberate. Dooley Wilson’s character – a true friend to the Bogart character, an egalitarian relationship between a white man and a black man that was extremely rare for the time. The use of “As Time Goes By”. We have Bergman’s idealism, and Henreid’s boring elegant passion. Then there are all the crazy wheeling-dealing characters who inhabit the cafe, doing their best to bribe their way out of Casablanca. There are even clues that women sleep with Captain Renault in order to get their orders of transit, which, when you think about it in any real way, is horrible. That’s the world of Casablanca. It’s all there. We have a tortured lead character, on the run from something (and, best of all, it is never explained WHAT), and heartbroken from his failed romance. It’s awesome to have a lead character so full of an unnamed cynicism that when he makes the sacrifice in the last scene … when he shows, suddenly, how good he is, how willing he is to “stick his neck out for someone” … it still takes the breath away. Viktor Lazslo walks around with “I AM NOBLE” stamped on his forehead. Rick doesn’t. He’s the opposite. And it is those people who provide us an entryway into the story, because we relate to someone like that. None of us are ever as good as we want to be. Rick provides the hope that when the chips are down, we may too show our most noble sides.

But again, not one of these details can actually explain the success of the film. It’s just one of those times when magic happened. Lightning is captured in a bottle. You can’t set out to make such a film, although, of course, everyone tries. But sometimes it happens when you are looking the other way.

The dueling-anthems scene, for example. I never get sick of it, and it never fails to move me. I can certainly point to a couple of the details: Bogart’s stoic nod from the stairway (which, incidentally, was an insert, put in later – Bogart the actor didn’t even know what he was nodding at! But it works!), Bergman’s glowing face looking up at Henreid, the shot of the black-haired guitar player singing the Marseilleise with a passion that still catches at my throat, the drunk French woman in tears at the bar, how the little band at Rick’s suddenly swells into the sound of a magnificent orchestra (that was Wallis’ idea) … all you can say is every single piece of that sequence works. It is put together perfectly, imagined perfectly, and the end result is one of the most moving moments in all of cinema.

One of the chapters I found most fascinating had to do with all of the character actors hired to play bit parts in the casino, and most of them were actual refugees from war-torn Europe. And this, more than anything else, very well may give Casablanca that special oomph, that feeling that you are watching something that actually approaches reality. Yes, the Nazis were often played by Jews who had fled France and Germany (a strange and common situation), but all of the smaller characters who populate the casino were not Hopeful Starlets who grew up in Fresno. These were people who had lived some version of this story, who were a long long way from their rightful homes, who were forced to watch helplessly as the Nazi wave overtook their countries … and so all of those bit characters, every single one, even the ones with only one or two lines, bring with them a world of experience appropriate to the film.

Here is an excerpt from that chapter.

Excerpt from The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, by Aljean Harmetz

Of the seventy-five actors and actresses who had bit parts and larger roles in Casablanca, almost all were immigrants of one kind or another. Of the fourteen who were given screen credit, only Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were born in America. Some had come for private reasons. Ingrid Bregman, who would lodge comfortably in half a dozen countries and half a dozen languages, once said that she was a flyttfagel, one of Sweden’s migratory birds. Some, including Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, wanted richer careers. But at least two dozen were refugees from the stain that was spreading across Europe. There were a dozen Germans and Austrians, nearly as many French, the Hungarian S.Z. Sakall and Peter Lorre, and a handful of Italians.

“If you think of Casablanca and think of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn’t have had anything like the color and tone it had,” says Pauline Kael.

Dan Seymour remembers looking up during the singing of the Marseillaise and discovering that half of his fellow actors were crying. “I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees,” says Seymour.

