Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  First, Casablanca was laced with compelling subplots. There were contretemps between the refugees; Ugarte holding letters of transit guaranteeing safe passages out of Casablanca for four people, hiding them with Rick before being slain; Rick’s ex-lover Yvonne (Madeleine Lebeau, and Mrs. Marcel Dalio in real life) dating German officers; Nazis singing the German national anthem, drowned out by French patriots singing “La Marseillaise”; members of the Third Reich closing in on the French underground; Rick’s place closed down by Captain Renault on order from his German masters because Laszlo has awakened the patriotism of the clientele.

  The second element was the dialogue. At this point in history, almost every line had significance. The smallest parts gave actors a chance to glow, if only for a moment. An elderly couple pathetically attempt to learn English so that they can get on in an unattainable America. The man asks his wife, “Liebchen, sweetnessheart, what watch?” She consults her timepiece. “Ten watch.” Carl diplomatically assures them that they’ll get on in the New World.

  An imperious patron wants Rick to join his table. After all, he boasts, he once ran the second-largest banking house in Amsterdam. Carl is unimpressed. The banker who ran the largest house in Amsterdam is now Rick’s pastry chef. Carl displays a cynical realism no matter who he addresses. Ordered to give the best table to Major Strasser, for example, he informs Captain Renault that he has already done so; the major is a German and would have grabbed it anyway.

  The principals have the most memorable exchanges, phrases that have entered the world’s lexicon of favorite movie quotes. Major Strasser tells Captain Renault to close Rick’s café. On what grounds? Rick demands. Renault gets on his high horse: he is “shocked, shocked” to find that illegal betting is taking place on these very grounds. Whereupon a croupier hands the captain a sheaf of francs—his winnings from the night before.

  Captain Renault admonishes Rick not to be so offhanded with a beautiful French femme du monde: women should not be thrown away like that; one day they may be scarce.

  Almost all the classic quotes are uttered or prompted by Rick, and Humphrey gave them a unique tempo and authority. Asked how he has ended up in Casablanca, he explains that he came for the waters. Renault points out that they’re in the desert. Rick drily replies that he was “misinformed.”

  Rick mentions the invasion of Paris, when he and Ilsa watch the invading soldiers from an apartment window. The Germans wore gray, Rick reminds Ilsa; she wore blue.

  Rick’s selfless gift—Ugarte’s passages of safety turned over to Laszlo and the beloved Ilsa—is expressed in tight-lipped remarks to the beautiful lady. He’s never been good at striking a noble pose. The facts are simple and stark: the problems of three people don’t amount to much when the world is aflame. Ilsa’s too young to understand what he’s doing, but someday it’ll all be clear to her. He wipes away her tears with the now-familiar salute: “Now, now, here’s looking at you, kid.”

  The final lines are, of course, legend, but they did not come easily. Script revisions had been handed to the actors on an almost daily basis. Everyone was edgy, particularly Bergman. The most ungainly expository dialogue was assigned to her: “Oh, Victor, please don’t go to the underground meeting tonight.” So was the most cloying romantic line: “Was that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?” Moreover, as the last weeks approached, Casablanca still had no ending. “Every day we were shooting off the cuff,” Ingrid was to remember, “and we were trying to make some sense of it. No one knew where the picture was going and no one knew how it was going to end, which didn’t help any of us with our characterizations. And all the time I wanted to know who I was supposed to be in love with, Paul Henreid or Humphrey Bogart.” Beseeching Curtiz, she was told, “We don’t know yet—just play it, well … in between.” That did little to calm her mind. “I didn’t dare to look at Humphrey Bogart with love because then I had to look at Paul Henreid with something that was not love.” Her situation was unwittingly stated in an exchange between Ilsa and Rick, when she tries to explain where she’s been since they parted in Paris.

  She hesitates, scarcely knowing how to begin the autobiography and unsure of its finale. Rick tells Ilsa to say whatever’s on her mind; perhaps an ending will come to her as she goes along.

