Casablanca

Recorded at the Crossed Wires Festival in Sheffield, Misha Glenny and guests discuss Casablanca, one of the greatest films from Hollywood’s Golden Era. The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and features the unforgettable song As Time Goes By. Casablanca opened in November 1942 when Europe had been at war for three years and the USA for one. It was among Hollywood’s first major films to explain to US audiences why the war was worth fighting, and alongside this became a huge box office hit. It was created by a cast and crew full of emigres and refugees from lands under Nazi control. They produced a movie that has authenticity as well as astonishing emotional power that continues to this day. With Ian Christie Emeritus Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University of London Pamela Hutchinson Film historian and critic Sheldon Hall Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University. Producers: Simon Tillotson & Sam Peach Reading List: Rudy Behlmer, Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986) Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013) David Gerstner and Janet Staiger (eds.), Authorship and Film (Routledge, 2003), especially 'The Auteur theory: Michael Curtiz and Casablanca' by Peter Wollen Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (Hyperion, 2002) Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood`s Most Beloved Movie (Faber & Faber, 2020) Colin McArthur, The Casablanca File (Half Brick Images, 1992) Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Pantheon Books, 1988) David Thomson, Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio (Yale University Press, 2017) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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• 2:22Speaker 04

  This is one of more than a thousand episodes that you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Casablanca is one of the greatest films from Hollywood's golden era with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and the unforgettable song As Time Goes By. Casablanca came out in 1942, when Europe had been at war for three years and the USA for one, and was among Hollywood's first major films to explain to US audiences why the war was worth fighting and still be a box office hit.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  And with a cast and crew full of emigres and refugees from lands now under Nazi control, it has an authenticity as well as an astonishing emotional power that continues to this very day. Which is why we're here at the Crosswires Festival in Sheffield to discuss Casablanca with Ian Christie, Emeritus Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, Pamela Hutchinson, Film Historian and Critic, and Sheldon Hall, Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University. Please welcome them all.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. And I'm going to start with our local boy, our guest Sheldon Hall. Sheldon, can you tell us how big Hollywood was in the early 1940s, both in the US and here in the United Kingdom and Europe?

• 4:01Speaker 05

  I'll try to make it local and explain it that way. Where we're sitting here in Sheffield, in 1940, there were 54 cinemas available within the city and in the surrounding districts and suburbs. 54 separate cinema buildings.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  And how many are there now?

• 4:22Speaker 05

  There are five multiplex cinemas with a total of 54 screens in them. You might say, well, what's the difference? 54 screens, 54 cinemas, so what? Well, the difference is size, partly location and design of the buildings, but also the fact that the cinemas today are much, much smaller. The largest auditorium in Sheffield today, which is just over 500 seats, is smaller than the smallest cinema in Sheffield in 1940, where the average was about 800 to 1500 seats. Some of them had 2,000, 2,500. And that was needed because people went to the cinema far more often than they do today.

• 5:04Speaker 05

  I think the average is, every person in the UK goes to the cinema once or twice a year now. In 1940s, people went to the cinema every 10 days on average. Of course, some people wouldn't go at all, but some people would go a lot more often than that. So there was a habit to sustain. And so Hollywood produced a lot more films than it does now, hundreds every year. Every major studio had between 25 and 50 films released. The British studios competed, didn't make quite as many as that. But there was a need to sustain a regular supply of movies so that people would go to the cinema week in, week out.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  So Warner Brothers, the studio which made Casablanca, they picked up a script, Everybody Comes to Rick's, which was a stage play. But this was before Pearl Harbor. The play hadn't even been performed. So why were they looking at plays like Everybody Comes to Rick's?

