Of all the minyans in all the world
Monica Porter leans back in her seat and enjoys some movie magic. Keren David samples well-crafted reflections We’ll Always Have Casablanca
Faber & Faber, £25 Reviewed by Monica Porter
UNDOUBTEDLY HOLLYWOOD’S most cherished movie — most often shown, most studied on screenwriting courses, its dialogue perennially quoted — the 1942 classic Casablanca can claim another superlative. It must be the most Jewish film in which the word “Jew” is signally absent.
Now, the fascinating story — subtitled The Life, Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie — of how Casablanca came to be made is told by Noah Isenberg, who teaches screen studies in New York.
It began as a stage play co-written by Murray Burnett, an American schoolteacher and aspiring playwright who, while holidaying in Europe in the summer of 1938, helped his wife’s Jewish relatives smuggle their valuables out of Nazi-occupied Austria. He learned of the perilous escape route taken by Jews and other “undesirables”, via Marseilles to Casablanca, in the hope of securing a visa to Lisbon and sailing from there to America. Moved by their plight, and inspired by the drama of it, Burnett had found his theme.
While the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s remained unstaged, it was sent to several Hollywood studios, eventually landing on Jack Warner’s desk… five days after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The Polish-born, pogromfleeing Warner Brothers (former name Wonskolaser) ran Hollywood’s most stridently anti-Nazi studio. And, with America at war, here was the powerful propaganda vehicle the studio boss needed. Warner assigned his top writers, twins Julius and Philip Epstein, to write the script; later on, others would contribute. The director was the Hungarian-Jewish émigré Michael Curtiz. Max Steiner composed the score. And while we all know the stars — Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains (not to mention the Hungarian-born Jewish actor Peter Lorre who, having gone to Germany, left with the Nazis’ ascent to power in 1933) — Isenberg tells us that nearly all of the 70-odd actors and actresses who made up the rest of the cast were immigrants, real refugees portraying the refugee characters who had washed up in Rick’s café — and playing the Nazis, too.
Conrad Veidt, who left Germany in 1933 on marrying his Jewish wife, played the film’s arch-villain Major Strasser. “I know this man well,” said Veidt. “He’s the reason I gave up Germany.”
Many other cast members had been illustrious stars of stage and screen in their native European countries. Now they were consigned to bit parts, generally uncredited. One such was the Jewish Marcel Dalio (Emil the croupier), celebrated in his native France before fleeing Nazi occupation. Afterwards, his image was used on Vichy propaganda posters to depict the stereotypical Jew. “At least I had star billing on the posters,” noted Dalio.
Casablanca was the ingenious creation of talented Jews, and its plot was infused with the wartime tragedy of the Jews but, as Isenberg explains: “To tell the story on the Hollywood screen in 1942, these refugees would have to be stripped of any obvious ethnic or religious affiliations.” Because, as Jack Warner knew only too well, America was not at war primarily to save the Jews.
Monica Porter’s book, ‘Deadly Carousel’ is being adapted as a stage musical