Marcel Dalio, Rick’s croupier, had starred for Julien Duvivier as the informer in Pepe Le Moko, and for Jean Renoir in two classic French films – as the Jewish prisoner of war in La Grande Illusion, and, in the role of a lifetime, as the benevolent aristocrat in The Rules of the Game. Like Richard Blaine, Dalio left Paris hours ahead of the invading German army. Like the most fortunate of the refugees in Casablanca the forty-year-old actor and his seventeen-year-old second wife, Madeleine LeBeau, eventually reached Lisbon. Then it was another two months before they could get visas to Chile. They didn’t know that their visas were forgeries until their Portuguese steamer docked in Mexico, stranding two hundred passengers with fraudulent visas. Dalio and LeBeau were eventually able to get temporary Canadian passports. At forty, the actor whose photograph had been used on Nazi posters to demonstrate the features of a Jew began English lessons. Dalio and LeBeau had met when she played a small role in a play in which he starred, and the marriage lasted long enough for them to play adjoining small roles – croupier and discarded mistress – in Casablanca. On June 22, while LeBeau rushed into Rick’s Cafe on the arm of a German officer, Dalio was at a Los Angeles courthouse filing for divorce on the grounds that his wife had deserted him.

Acting is what actors do. It is not necessary to be a murderer to portray one. But a dozen good actors, cast adrift, brought to a dozen small roles in Casablanca an understanding and a desperation that could never have come from Central Casting. After the Germans occupied Austria, Ludwig Stossel was imprisoned several times before he was able to escape from his country. Dalio’s mother and father died in a concentration camp. Palfi begged her mother to emigrate, but, until it was too late, her mother continued to believe that a “nation of poets and philosophers was incapable of committing the crimes” her daughter feared. Sakall’s wife lost her brother and sister-in-law, her sister and her sister’s daughter. Not one of Sakall’s three sisters survived the concentration camps. On the French Street, on May 27, an extra broke into tears as Rick and Ilsa sat at a sidewalk cafe and wondered how soon the Germans would reach Paris. “We went through that awful day,” her husband said.

In Europe everyone knew their names. IN America they would play roles that were defined by occupation – Baccarat Dealer, News Vendor, Policeman, German Officer, or, even more simply, Refugee Woman, and Civilian.

Curt Bois was the Dark European in Casablanca, the pickpocket. “I have such a small part,” he says in 1990. “If one of the audience coughed while I was stealing from a man his money and then he stopped coughing, he didn’t see me anymore. It was such a small part. It was no part at all.”

He apologizes for his English. It is rusty, he says, “since I’m in Germany already for forty years now.” Like many of the German-speaking refugees, Bois went home when the war was over. The bitterness of his regret at the choice he made is tangible, even over the telephone from Berlin. They went back, most of them, to reclaim their language, just as all but a reckless few had first gone to Austria or Czechoslovakia in a futile attempt to avoid being stripped of speech. Bois is typical of the Germans. An atheist with Jewish parents, he left Germany soon after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. He went to Vienna, where applause had bumped the rafters when he had turned Charley’s Aunt into a dapper flapper. “Already in 1933,” Bois says, “my fellow colleagues didn’t greet me anymore.” When Vienna became too uncomfortable, he went to Prague. But in Prague, too, he heard “the awful voice of the murderer of all times.”

By 1935, Bois was in America. Others stayed in Austria until the Anschluss in the spring of 1938, then crowded into German-speaking Czechoslovakia until the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland in October. Many of them made it no further. Billy Wilder, then a young screenwriter, was one of the few who dared to discard his language immediately. He was on a train to Paris on February 28, 1933, the day after the Nazis burned the Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists. “For the rest of that year, people were stupid enough to go to Austria, or the German part of Czechoslovakia,” Wilder says. “They thought they would be safe there. Mostly writers or actors, they were afraid that being deprived of language they would have to die of hunger.”

Wilder, whose six Academy Awards for The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment testify to his success in Hollywood, never quite starved in Paris, but there were days when Wilder, Peter Lorre, and Lorre’s wife, Celia Lovsky, shared a single can of tomato soup for dinner. When he reached Los Angeles, Wilder avoided the restaurants and living rooms where refugees met to drink coffee, eat pastry, and speak German. Instead, he lay on his bed and listened to the radio. Each day he learned twenty new English words. It was years before he was willing to speak German again.

