Casablanca: Behind The Scenes – Harlan Lebo, 1992 ★★★

Making Hollywood Hokum for the Ages

Watching Casablanca, it’s easy to grasp its elemental appeal. Snappy dialogue, compelling characters, a suspense-rich environment, beautiful images, a wow finish. But how did it all come to be? Harlan Lebo examines the film’s origins and lasting success in this 1992 book.

Lebo’s central premise, perhaps not that original when he wrote it, is nevertheless compellingly presented in this solid, easy-to-read appreciation. Warner Bros. was a studio that valued craft and efficiency, qualities that didn’t always add up to high art. As Lebo explains it, rival in-house forces that traditionally clashed over story, message, budget, and morals came together even as they disagreed to achieve a kind of cultural apotheosis, set amid the whirling backdrop of World War II:

Casablanca is the brightest product of Hollywood’s most dynamic studio at its fruitful peak; the history books often pigeonhole a motion picture as a “director’s film” or a “producer’s film,” or an “actors’ film.” Casablanca is – primarily for better but a little for worse – a studio’s film.

Casablanca: Behind The Scenes also suggests that a film filled with talent, drive, and imagination may have benefited from a giant helping of luck.

• How else could the idea of turning popular film baddie Humphrey Bogart into a first-time romantic lead pay off so handsomely?

• How else did a lowly script reader sense that a play that never made it on Broadway could click on the silver screen?

• How else could the city in the film’s title get such double-play in the headlines during its extended premiere, first as the site of the initial American assault against Nazi Germany, then as the meeting place for the Allied troika of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin?

• How else could a long-forgotten pop song become Hollywood gold by laying out the movie’s core message that “the world would always welcome lovers/As time goes by…”

Warners was well ahead of the studio pack when it came to embracing World War II as the stuff of movies. The anti-Nazi Warners were churning out agenda-based entertainments as far back as 1939, when Confessions Of A Nazi Spy, starring one of their biggest names, Edward G. Robinson, came out months before Hitler invaded Poland.

Other Warners films similarly touted war readiness, featuring big stars like James Cagney and Errol Flynn. “Throughout 1941, with most of the world already at war, Warners produced some of the industry’s best action-oriented pictures with military themes, months before the United States entered the conflict,” Lebo notes. One of them, Sergeant York, became Warners’ highest-grossing film of 1941, setting a box-office apex for the studio that Lebo notes would stand for over a decade.

So when a script from an unproduced play called “Everybody Comes To Rick’s” landed on the desk of Warners story analyst Steven Karnot the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked and three days before Germany declared war on the United States, he gave it a rave: “Colorful, timely background, tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum.”

It's a tense final scene in Casablanca, as (left to right) bit player Jean De Briac, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Humphrey Bogart, and Ingrid Bergman wait to see what magic the screenwriters came up with a few hours before. Image from http://thefineartdiner.blogspot.com/2012/04/casablanca-dark-passage-to-freedom.html.

The play, by high school teacher Murray Bennett and a socialite, Joan Alison, who dabbled in playwriting, featured “an apolitical man of mystery,” Lebo writes, one Rick Blaine, who finds himself in possession of letters of transit which can help wealthy Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo escape the Third Reich. But Blaine’s motives are complicated by Laszlo’s wife, Ilsa, with whom Rick once had an affair.

Another way the Warners studio system enabled Casablanca to attain masterpiece status came in its early choice for who would play Blaine: Humphrey Bogart. He was hardly what one would call the usual suspect for such a role. Bogart was certainly successful and recognizable around the lot, but more as a gangster just beginning to branch out into more likeable roles:

In the thirty-five pictures he made under contract at Warner Bros. before Casablanca, Bogart played gangsters, underworld figures, or other unsympathetic characters twenty times. He also ‘died’ on-screen more frequently than any other leading actor at the studio – some eighteen times – and his frequent demises were often at the hands of Cagney, Robinson, or the other more established stars of the Warner stable.

But in 1941 the worm began to turn for Bogie, or Bogey (accounts differ as to which nickname he preferred.) High Sierra was a gangster film, but this time Bogart’s character had empathy to go with his rap sheet. Then The Maltese Falcon introduced Bogie as hard-bitten hero, complete with the trench-coat-and-fedora wardrobe he donned in Casablanca. There he tangled with baddies played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, whom he would not coincidentally meet up with again in Casablanca.