• 6:04Speaker 05

  Every major studio had a department, a story department, which would actively seek out material. They would scour the listings of theatres, they would have regular contact with literary agents, they would have deals with publishers to look at unpublished books in the Galley proof form. And so there's a constant need for a supply of material. Everybody Comes to Rick's was written before Pearl Harbor, as you say, but it was submitted to Warner Brothers the day after Pearl Harbor. And three days later, a reader, studio reader at Warner Brothers reported on, gave a summary of the story, and reported that it was a box office natural.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  Timely, suspenseful, sophisticated hokum, excellent melodrama. These were some of the phrases from the reader's report. So it had all of the kinds of ingredients that they were looking for in that particular time, as well as just in general.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  So what happened at the time is that you'd have these scouts scouring all sorts of plays, books, films, anything. And they, I mean, they paid quite a lot of money for this script, didn't they? Even though it hadn't been produced?

• 7:19Speaker 05

  Yes, as an unproduced play, it was bought for $20,000, which I think was a record, at least for the studio.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  It could have been a lot more had it been a successful play, but they got a good deal.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Thank you, Sheldon. Pamela Hutchinson, how interconnected were Hollywood and the Europeans at this time in the lead up to the Second World War?

• 7:45Speaker 06

  Well, ever since the First World War, Hollywood had been like the dominant producer of films across the world. And so territories in Europe are watching Hollywood films as much as people in America. And Hollywood had such power and influence that they would hire the best European talent. So that's how we get in Europe, directors like Ernst Lubich and indeed Michael Curtis, how we get stars like Marlena Dietrich. And this process continued. So that's how Ingrid Bergman made her way to Hollywood. David O'Shaughnessy's assistant, Kay Brown, was in New York and she asked her, the lift operator in her apartment block said, my Swedish family and all my Swedish friends are watching this film called Intermesso with this wonderful star. And that's how she was picked up.

• 8:27Speaker 06

  They brought her over to Hollywood, remade the film and launched her as a star. But there's this other, and I think more relevant to Casablanca, way in which European talent came to Hollywood at the time. And that's obviously because in the 1930s, when the Nazi regime was installed, many Eastern Europeans, Germans, Jewish people, gay people fled their home countries and came to Hollywood. So you have a wave of emigre talent who have already excelled in another industry and who have a reason to be in Hollywood that is really quite a terrifying situation for them. And so there's a kind of parallel between the glamour of the Casablanca milieu, where

• 9:09Speaker 06

  all these refugees are drinking champagne cocktails and gambling and listening to music while they're fighting for their lives, with the fact that people came to Hollywood to work on sophisticated hokum, you know, but out of very real reasons. Billy Wilder famously said, you know, all the optimists died in the concentration camps and all the pessimists have swimming pools in Beverly Hills.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  And Billy Wilder was one of those emigres who came from Vienna, I believe.

• 9:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, and so many of the cast of Casablanca, Conrad Weit from Germany, Paul Henried, Peter Lorre, they came in this way.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  So we've heard that it's a natural hit, according to the reader. How did Warner Brothers go about fashioning this script for film and to turn Everybody Comes to Rick's into Casablanca? And I have a hidden motivation for asking this question because I also want you to tell us a bit about the plot.

• 10:05Speaker 06

  Okay, so I'm not going to give away the ending, but I think everyone here probably has seen it. Okay, so it's set in Casablanca. It's a vicious controlled Morocco. It's some point before Pearl Harbor. And in Casablanca is where people are gathering because they want to get out of Africa and to Lisbon to then cross to America, to get out of Europe and to safety. And a lot of people gather in this very glamorous bar called Rick's Cafe, which is owned by a man called Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart. And he is studiously neutral in affairs of the heart and matters of war. And then one day, in walks to his gin joint, obviously, Ingrid Bergman playing his old flame, Ilsa.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  And she is now married to a freedom fighter, Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henried. And this situation is complicated by the fact that we know that Rick has got these mystical letters of transit, a sort of free pass for anyone to get out of Europe and into America. How and in what formation is he going to use these? That's what we want to know, right?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Because of course Victor Laszlo is this legendary freedom fighter, anti-Nazi resistance fighter, and those letters of transit could be very, very helpful to him.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, he's a wanted man. And if he gets to America, he could save the world, right? So do you get the girl or do you save the world?

• 11:27Speaker 04

  And the script itself, how did they manage to write that? Because it's just full of fantastic zingers, one-liners, you know, time after time.