  Once the triangle was worked out, there remained the problem of locale. Curtiz, the Epsteins, and Koch knew very well that Casablanca is an arid region with an absence of heavy mists. They also knew that when a movie is subject to budget constraints and a firm deadline, the first casualty is truth. The atmosphere was made murky so that a jerry-built wooden simulacrum of a plane—the aircraft that would spirit the Lazlos away—could be indistinctly revealed in the background. Even then, the set was so shallow that airport mechanics had to be played by midgets to trick the eye and add perspective, thanks yet again to the camerawork of Arthur Edeson. On orders from Wallis, Edeson had supplied the “real blacks and whites, with the walls and backgrounds in shadow and dim, sketchy lighting.”

  Every other aspect of the film inexplicably fell into place. Even the most negative Hollywood personalities helped, no matter how inadvertently, to improve the film. Joseph Breen, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, was well-known for his censorious view of risqué material. He read a pivotal scene in which Ilsa confronts Rick with a pistol, demanding the letters of transit. Breen put his order in the form of a suggestion: “The present material seems to contain a suggestion of a sex affair which would be unacceptable if it came through in the finished picture. We believe this could possibly be corrected by replacing the fadeout with a dissolve, and shooting the succeeding scene without any sign of a bed or couch, or anything whatever suggestive of a sex affair.” His wishes were carried out, and the dissolve not only sped up the narrative, it made the confrontation more suggestive rather than less.

  Max Steiner was brought in to write the stirring music for Casablanca, and he didn’t think much of the song “As Time Goes By.” Classically trained under Gustav Mahler, he felt, not unreasonably, that its composer-lyricist, Herman Hupfeld, was a hack who specialized in novelty numbers like “When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the Tuba.” Besides, “As Time Goes By” was already eleven years old, having been featured in an insignificant Broadway show called Everybody’s Welcome. Rudy Vallee’s recording had enjoyed a brief vogue and then disappeared from stores. But the melody and rhymes had not disappeared from the memory of Murray Burnett, who heard them as a college student and quoted Hupfeld’s lyrics in Everybody Comes to Rick’s. Much had been changed since then, yet somehow the song remained, and Dooley Wilson gave it elegance and style. Steiner argued for reshooting the scenes with “As Time Goes By,” getting rid of the thing for good. But by this time Ingrid Bergman had been cast in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and her hair had been cropped for the role of the innocent Spanish girl Maria. There was nothing Steiner could do except use his considerable expertise. With canny orchestrations, he turned the tune into an integral part of the drama. It had a sad and haunting eroticism, but the words

  It’s still the same old story

  A fight for love and glory

  also gave it a wartime significance. Using the melody underneath the last farewell, Steiner provided an operatic tone to Humphrey’s sacrificial speech, and suddenly the problems of three people in Casablanca didn’t seem so little after all.

  In the years to follow, a great deal was written about the fortunate accidents that made the film jell. All sort of arguments ensued: Was Casablanca the ultimate refutation of the auteur theory—that movies are the quintessence of the director’s personality and aesthetic? Or was it merely an exception to the rule? Was the script the work of a committee, rather than the two men who got the credit? Did Warner Bros. get lucky with this one, or was Jack Warner just pretending to be indifferent, pulling the strings all along?

  But when it came time to discuss the acting, there was no dispute at all. No one would ever refer to Casablanca as an Ingrid Bergma
n picture or a Paul Henreid picture, or for that matter a Michael Curtiz picture. It was, and would remain, a Humphrey Bogart movie because he was the one who furnished the work with a moral center. There was no other player who could have so credibly inhabited the role of Rick Blaine, expatriate, misanthrope, habitual drinker, and, ultimately, the most self-sacrificing, most romantic Hollywood hero of the war years. To watch him in this extraordinary feature was not only to see a character rise to the occasion. It was to see a performer mature, to become the kind of man American males yearned to be. When Humphrey Bogart started filming Casablanca on May 25, 1942, he was a star without stature; when he finished, on August 1, he was the most important American film actor of his time and place.

