Noah Isenberg’s book shows why Casablanca still matters.
NOAH ISENBERG’S BOOK SHOWS WHY CASABLANCA STILL MATTERS IN ‘ THIS CRAZY WORLD’
We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie By Noah Isenberg WW Norton 336 pp; $ 36.95
It was 1942 when Casablanca was produced, 75 years ago, and standards were different. As a result, the filmmakers had considerable trouble skating around the rules of the Hollywood Production Code, especially the rule about adultery. The censors who administered the code were gravely worried about the relationship between Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa Lund ( Ingrid Bergman).
Rick and Ilsa were in love — in fact, their love gives poignancy to the emotional core of the film, when Rick gives up Ilsa so that she can help lead the Czech resistance to the Nazis. Reading an early draft of the script, the censors realized to their horror that Ilsa was married to someone else.
They ordered that the final version must avoid even a hint of sex involving the two stars. With the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency breathing down Hollywood’s neck, nothing offending “the sanctity of the institution of marriage” could be allowed.
So, with much argument and careful rewriting, the censors were satisfied and Casablanca went on to great success and a long life. But Noah Isenberg, a film historian at the New School in New York, believes audiences assumed (then as now) the characters were lovers anyway.
Isenberg includes that story in his new book, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie — a good title lumbered with an overweight subtitle. He’s an industrious and sensitive writer, obviously dedicated to his subject. He chases down every opinion of Casablanca uttered and every effect it had on the United States and the world.
He even quotes a scene of the kind the writers couldn’t even imagine, much less include in their script. In 1987 Robert Coover wrote A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This, a book of connecting stories. One of them depicts Ilsa and Rick in a great thrashing orgy, overcooked to the point of satire.
Casablanca appeared only a year after the United States entered the Second World War and just when its army entered North Africa. Looked at in history, Rick seems to enact (and perhaps encourage) the movement of American opinion as it gives up the isolationism that was popular in the 1930s and commits itself to the war in Europe. An American running a bar in North Africa under the Nazi-dominated Vichy government of France, he claims to be neutral (“I stick my neck out for nobody”) but converts before our eyes to the Allied cause.
The human environment of Casablanca is filled with refugees fleeing the Nazis, and Isenberg believes the popularity of the film encouraged American sympathy for newcomers. Black critics in the 1940s praised Casablanca for the way the character of Sam ( Dooley Wilson) steps outside the usual Hollywood racism. Sam is no stereotype. He’s never a clown. He gives solid advice to Rick and drinks with Rick. He’s an equal.
Casablanca has grown so popular that it’s been used by other writers as a frame or a touchstone. In Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam, a 1969 play and 1972 movie, Allen is a neurotic film critic who conjures up a vision of Bogart as Rick providing advice on dealing with women. In When Harry Met Sally ( 1989), a romantic comedy written by Nora Ephron, Harry ( Billy Crystal) and Sally ( Meg Ryan) discuss the meaning of Casablanca and watch it. In an article about favourite films, Ephron asked, “How many times can you see it?” Her answer: “Never enough.”
Isenberg goes some distance toward rescuing the reputation of the stage play on which Casablanca was based — Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. It was bought unproduced by Warner Brothers for $ 20,000, a good sum at the time. Just about everyone who mentions it in print derides it. Isenberg has actually read it and discovered that some of the best lines in the movie were in the Burnett- Allison original.
Isenberg takes us into the creation of Casablanca, outlining the infighting among the writers and the odd moments in the process of casting. In one announcement Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan were named for Ilsa and Rick. George Raft was a possible Rick mentioned at Warners. Bogart, whose stature would be permanently changed by this role, didn’t believe at first that anyone would accept him as a romantic hero. But when Ingrid Bergman looked at him lovingly, everyone decided it was a good idea.