• 11:38Speaker 06

  As time goes by, yeah. It's a phenomenal script, and although in the context of the subject of Casablanca, collaboration isn't the word that we were championed. That is exactly how it was done, and that's how Hollywood excelled during its golden age. So there were many, many authors of this screenplay. The authors of the play, Murray Burnett and Joan Allison, and then the assignment was given to the Epstein brothers, two twins, Philip and Julius, who really were responsible for many of those great lines, the crackly dialogue. They then left the project to work on some straight propaganda, and a writer called Howard Koch was brought in, and he really emphasized the political dynamic of this story. And then we have many other people getting involved.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  Lenore Coffey, a well-known screenwriter, she added a little bit more drama and intrigue. A script reader called Casey Robinson added a little bit more romance. The good officers of the production code necessitated several changes to the dialogue to make things more subtle and suggestive. Humphrey Bogart absolutely improvised the line, "He is looking at you, kid." He just said it to Ingrid Bergman one day, one of the few times he spoke to her. Unfortunately, true. And as all stories of the Hollywood system must end up with, it was the producer, Hal B. Wallace, who came up with the famous final line. Sorry for the people who haven't seen it, but it's something about a beautiful friendship, and it does end the film well.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  I re-watched the film, and I've just got to... There was one line which I'd forgotten, which is just so fantastic. Captain Renault, played by the spectacular Claude Rains, says, "What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?" And Rick says, "My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters." Captain Renault, "The waters? The waters? We're in the desert." Rick, "I was misinformed." Ian Christie, why had Hollywood held back from denouncing fascism until quite late?

• 13:42Speaker 07

  Well, you could argue that they hadn't really held back, but it's a process that starts. There are obviously a lot of really well-informed people in Hollywood who are very politically alert, not just the emigres, but also lots of, you know, internationalists who are working in Hollywood, and of course, the enormous cast of talent from Europe that had arrived. But they're always thinking about, you know, the audience, "Will it play in Peoria?" One of those old phrases. If you get too far ahead of the audience and start talking about distant wars and far-off issues, unless there's a drama at the center of it, it won't work. So there's a kind of, I would say there's a steady buildup of alerting people, and

• 14:26Speaker 07

  very often it's done in the form of, I mean, romantic stories. Somebody is rescued from Europe, clouds are forming over Europe, a man rescues a woman, a woman... And that sense that Europe is in danger is growing during the 1930s. And as we get closer to 39, the outbreak of war in Europe, and closer to Pearl Harbor, so the tempo builds. And there's an extraordinary film, which I think is a real, you know, prelude to thinking about the politics of Casablanca, which is a film called Hold Back the Dawn, which I would strongly recommend to anyone who hasn't come across it. It's by a director who is not as well-known as Michael Curtiz, in his Mitchell Lysen,

• 15:11Speaker 07

  but it's written by Billy Wilder. And in that film, you've got a distillation, I suppose, of what Americans needed to know about the threat from Europe, because it's not set in America, it's set in Mexico, and it's about a bunch of desperate people who are trying to get into America. And one of those is a cynical gigolo, played by Charles Boyer, who latches on to an innocent Ameri... An apparently innocent American woman, Olivia de Havilland, and hopes to marry her and so get into the States. And what Wilder was doing was distilling in that film the desperation that people had to get to somewhere safe. And of course, it's a situation that we can see being reflected again and again in history, right up to the present.

• 15:56Speaker 07

  But so, audiences were not unaware of the dangers in Europe, the tide of refugees heading towards America and safety by the time Casablanca was made.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  You mentioned Michael Curtiz, the director. I think his original name was Curtis Misha, Hungarian, or even something else.

• 16:16Speaker 07

  He had several versions of his name, yes.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Several names, but he came from Hungary, as I understand it. With this, they'd already got the script, they'd chosen the principal actors. Why did they then approach Michael Curtiz for this film?