  v

  All through 1942, war news meant bad news: General Rommel’s Afrika Korps penetrated deep into Egypt, threatening Cairo, Alexandria, and, most vitally, the Suez Canal. German U-boats sank some nine hundred Allied vessels, severely weakening the supply line to Britain. Singapore, Burma, and the Philippines fell to the Japanese. And then, on November 8, a tidal change began as Allied forces invaded North Africa. A week later Casablanca was theirs. The exotic city made headlines all over the world; the biggest public relations break in cinema history had fallen into Jack Warner’s lap. His New York office jumped at the opportunity with all the wrong ideas. They suggested tacking on a hearty new ending for Casablanca: how about U.S. soldiers crushing the Nazi occupiers? Humphrey Bogart was still on hand for retakes; there was talk of flying Claude Rains from his Pennsylvania farm. Jack mulled it over, then sent a wire: “It’s such a great picture as it is, would be a misrepresentation if we were to come in now with a small scene about American troops landing etcetera … the longer we wait to release it the less important the title will be.” At this time, an unlikely fan climbed into Humphrey’s corner. Hedda Hopper, one of the most feared journalists in town, had begun as a film actress. After more than a hundred movies, she failed to become a star, quit the silent screen, and became a gossip columnist. She grew famous for her flamboyant hats, her feud with archrival columnist Louella Parsons, her right-wing politics, and her vindictive personality. Zasu Pitts compared her to a ferret, and Joan Fontaine once sent Hopper a live skunk. The note read: “I stink and so do you.” Yet for some reason Hedda had taken a shine to Humphrey, overlooking his liberal views, pushing his career, and writing kind words about him. After viewing Casablanca she asked him how he felt about being on the level after all those years of crime. “ ‘It’s all right with me, Hedda,’ ” he said. “ ‘I take ’em as they come. I just work here, you know.’ Then I asked him if he’d ever turned down a part because it was too small or for any other reason.

  “ ‘Somebody once asked my pal [character actor] George Tobias that same question,’ said Bogie, ‘and George said, “There are no small parts, there are only small actors.” Well, that goes for me, too.’ ”

  There was some public relations swagger to that statement, but not much. Humphrey enjoyed the status and the money that came with stardom. But he also admired the traditions of the West End, where British actors had no compunction about taking small parts as well as major roles. He thought it a pity that American leading men were forced to turn down pictures with lower budgets or shorter speeches or less notable co-stars than their previous movies.

  At the same time, he did nothing to discourage the Warners publicity department from burnishing his hard-boiled image. Humphrey was amused rather than appalled by American magazine’s transparently bogus profile “Hollywood’s Trigger Man.” It included a letter, allegedly sent from a man behind bars. “ ‘Dear Humph,’ penned an anxious inmate of a Southern prison recently; ‘I have a little problem. Next month I’m walking the last mile to the hot seat. You’ve been there so many times yourself. I wonder if you’d write me a word-picture of what it’s like?’ ”

  Such items were meant to help the Bogart cause, but the real buzz began when Casablanca debuted on Thanksgiving Day 1942. Most of the reviews glowed with praise, though several had acerbic things to say; Time observed that Humphrey looked like Buster Keaton playing Paul Gauguin. Not that the negatives mattered, because yet another public relations bonanza lay straight ahead. From January 14 to January 24, 1943, a secret meeting took place between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. It was held in Casablanca. No sitting president had ever been to Africa, nor had any American chief executive left the country during a time of war. This was a historic event, deliberately kept from the press until both leaders had safely returned home. The following week Casablanca went on national release, accompanied by headlines like BULLETS, MYSTERY, SECRECY, AND CENSORSHIP PLAGUED REPORTERS OF CASABLANCA CONFERENCE. Film Daily excitedly predicted that “this Warner picture should have the impact of a bombshell on film audiences of the country.” The trade paper was correct; the news items were invaluable. Made at a cost of $1,309,000, the movie grossed almost three times that amount in its initial run, riding the waves of national optimism about the war. Earlier in the year, defeat was in the air. By the first months of 1943, battles had gone to the Allies in North Africa, Stalingrad, Guadalcanal. It was, in Churchill’s words, perhaps not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Now, Rick Blaine was not just the fulcrum of a melodramatic movie. He was a symbol of the nation itself, at first wary and isolationist, then changing incrementally until he headed in the opposite direction. At the finale Rick Blaine had turned into a warrior. That was the way moviegoers, especially male moviegoers, saw themselves in 1943. That year they did the most unlikely, and unrepeatable thing in the history of American cinema. They made Casablanca a smash, which was not unexpected. But they also made the middle-aged, creased, scarred, lisping Humphrey Bogart into a superstar. No one expected that. Not even Humphrey Bogart. Especially not Humphrey Bogart.

