Casablanca

On January 14, 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and French General Charles de Gaulle opened a wartime conference in Casablanca. And we all know how that war story ended. War is war. But even in the midst of terrible war, there is love, deep and heartbreaking love.  

And there is love in war torn Casablanca. Rick, Ilsa, Laszlo. Is there any story more romantic, more heroic, more universal, more quoted.  The very thought of those two long ago lovers sacrificing their own happiness for the greater good of the country, if not the world, makes the heart beat faster. 75 years later, we still remark: What a movie. 

As Time Goes By is the theme song for Warner Bros. The melody is played every summer at one or another performance at California's famed Hollywood Bowl. As the music carries over the air on a cool summer night, members of the audience inevitably will close their eyes and dream of long hugs and warm kisses. Da-di-da-di-da-di. While Max Steiner wrote most of the soundtrack, he did not write the theme song. The song was written by Heman Hupfeld. Outdoor wall murals depicting Rick and Ilsa in each other’s arms can be found all over Hollywood walls, as can murals of Rick staring at a half empty liquor bottle with Sam in the background. We all know that he said: “Play it”, not "Play it again, Sam". 

The Burbank airport, sitting in for the Casablanca airport, provided the backdrop for the final scene between Rick and Ilsa.   “We’ll always have Paris.” Paris. Is there a more celebrated line; even my brother used it during a short affair with a lovely lass at the end of a brief Paris vacation. 

And “Here’s looking at you, kid”. I too have unashamedly raised a glass and toasted with that line. While we’re on the subject of looks, let’s take a look at some of the actors in the movie. Their real lives were more incredible than the movie’s characters. 

Beginning with SZ Sakall, who played Carl, the chubby and cuddly head waiter, SZ Sakall was a Hungarian Jew. Sakall’s three sisters and his niece died in concentration camps. Although he was a famous film star in Hungary, with his wife, he fled for America in 1940. His wife’s brother and sister had likewise been killed by the Nazis. They only had each other. 

Nearly all of the 75+ actors and actresses cast in Casablanca were immigrants. Peter Lorre too escaped Berlin just in the nick of time. Among the 14 cast members who earned a screen credit, only four were born in the United States: Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, who played Sam, Corina Mura (nee Wall) and Joy Page, Jack Warner’s stepdaughter, who played the newly wed Romanian refugee.

Marie Madeleine Berthe Le­Beau; remember Yvonne, Rick’s wanna be girlfriend, was born near Paris in the early 1920s. In her teens, she landed a tiny role in a play with the already famous actor Marcel Dalio, who later played Emil, Rick’s croupier. Dalio was about 20 years her senior but was struck by her beauty and married her.  In 1940, Marie and Marcel raced out of Paris just hours ahead of the invading German army; incredibly, Dalio’s image had been used in Nazi posters to identify Jewish-looking features. They made their way to Lisbon and, using forged Chilean visas, booked passage on a Portuguese cargo ship, the Quanza, that was taking more than 300 refugees to the Americas.  Many of the passengers were not allowed to disembark in New York or the next port-of-call, Veracruz, Mexico. However, Marcel and Marie secured temporary Canadian visas in Mexico.  They didn’t make it to Canada, but did make it to California. And there they stayed, to forever become Emil and Yvonne. Heck, Casablanca could have been written about them. 

Conrad Veidt had served Germany in WWI, but contracted an illness that would no longer allow him to fight, but did allow him to learn to act. He played out his time performing for the troops. However, when WWII interrupted his acting career, he left with his Jewish wife to England. He was not Jewish but declared himself to be Jewish in a show of solidarity with his wife. He hated anti-Semitism and donated a great deal of his fortune to fighting it. After perfecting his English, they traveled to America to assist in the British effort to have America join the war. Realizing that Hollywood would most likely typecast him in Nazi roles, he had his contract mandate that his characters must always be villains. There, Veidt landed the role of the hated SS General Strasser. He was a great villain and we are forever grateful to Captain Renault when he ordered his men to “round up the usual suspects” after Strasser was shot. 

The romance behind the movie has always intrigued me. And the bits of background history even more so. While attending a friend’s 40th birthday party, I was introduced to a couple of elderly gentlemen who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. In fact, even my birthday girlfriend’s father had been one of the many blacklisted writers. She grew up in Europe and only returned to America with her parents later in her life. Learning they were script writers, we talked about old movies. These charming gentlemen asked the name of my favorite movie and, after replying Casablanca, one of the gentlemen beamed with a huge smile and averred that he had done some writing on the movie, as had many others. The making of the movie was famous for its own high dramas: firings, hirings, all manner of intrigues. He went on to tell me that in “those days” people didn’t hop airplanes and travel all over the world as they do today. In “those days”, if someone living in Los Angeles had traveled to San Francisco, or even Riverside, he had “been around”. Both gentlemen nodded knowingly. He went on with a wonderful little detail about the movie that has always hidden in plain sight. When asked to provide names for the movie’s characters, they didn’t have any idea what names to give European men landing in an international town like Casablanca, but they were men and men knew about cars so they named some of the main characters after cars: Renault, Ferrari, Strasser, to name a few. Now, watch the movie, hum the tune and count the cars before any more time goes by.