“Most of the refugees had a secret hope that Hitler would be defeated and they could go back home,” Wilder says. “I never had that hope. This was home. I had a clear-cut vision: ‘This is where I am going to die.'”

Bois learned his English by listening to the burlesque comics on New York’s Forty-second Street. Leonard Kinskey, who tended Rick’s bar in Casablanca, came to New York equipped with such phrases as “My good kind sir”. Kinskey expanded his vocabulary by working as a waiter in Manhattan. He got the job because a friend remembered his dashing performance in a French play, The Singing Waiter.

Marcel Dalio was lucky enough to have his friends Charles Boyer, Rene Clair, and Jean Renoir to introduce him to the intricacies of the language. S.Z. Sakall never really did learn English despite English lessons seven days a week. Whcih was all to the good since audiences found his jolly mangling of the language irresistible. And, when Warner Bros. wanted to sign him to a long-term contract in 1943, Sakall was able to see what the studio was trying to get away with by having a friend translate the contract into Hungarian.

It was the emigre writers and actors who struggled the hardest and the longest. Directors spoke with their eyes. With the aid of dialogue directors to coach the actors, Fritz Lang, Henry Koster, Robert Siodmak, and Douglas Sirk slipped easily into the industry. Producers had assistants to translate their thoughts. And the musicians, including Franz Waxman, Hanns Eisler, and Miklos Rossa, didn’t need words at all.

Lotte Palfi didn’t anticipate trouble. “America was called a melting pot because the great majority of the people there had emigrated from other countries,” she wrote. “So my German accent shouldn’t be any hindrance to my acting career. Of course I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Some of the refugees who acted in Casablanca were luckier than Palfi. Ludwig Stossel was upgraded to Sakall’s job as Carl the headwaiter in the Casablanca television series in 1944 and then found his own role of a lifetime, and fame, as the little old winemaker in Italian Swiss Colony television commercials. And nothing could keep audiences from loving S.Z. (“Cuddles”) Sakall.

It was Jack Warner who called Sakall “Cuddles” and insisted, despite Sakall’s protests, that the nickname be used as part of his screen billing. If there was ever a Cuddles, it was Sakall, who played flustered, endearing fussbudgets in thirty movies between 1940 and 1950. Sakall refused to loan money because he didn’t want a borrower who couldn’t repay him “to see me coming and run to the other side of the street.” Instead, he told people who asked for money, “I’ll give you as much as I can. Pay me back if you can.” Says Sakall’s sister-in-law, Lenke Kardos, “In Berlin there were a few part-time actors who practically lived off Yani – Mr. Sakall. Once, one was embarrassed to take Yani’s money, and Bozsi, Mrs. Sakall, said, ‘If you don’t take the money, I’ll call the police.'”

On stage in Vienna, Sakall’s ignorance of German made audiences laugh the same way his fractured English would two decades later. He was a popular comedian in early German talkies before the brown shirts and black shirts on the streets of Berlin sent him back to Hungary. A New York Times reviewer wrote in 1936, “Since that excellent Hungarian comedian, Szoke Szakall, once so familiar a sight in German films, is banned from working in Nazi Germany under Hitler’s racial dispensation Budapest producers are profiting by the situation.”

Movie producer Joe Pasternak, a relative by marriage, brought Sakall to America in May 1939. A few weeks later, Bozsi wrote to relatives that Sakall was depressed because, in America, “He draws no crowds.” He missed “being feted, applauded, celebrated”. Sakall’s first two movies, It’s a Date and Spring Parade, both starring Deanna Durbin, remedied his anonymity. By April 1940, Bozsi would be writing, “People begin to recognize him on the street.”

On the set at Universal, Sakall said, “I didn’t did it,” and jerked his head up, causing his jowls to shake and the director and crew to laugh. When he buried his face in his hands, the laughter grew longer and louder. Sakall laughed with them. A Hungarian on the set told him not to be happy, that now he would have to wiggle his jowls for the rest of his life.

