We’ll always have Casablanca
We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend And Afterlife Of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie Noah Isenberg F aber & Faber €35 ★★★★★
In the summer of 1957, New York’s Brattle Theatre began a season of the recently deceased Humphrey Bogart’s biggest movies. It was finals week at nearby Harvard, and overworked students lined up for tickets. Next year’s finalists did the same, and a trend was set. Soon enough, college kids were showing up to the annual Bogie bonanza in battered trenchcoats and snap-brim fedoras – and one year, when the sound system broke down, they actually recited the dialogue of Casablanca. ‘You must remember this…’
Casablanca turns 75 this year, and to make sure we do indeed remember this, Noah Isenberg has written a book on ‘Hollywood’s most beloved movie’.
Not that anyone expected Casablanca to be a hit. The play it’s based on – Everybody Comes To Rick’s – was so lacklustre that it never made it to the stage (not until 1991, anyway, when Leslie ‘Dirty Den’ Grantham donned Bogie’s tux for a short-lived West End production). The characters are clichés. The dialogue is often laughable (‘Was that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?’).
At first, the script was also a dog’s breakfast of multiple rewrites. It was Julius and Philip Epstein who gave it its wisecracking snap, while Howard Koch was tasked with making it historically and politically relevant.
Relevant it was. Casablanca was released in 1942. A year
earlier the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and America had finally joined the war. Bogart’s Rick Blaine was an emblem of this late-in-the-day commitment to the struggle. Strolling around his Café Americain, Rick is forever being asked to help refugees on the run from the Nazis. They all get the same reply: ‘I stick my neck out for nobody.’ Only when Ilsa Lunt – Ingrid Bergman – the woman who broke his heart, enters the bar on the arm of resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), does Rick realise he either steps up to the plate or the Nazis stamp on everything he loves. But historical parallels do not a great movie make. What counts about Casablanca is its mood of tragic romanticism. It makes crying into your beer as the world descends into chaos seem the very definition of glamorous. From the smoky interiors of Rick’s bar to the fog-shrouded airport (fog in Morocco?), Casablanca looks like a dream. Certainly Ingrid Bergman was never more ravishing. But nor was Bogart. Shot in shadowy close-up – he seems to have been chiselled out of light – this one-time gangland anti-hero became a matinee idol overnight. And then there’s the music. Apparently composer Max Steiner dismissed Herman Hupfeld’s song As Time Goes By as a ‘lousy tune’. Nonetheless, he used it as a Wagnerian leitmotif in a score that sounds like democracy entwined with despair. Engaging though it is, Noah Isenberg’s book is no substitute for sitting down with this wonderful movie one more time. On the other hand, only by reading it will you learn which member of Casablanca’s cast thought Paul Henreid such a pain in the proverbial he called him ‘Paul Haemorrhoid’. Here’s looking at you all over again, kid.
‘It makes crying into a beer as the world descends into chaos seem glamorous’