• 16:34Speaker 07

  Well, the simple answer is he was one of the most efficient directors in Hollywood. Michael Curtiz, however you choose to pronounce it, is legendary in the annals of film history because he directed more films than anybody else, well over a hundred. By the time he was headhunted by Hollywood, as Pamela explained, he'd already directed 64 films, I think, in Hungary. I mean, he was the founder of the Hungarian film industry back as far as 1912. And so he'd moved to Germany, and he was a natural for the bosses of the Hollywood studios. By the time he arrived in Hollywood, he was a superb craftsman, and he was amazingly efficient.

• 17:16Speaker 07

  I mean, he could knock out four or five films in a year. He did, most of his time. And the interesting thing about Curtiz is that there's a very famous critic, Peter Wollin, who put his finger on it. He said that Curtiz always found the right style for every different genre, every different subject that he tackled. So if it was a swashbuckler with Errol Flynn, he had created Errol Flynn, Michael Curtiz was right there on the quarter-deck. If it was a romantic film, he was there. If it was a musical, he was there. He could turn his hand to anything. And so, you know, it wasn't that he was the perfect person for this, although he turned out to be, it was more that, of course, we want Mikhail, Michael, Mike, he was known

• 18:00Speaker 07

  actually in Hollywood, to do this film.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  So we have Curtiz, as I now know that we pronounce it, Sheldon Hall, we have Curtiz as the director, but before that, the studio had selected Bogart and Bergman as the two lead characters. Why were they considered so bankable?

• 18:22Speaker 05

  They were not quite as bankable in 1942 as they later became because of Casablanca. Bogart had been under contract with Warner Brothers since 1936, and he'd made something like 50 films before he got to this point. He was never a star until the early 1940s. He was famously cast as the villain, the snarling villain opposite other actors like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, or he was the lead in low-budget B-movies, but he was never a romantic lead. And the studio was looking to develop his star persona. He'd become a star because of two films that George Raft famously and hilariously had turned down, High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon.

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Bogart plays a gangster with a heart in High Sierra and a hard-boiled detective with a sensitive streak in The Maltese Falcon. So they were looking to kind of put together all these elements of Bogart's persona, but also add a romantic dimension which he hadn't previously had before. And so Casablanca was built up quite specifically as a vehicle for Bogart. There are some stories that it was originally intended for Ronald Reagan. There was, in fact, a press release that came out in the first week of January, just after the title had been changed from Everybody Comes to Rick's to Casablanca, in which indeed Ronald Reagan had been named as the potential lead.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  We dodged a bullet there.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Reagan later said he knew nothing about this. No one talked to him at Warner Brothers. He was another contract actor. No one had told him that he was being considered for this part. And in fact, the key figure in all of this is really Hal Wallace, who we've already mentioned, the producer, who developed the project and who picked Bogart as his favored lead. The other myth around the casting is that the studio had originally thought of George Raft for the part. Now, George Raft was already a bit of a has-been by this point. In fact, the reverse is true. Raft had gone to Jack Warner, the head of the studio, and said, "I hear you're making Casablanca. I'd be interested in being the lead for this." And Warner had gone to Wallace and Curtiz and said, "What about George Raft? We've got him under contract.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  He wants a more important film." And Wallace and Curtiz huddled and said, "No way. There's no possibility of Raft being cast. This film is being written for Bogart. It's ideal for him." So there was never a possibility, realistically, that anyone else was going to be the star. And indeed, it became his most successful film by far at this point, and remained so for probably the rest of his career, really. Pamela has already mentioned Ingrid Bergman as having had a start in Hollywood with Intemetso in 1939. She was on a much lower plane than even Paul Henried, I think, at this point. She'd had three other films after Intemetso. She was waiting for a big role in For Whom

• 21:18Speaker 05

  the Bell Tolls. That was the film that she really wanted to do. And she hadn't yet been cast in it. She was under contract, personal contract, to David O. Selznick, the producer of Intemetso and Gone with the Wind. And so when Warner came to him, not to her, asking for if she was available to appear in Casablanca, he gave the okay, and he got the money. So he would pay her a regular salary.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Pamela, we've heard the film described as hokum, but we've also heard of it described as a melodrama. So what does a melodrama mean? And what sort of conventions were at play here?