I found Lebo’s strong Warners focus at times tiring, but he does draw from their massive collection of in-studio records to good effect. This was a core component of the Warners culture; each memo sheet had a legend printed at the bottom: “Verbal Messages Cause Misunderstanding and Delays (Please Put Them in Writing).”

Lebo lays out the underlying friction that bubbled around the eventual 1943 Academy Award winner, from Bogart’s scheduling conflict making another war film, Sahara, to the famously hectic last days of shooting, when Bogart and director Michael Curtiz were locked in an hours-long argument about how to play out the big final scene.

“I felt like a weary traveler who had arrived at a destination but with only the foggiest notion where or how he had got there,” Lebo quotes one of the film’s writers, Howard Koch, remembering.

Lebo works hard to separate fact from legend; for example, while Ronald Reagan was initially announced as the film’s prospective lead, he was never seriously considered for the role of Rick. (Ann Sheridan, first announced for Ilsa, was actually in the mix for a while.) Also, while the final lines of the film were practically written on the spot, there was never any doubt from the start of production how the film would end, with Rick and Ilsa taking a sad but necessary leave of one another.

Actually, one of the most famous lines in the film was written weeks after production wrapped. As Rick and Captain Renault (Claude Rains) walk away in the final shot, several alternative pieces of dialogue were looped in during editing, until producer Hal Wallis himself suggested they try something he called “wild:” “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Another stroke of luck, genius, or both.

The luck of Casablanca was not only in what made it in but what didn’t. Lebo notes an early script included this howler of a come-on, from Ilsa to Rick: “Hitler or no Hitler – kiss me.”

Lebo does drift from the central topic a bit too much at times, not just on the rise of Warner Bros. but on various story tangents and ideas left unexplored. He gives a lot of attention to Julius Epstein, another screenwriter who in his dotage hadn’t lost his ability to spin yarns. There are some brief anecdotes about Peter Lorre, not nearly as much as I would have liked – though it was amusing to read of studio anxiety whether his character Ugarte was Italian or Spanish. Italy was an Axis power, but Spain was neutral, and Warner Bros. didn’t want to offend them by assigning the devious visa-stealer an overtly Spanish nationality. The matter was left hazy in the final film.

"Rick, you must help me!" Peter Lorre's Ugarte has his final confrontation with the gendarmes in a posed still on the set of Rick's Café Américain in Casablanca. According to Lebo, Lorre put up such a fight as he was dragged off that he scared a film distributor's wife who happened to be visiting the set that day. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/JoeBuckley1958/casablanca/.

One important player in the proceedings was the Breen Office, guardian of Hollywood morality. Much of their attention, Lebo notes, centered on Renault, who was clearly using his police power to get desperate women to sleep with him. Much of Renault’s dialogue in this vein was trimmed down, yet Claude Rains played Renault as such a consummate sly fox his hilarious rascality came over anyway.

There was also alarm raised about Rick’s prior relationship with Ilsa, to the point where the Breen Office warned Wallis not to show a bed in the room they shared. It was important, they said, to make clear that Ilsa was with Rick only because she thought Laszlo was dead.

Actually, the Breen cuts may have helped ennoble the main characters and enhance their enduring mystery. Lebo regards them as at worst a minor nuisance, but one which helped boil down the material to its essence. “Strangely enough, the most important debate over censorship that could have affected the script concerned a problem that never developed: the possibility that Ilsa might remain with Rick,” Lebo notes.

Lebo spends time on other aspects of the film worth noting, things I didn’t really notice until he pointed them out: “Early in the film, for example, while Ugarte is saying to Rick, ‘You despise me, don’t you,’ a shaded lamp behind Bogart casts an intricate stained glass-like pattern on the ceiling over their heads.” Composer Max Steiner employs numerous musical passages, what Lebo calls “mickey-mousing,” to highlight key story moments, like when Captain Renault drops a bottle of Vichy water, symbolizing his collaboration with the Germans, into a trash can, kicking it for good measure.

Lebo’s book really won’t connect unless you have seen Casablanca and remember it at least a little. Its memo-centric approach can get a bit dry. But for people who love Casablanca, and can replay scenes from memory, Lebo’s book is enjoyable company, very much something one can tuck into and put down, yet still offering a focused narrative for those wanting the full story on one of Hollywood’s finest moments.