One of the most beloved movies of all time, Casablanca—released
75 years ago this month in New York—was also one of the most unlikely films
ever to become a classic.
It was not the kind of biopic, costume drama or
adaptation of a major novel or play that is traditional Best Picture Oscar
bait, but instead a picked-up property, an unproduced drama called Everybody Comes to Rick’s.
Once Warner Brothers and producer Hal Wallis passed on the two actors
originally considered for the leads (George Raft and Ann Sheridan), they
still faced the difficulty of making the assembled cast and crew cohere.
With
no settled ending during much of production, Ingrid Bergman was uncertain how
to play her love scenes as Ilsa (although she was certain that the actor who portrayed her husband, Paul Henreid,
was self-important). The actress was also taller than Humphrey Bogart, so their
size difference had to be eliminated by having him stand on boxes and being photographed from favorable angles. Even that didn’t completely mollify Bogie, who—in the death
throes of his first marriage—was drinking heavily and bickering constantly with
one of the studio’s favorite directors, Michael Curtiz.
Somehow, in the end, despite its numerous problems
throughout shooting, the world did
come to think that “the problems of three little people” “amount[ed] to a hill
of beans in this crazy world.” Casablanca turned Bogart not just into a lead who
could carry a film (as he had been since High
Sierra and The Maltese Falcon the
year before), but also as a romantic—if unconventional and complicated—leading
man, even as an international prototype of an existentialist hero who, despite a cynical surface, is forced to
act for good amid an evil world.
While his innate acting skill and his offscreen anguish
combined to produce the requisite misery of Bogart’s Rick Blaine, we can’t
bypass the script. The credited screenwriters, Koch and the Epstein brothers,
contributed unique points of view to the final product, including many of the
most quoted lines in film history (Claude Rains’ “Round up the usual suspects”).
But it was the uncredited Casey Robinson who may have made the most significant
contribution, according to Frank Miller, author of a book on the making of the
film. It was Robinson who thought that Rick should tell Ilsa to get on the
plane for the good of the cause.
For a fine brief retrospective of this improbable
cinema triumph, what many think of as the “Great American Movie,” I urge you to
read Robert Garnett’s excellent article
in this past weekend’s Wall Street
Journal.
“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do
generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason
for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are
offended with it.”—Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), The Battle of the Books (1704)