• 21:55Speaker 06

  A melodrama in the 1940s in Hollywood, as the way to define it, would often call it a woman's film, or a woman's weepy. And I think a lot of people know these kind of films. They were hugely popular in the 1940s, all throughout the wartime period. Female-led stories with very strong stars in them, much more famous than Ingrid Bergman. You know, and people like, if you take as an example, Warner Brothers had just made Now Voyager with Betty Davis in the lead, but of course also with Paul Henried and with Claude Rains. And that follows a lot of the kind of melodrama conventions, in that we have a woman, played by Betty Davis, who, she has a kind of a life outside of society. Because of her relationship

• 22:36Speaker 06

  with her mother, she can't get married, she can't enter into sort of the life she wants. And when she finally gets that opportunity, she has this romantic meeting. She falls in love with Paul Henried, they smoke cigarettes together. She proves herself to be the perfect partner for him, and also the perfect mother for his child. And yet, I'm so sorry to the audience, but I have to spoil it, she does have to give that up in the end. She cannot have that. And it's always about looking at the things you want, particularly the classic Hollywood happy ever after, and denying it, and being kept away from that particular pleasure. So we can see in Casablanca that Rick has this love affair, it is rekindled,

• 23:17Speaker 06

  he has the opportunity to escape and build a new life, and yet, at the end, he makes a more noble sacrifice.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't mind about giving spoilers for Now Voyager, by the way, so if you want to, do. Ian Christie, so it's been described as melodrama, but it's also at the very height of the film noir genre. There's a lot of seediness, a lot of lowlife here, desperate people on the run. How does that turn into entertainment?

• 23:48Speaker 07

  Well, you know, there was a period when film studies, serious study of popular cinema, got very hooked on genre theory. And masses of books and articles and conferences were held about melodrama. It became a subject. But I think it's important to stress that actually Hollywood never dealt in straightforward genres, really. Okay, westerns, perhaps, at the limit. But all Hollywood movies are a mixture of genres, really. And all successful Hollywood movies definitely are a mixture of genres. That was Hollywood's secret, the ability to meld together traditional melodrama, women's weepies, with historical subjects,

• 24:31Speaker 07

  with action, and, as you rightly say, with, well, what became known as film noir. It's interesting that the term film noir, you know, it's French, was actually coined by French critics when they saw all the American films of the early 40s, after the war. The films that couldn't be released while France was occupied were suddenly released in an avalanche in France. And French critics said, but these are film noir, because they're all dark. Dark, literally, shadows, dark subjects, dark themes, dark characters. And yes, to us today, it's obvious that Casablanca is predominantly a film noir, with melodramatic elements, perhaps. I mean, you don't have to categorize it, but it's a supreme example

• 25:15Speaker 07

  of what I would describe as the genius of the system. The ability to bring together these disparate elements and to weld them together into something so that you don't notice the joins. You really don't spot the join. And there are many joins in the film.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  And this is where Curtis's direction really comes into its own. Because if you look at it, the camera work, the shadows, the sort of the use of light in dark situations, it's a masterclass, really, isn't it?

• 25:44Speaker 07

  Pools of light, bigger pools of darkness. One of the things that had attracted Hollywood's attention to Curtis way back in the 20s was his moving camera. He was one of those pioneers who moved the camera. He was famous for his high shots. Camera would come swooping in on a crane. You don't see so much of that in Casablanca, but it's still there. He's a very mobile director. And he can bring life to a scene which could otherwise be static. And, you know, there's some, I mean, just one example, if I can pick out another example. I just realized this when I re-watched the film, like many of us recently. There's a single shot right at the beginning. We don't see much of Casablanca in the film.