  BABY FACE: The infant Humphrey inspired comic book artists, but contrary to popular legend he did not pose for his mother’s famous illustration of the Gerber baby. (photo credit i3.1)

  NAVAL ENCOUNTER: Seaman Bogart braces for inspection in the fading days of World War I. (photo credit i3.2)

  LEGITIMATE THEATER: Paul Kelly, Humphrey, and Helen Menken (the first Mrs. Bogart) in Nerves, a Broadway play of the Roaring Twenties (photo credit i3.3)

  HONEYMOON: Menken and Bogart in a rare moment of happiness, 1926 (photo credit i3.4)

  TRIO: Bette Davis and Leslie Howard listen to Bogart as Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood’s career-making melodrama, The Petrified Forest (1936). (photo credit i3.5)

  GUNMEN: Bogart and Edward G. Robinson shoot it out in Bullets or Ballots (1936), one of their many screen battles. (photo credit i3.6)

  ON THE LAM: Bogart, as the hunted killer Baby Face Martin, confronts his distraught mother (Marjorie Main) in Dead End (1937). (photo credit i3.7)

  INDIGESTIBLE OATER: James Cagney helps Humphrey to his feet in the miscast Western, The Oklahoma Kid (1939). (photo credit i3.8)

  ALSO RAN: Humphrey Bogart played second banana to superstars Ann Sheridan and George Raft in They Drive by Night (1940). (photo credit i3.9)

  DRINKING IT IN: Mayo Methot, the third Mrs. Bogart, joins her husband for a few shots. The marriage, like the Scotch, was already on the rocks, c. 1940. (photo credit i3.10)

  MOVING ON UP: With director Raoul Walsh on the set of High Sierra (1940), one of the key turning points for Bogart (photo credit i3.11)

  THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF: Humphrey, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet gather around the mysterious black bird in The Maltese Falcon (1941). (photo credit i3.12)

  THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Bogart and Ingrid Bergman with director Michael Curtiz, making it up as they go along on the set of Casablanca (photo credit i3.13)

  LOVE AT FIRST TAKE: Bogie and Lauren Bacall on the set of To Have and Have Not (1944) with director Howard Hawks (photo credit i3.14)

  THE ONE THAT WORKED: Bacall becomes the fourth and last Mrs. Bogart in May 1945 as they exchange pieces of w
edding cake at the Ohio farm of writer Louis Bromfield. (photo credit i3.15)

  CHAPTER 4

  Bogart Can Be Tough Without a Gun

  i

  MGM star Clark Gable volunteered for military service; so did Twentieth Century Fox’s leading man Tyrone Power, Columbia’s James Stewart, and many other prominent actors. It would not do to have Warner Bros. looked upon as the slacker studio. In the early 1940s masculinity was defined by the appearances of men in uniform. Those who couldn’t make the grade were defined as lacking in virility or, worse, in patriotism. And so its current mainstays, swashbuckler Errol Flynn (4-F because of a heart irregularity) and leathery Humphrey Bogart (overage) were assigned to war pictures that dealt with heroism under fire. In the process, they gave masculinity a face, and the screenwriters furnished it with a narrative. Flynn outdid himself in films like Desperate Journey, in which the hero outwits the German army—“The iron fist has a glass jaw!”—steals a bomber, and safely lands in England. No time to rest, though; his exit line is “Now to Australia, and a crack at those Japs!”

  Action in the North Atlantic, Humphrey’s newest picture, had fewer comic-book episodes. But the star had to wrestle with a plodding script by John Howard Lawson, punched up with additional dialogue by W. R. Burnett. In the end, the film essentially relied on Bogart as the resolute, sacrificial male of the war years. A real soldier or sailor, enlisted man or officer, did his griping and then got on with the job. If he got wounded, if he died, he did so not for some patriotism with a capital P, but because he didn’t want to let the team down, whether that team was a squad of GIs or a boatload of matériel. Humphrey perfectly embodied this weary but intrepid fighting spirit.