“Everything happened as he had foretold it – with the difference that later they weren’t satisfied with the trembling of my jowls,” Sakall wrote in his autobiography. “They demanded that they should quiver and shake in a bigger and better way . . . Later the writers made no attempt to put any humour or wit into my roles. They merely added a piece of business: ‘Here Sakall shakes his jowls and slaps his own face!'”

Curtiz didn’t make the actor shake his jowls, but he used Sakall to leaven Casablanca‘s melodrama. In a wordless gag, the pickpocket bumps into Sakall, who responds by frantically touching all his pockets. Sakall, whose mother died before he was of school age and whose father died before he was grown, loved America with all the passion of the dispossessed. He kept his citizenship papers on the mantel in the living room. “He had lived in so many parts of the world, and he never felt at home except here,” says his sister-in-law.

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7 Responses to The Books: The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, by Aljean Harmetz

  1. george says:

    Enjoyed the excerpt you picked as it plays on something I find particularly engaging – character actors and supporting ensembles. For however many reasons may be conjured to explain this endearing and enduring classic I’ve always been partial to the art/luck of the supporting cast. The Third Man was another such engaging experience with much the same modus operandi – using native actors. Can’t help getting lost in all those characters.

  2. Jaquandor says:

    OMG, thanks for this post…this is why I read your blog faithfully, even though it’s often about movies I haven’t seen or books I haven’t read or Elvis stuff I don’t know about because it’s not what you ever hear on 104.1, “Hits from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s!” Because when you get to something I do know, I can nod along and enjoy that special feeling of learning something about something I already knew about.

    I can never get over Casablanca for the sheer accidental nature of its greatness. So much art is meticulously crafted, labored over with exquisite care, pored over by its creator until he or she feels that every note, or word, or brushstroke, or frame is in its perfect place…and then along comes Casablanca, with its script still being written while shot, with its ending determined by sudden epiphany, and then that ending not even working until someone figures out how to edit it together…I just can’t get over that. A movie about the making of Casablanca couldn’t possibly seem anything other than contrived — “Those two producers, suddenly looking at each other and shouting, ‘Round up the usual suspects’! Give me a break, like that would ever happen!!!” And yet, it did. Wow.

    I’ve always liked Roger Ebert’s view that Casablanca doesn’t have its greatest impact until you watch it the second time. I can attest to that…I enjoyed it well enough the first time, but when I watched it again, six months later, the thing just shattered me. I then watched it every single Sunday afternoon for six weeks. Movies like Casablanca are one of the only reasons I find death fearsome: I don’t want to enter a state where I can never see Casablanca again.

    • Jaquandor says:

      (I just feel like I should clarify that first paragraph, on the chance that it reads too much like “Why don’t you write what I know about”, which isn’t what I meant at all!)

      • sheila says:

        Oh, you. I knew exactly what you meant! Of course it’s thrilling to have someone talk about something you feel so passionately about.

        I love the story about you seeing it the second time. Fascinating. I wonder why that is. I’m trying to think … I didn’t have that experience – but I don’t remember it as clearly as you do (my second time seeing it). I can see what you mean, though. The movie grows in impact, import, meaning, the more times you see it.

        It’s one of those weird movies that you can grow up with. It looks differently depending on the life-stage you are in when you see it. It took me a long time to understand Ilsa’s attraction to Viktor – but now I think I get it. It is also the KEY to the movie’s power and why it resonates so deeply. It is that selfless aspect … that you can commit yourself to a greater good, that you can deny yourself the more primal in-the-moment happiness – and the world itself will be better for it.

        Thank you for your comment!!

  3. Bybee says:

    I almost named my son “Richard Blaine”. The first name was all picked out and the only thing left was a bold strike with the middle name on the birth certificate. Alas, I was shouted down. Still. Not. Happy. My son loves “Casablanca”, though.

  4. Roy Griffis says:

    It’s an amazing book, and should be read by any movie lover. The research is stellar, and the stories she tells are gripping.

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