• 26:27Speaker 07

  Casablanca is quickly forgotten, and we're inside Rick's place, as it were. But we also, we see as part of that opening flurry of shots, a poster of Marshal Pétain, the leader of Vichy France. And nowadays, you can freeze frame on it. Audiences wouldn't have been able to do that, remember, but actually, the slogan on the poster says, I keep my promises. It's quite chilling. It's the motto of Vichy France. And there it is, right at the front of the film, just to remind you that, the wartime situation.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Well, talking about Vichy France, Sheldon, let's go to what some critics consider the very heart of the film, which is the Marseille scene. Can you tell us what that's about, why it's there, and what is it? Why is it so important?

• 27:20Speaker 05

  It reminds us, among other things, that apart from being a melodrama, and a thriller, and this and that, it's also a musical. And there are about 20 musical numbers in the film. And this, obviously, the film is best remembered for As Time Goes By. But the kind of the political centerpiece, oddly enough, of the film is this performance of La Marseillaise. And at the time, I mean, that was a way of activating the sentiments of the audience around occupied France, and, you know, defiance of Nazi regime.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  So just briefly, what happens in that scene?

• 27:54Speaker 05

  To set it up in the film, in Rick's café, a group of Nazi soldiers, led by Konrad Weit, are singing in German, Vakhtam Rhein. And the resistance leader, played by Paul Henried, Victor Laszlo, hears this, goes out to the band in the café, and instructs them to take up La Marseillaise. And the bandleader looks rather nervously at this, and glances at Humphrey Bogart, and we get a quick shot of Bogart nodding to say, yes, it's okay. And so the band contributes a performance of La Marseillaise in competition

• 28:39Speaker 05

  with Vakhtam Rhein. And of course, the audience joins in with it and eventually drowns out the Nazis who give up. So there's a kind of battle of song that takes place between the two forces, with Laszlo triumphant, La Marseillaise triumphant. And the crucial point about this is that it's the only point in the film, really, where Laszlo comes into his own. He's a boring old stick for most of the movie. He's the least interesting of all the characters in the movie. But this is where he shines, because he has to, the film has to demonstrate, he has to demonstrate, his power to inspire, to be a great leader, to gather people behind him.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  It really is quite moving, and almost, you know, hairs down the back of your neck when you see the Marseillaise be sung. What a patriotic motivation that is. It's a huge success, that scene.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  And equally moving, not only for people in the audience, but for the actors on set, many of whom were French refugees, including, you know, do you want me to mention Madeleine LeBeau?

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Go on, mention Madeleine.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Who, we get a close up, or the tear-stained face of one of the principal cast, Madeleine LeBeau, who was herself a fugitive from France.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  As was her husband, who played the croupier.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  Yes, Marcel Dalio, who plays the croupier in the film, was her real-life husband.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  Pamela, can you tell us, broaden that out a bit, about the function of music in this film, in general, not just the Marseillaise scene?

• 30:11Speaker 06

  I mean, the Marseillaise scene, as Sheldon rightly points out, takes place inside a very musical film. And as Ian said, you know, Hollywood isn't necessarily rigorously sticking to genres, but there are conventions that people would expect from films of this time. And very often, in the course of any Hollywood film in the 1940s, they'll walk into a nightclub and stop to listen to a musical interlude. And that is just multiplied several times in Casablanca. When we first enter Rick's café, Dooley Wilson, who plays Sam, who's such an important character in the film, is playing It Had to Be You. He's playing American music. And the repeated use of American standards in the café makes it clear to us that we are meant to consider Rick's café as a kind of outpost of America,

• 30:54Speaker 06

  that this is some, a little American domain, because it's run by Humphrey Bogart, which is about as patriotic as the film gets. So the main song that that they build up to playing that they tell us is going to be difficult for the characters to listen to is As Time Goes By. And this was not an original composition. And Max Steiner, who wrote the score for the film, hated this song and was very vocal about having this schmaltzy sentimental tune. There's even a story, which is probably not true, that he almost persuaded the studio to reshoot the whole film with a different song. But being lumbered with As Time Goes By, a song that many of us will find very beautiful, not least when Ingrid Bergman hums it to

