DAVID ROBSON
It was peculiarly apt that, on November 26 1942, the New York Times carried an advertisement announcing the release that day of the movie Casablanca and a story headlined “Slain Polish Jews Put At One Million”, sub-headed “One third of number in whole country said to have been put to death by Nazis”. It appeared as a single column hidden on page 16 of the paper. The US press still displayed a marked reticence about such atrocities.
The Casablanca promo read: “A surprising story — a super-surprising cast!” That was true in more ways than one. The stars — Bogart, Bergman et al — were luminous but the ensemble was more interesting still. Those playing the parts of the inhabitants of Rick’s bar, drinking, dealing, ducking and diving, some fleeing, hiding, dodging the Vichy French authorities and German forces in that north African town were mostly Jewish refugees from central and Eastern Europe, acting out scenes that mirrored their own lives.
Madeleine LeBeau, the longestsurviving cast member, died in 2016 at the age of 92. She played Bogart’s rejected girlfriend who consorted with German soldiers but later, in the film’s most heroic moment, sings the Marseillaise in defiance of the Nazis.
LeBeau’s husband Marcel Dalio (born Israel Moshe Blauschild), who played Rick’s croupier, had been used in Nazi posters as an example of what Jews looked like. They fled Paris in 1940, days before Hitler’s troops arrived.
Carl, the cuddly head waiter, is played by S. Z. Sackall who left his native Hungary in 1940. His three sisters died in concentration camps. Talking to his bar customers the Leuchtags, a refugee German couple about to leave for the US and making a hopeless attempt to speak English, Carl says: “Hm. You will get along beautiful in America,” an ironic comment that applied to himself and many others in the cast, who had fled to Hollywood and still had accents that equipped them only to play foreigners, sometimes even Nazi soldiers.
Warner Brothers, the studio that made Casablanca had been trying to produce films critical of the Nazis since 1934 but they were stymied for five years by Joseph Breen, the chief censor, who refused to give them the go-ahead, warning Hollywood producers “there is a strong pro-German and antisemitic feeling in this country… and while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.” Breen was himself a rabid antisemite. He once wrote a letter about Hollywood to a Jesuit priest: “Ninetyfive percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth.”
The Warners’ (Wonsal) parents had experienced pogroms in rural Poland. The Brothers began their route into the industry by putting on film shows in Youngstown, Ohio, a steelworkers’ community, a tough place to set out from. The Warners were rough. They felt like outsiders in Hollywood and that was their strength.
Their Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released in 1939, starring Edward G Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg) was the first explicitly anti-Nazi film from a major studio.
In 1940, Murray Burnett, a young New York school teacher and aspiring playwright, went to Belgium where his wife’s family lived. The family asked the couple to go to Vienna to help other relatives get their money out of Austria. There they saw the impact of the Nuremberg Laws and learnt about the refugee trail via Marseilles to Morocco. In the south of France they visited a smokey cafe where they saw a black pianist/singer they particularly enjoyed. Burnett went home, got together with his collaborator Joan Alison and wrote Everybody Comes To Rick’s, a play nobody wanted to stage. It was bought for Warner Brothers by the producer Hal B Wallis (born Aaron Blum Wolowicz), directed by Michael Curtiz (a Hungarian-born Jew), the screenplay was written by three Jewish scriptwriters with a music score by a Jewish composer.
Of all the stars, only Peter Lorre was Jewish, and it’s not remembered for its politics. But perhaps it should be.