• 31:36Speaker 06

  Dooley Wilson, which is a really haunting moment, and he works it into the film. So we hear it played and we hear it coming back in snatches on the score. So this idea that it represents the love story between Rick and Ilsa, their previous romance in Paris, is built, saturated into the film. And it's really wonderful. It works, sort of, it works against our better instincts. We are being fully manipulated into finding it romantic. There's also one song that was written originally for the film, probably everyone's least favourite song in the film, which is a very jaunty number called Knock On Wood. And it feels quite jarring. And you hear that quite early on in the film. The people in Rick's café are singing along to this song that says, if you've got trouble,

• 32:20Speaker 06

  just knock on wood. And I think we're meant to discount this song. We're meant to say that it's wrong from the beginning, because the moral of the film is going to be that when you are in a time of trouble, you don't just sit tight and hope for the best, that you have to act. So we have this sort of suggestion of what not to do, braying at us in this rather all too cheery manner. What we really have to do is think about As Time Goes By and remember the past.

• 32:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, it's a conversion film, if I can come in, because I think that's a really interesting point you make about the difference between those two numbers. Because really, if you think about what's the underlying kind of plot of the film, it's about how Rick is, who is shown as a cynic. But he's a cynic with a background. He's got a reason to be cynical. He's been in two wars before. He's been running guns in an earlier war in North Africa, and he's been involved in the Spanish Civil War.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Yes, we'll come to this point about the politics in a minute. But before we do, what about the business aspect of the studio? So Warner's in the business of making money. Is wartime an opportunity? Or is it a problem because they have to adapt to what perhaps the government, perhaps society is expecting?

• 33:43Speaker 07

  It's an opportunity. If you look at the pattern of film attendance, it basically rises through 40s. 40s is the peak of film attendance all over the world, really. Of course, people are watching different films. So in the allied world, they're watching Hollywood predominantly, but increasingly, they're watching British made films. That's another story, too. But Hollywood has lost part of its foreign market. With Hitler coming to power, with the Nazi takeover, American films are out. It's a major foreign market.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  So it's lost some market. And foreign earnings were important to the Hollywood studios. But it's also gained increased adherence, attendance, searching for entertainment in its home audience. So interference, yes. And what's happening is that there is, Hollywood has always presented itself as apolitical. But there's a backstory to this, that during the slump, the depression, Franklin Roosevelt made an appeal directly to the bosses of the Hollywood studios to get behind the New Deal. And although many of them were not of his persuasion, politically or economically, they did. And so some of those great musicals

• 35:08Speaker 07

  of the early 1930s, the Gold Diggers musicals, for instance, are actually responses to the depression, because they show people, you know, making do and coping with the difficult situation in America. So Hollywood retains that kind of sense of, yes, ultimately, they will back the direction of travel. And when America, of course, is in the war, when Pearl Harbor happens, they're absolutely 100% in support of our boys, our girls, our country. And so there's a very interesting kind of pivot going on here. It's a business opportunity, but it's also a patriotic opportunity to show how patriotic they can be.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Thank you, Ian, for that. Sheldon Hall, the United States was actually quite a censorious place at the time. What concessions did Warner Brothers have to make for the censors? Because this is a very sensual film as well.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  One of the main reservations that was expressed by Warner executives to whom Hal Wallace showed the synopsis of Everybody Comes to Rick's was that some of the material was highly censorable. In the play, Ilsa Lund, the character played in the film by Ingrid Bergman, was actually called Lois Meredith, and she was an American. And she was played as a bit of a floozy. And the first thing that happens in the play is that she falls into bed with Rick. And you couldn't do that at all in a Hollywood movie, unless the character was played by Barbara Stanic, in which case maybe. But you'd have to be very indirect about it. And so one of the things the writers had to do was to filter out a lot of the

• 36:47Speaker 05

  kind of censorable material and find indirect ways of communicating what was actually going on on the screen. And one of the key figures in that is Captain Renault, the Claude Rains character, who was given some quite knuckle lines or his activities in respect of some of the women who he encounters.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  He's quite clearly extorting them for sex as a way of getting visas or money.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Absolutely, yes. And that comes through very clearly in the film. And that had to be toned down a little from the play and from the original screenplay, or drafts of the screenplay.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  And what's the most famous bit in terms of the censorship and how you get around it?

• 37:32Speaker 05

  In the film?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  In the film.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  There's a scene about two thirds of the way through, in which Ilsa and Rick meet late at night, and they eventually renew their love for one another, it seems. And as they reconcile, as they embrace and kiss, there is a dissolve. In other words, the picture turns into another picture. And the shot that immediately follows that embrace is, it's like a search tower with a light around it. It's, in other words, a phallic symbol. And then it dissolves again to Rick standing at a window. I'm not sure that he's actually smoking a cigarette. People smoke a lot of cigarettes in this movie.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  He's not at that particular point. That scene transition was actually the result of the interference of the Production Code Administration, which was the body, the trade body responsible for seeing that scripts and films complied with censorship regulations. Originally, the film had a fade to black at the end of the embrace. And the censor asked for it to be changed to a dissolve. And you think, well, what's the difference? Because in Hollywood grammar, a fade to black indicates a longer passage of time than a dissolve. In other words, they'd have had more time to get up to something naughty if there was a fade

• 39:00Speaker 05

  to black. And so the dissolve replaced it. And there's been a lot of debate ever since about the significance of that search tower image and how much you can read into it. And the point is that suggestions are provided for the audience to go away and make up its own mind. And various critics have pointed out that two people sitting next to one another, seeing the same film, could come up with an entirely different interpretation of what actually went on there.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Well, look out for that next time you watch the film and see what you, how you interpret it.

• 39:34Speaker 03

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• 42:20Speaker 04

  Pamela, actually, from the very beginning of the film, there are references to Rick not caring about politics, and indeed specifically to isolationism. How effective is Casablanca in combating the ideology of isolationism, which was very present in the United States at the opening of the war?

• 42:47Speaker 06

  So, I mean, it's quite clear, obviously, that this film was made for the public, the American public. It wasn't made for the commander in chief, who'd obviously already made his decision. So this is about selling the idea of what is the value of being involved in the war. They use words like isolationism and foreign policy quite heavily in the film, but often in regards to people's personal situations, not necessarily having conversations about politics. And Rick has this pose where he says, "I don't stick my neck out for anybody." He says that a couple of times. And, you know, he doesn't drink with customers, and he doesn't take sides on the war. And we see through various bits of information, as Ian mentioned

• 43:26Speaker 06

  earlier, this is completely not true. He may not be acting on his impulses, but he has a very strong, he really is on one side rather than the other. And he talks to a fellow cafe owner who wants to hire his piano player, and he says, "Well, I don't buy and sell human beings." We know he's been in Ethiopia, fighting against Mussolini, fighting against Franco. He talks about being on a blacklist, even. We know he has this past of action. So the toughest thing he ever says is he tells some Nazis that they wouldn't have a very good time if they tried to invade New York City. But he is stuck in this idea that the best thing for him to do is to be neutral. But in this film, we see again and again that passivity is amoral, right?

• 44:09Speaker 04

  So, Ian, what is the key scene where he appears to recognize that his retreat into isolationism is not sustainable and not moral?

• 44:21Speaker 07

  Well, I think it's articulated through a series of moments. I mean, when we see him, there's a crucial moment when he rigs the game, the gambling game, so that the young couple can make enough money, the young refugee couple.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  From Bulgaria?

• 44:41Speaker 07

  From Bulgaria, precisely. I think we should just say in passing that the range of Eastern Central European nationalities, identities that is represented in the film is extraordinary. I think I've counted up to 40 people from Europe who appear in the film. And about half of those were recent immigrants into America. So, really, the film is peopled with characters who represent what is actually happening over there in Europe. Rick gradually moves towards a situation where it's very clear that his old sympathies, his old alliances, his old gut instincts to be anti-Nazi comes to the fore. And he knows

• 45:23Speaker 07

  that he's got to help Viktor Lanzlo, and as a great, potential great leader, to get out with his wife, namely Ingrid Bergman.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  We see lots of other films coming out in 1942 and 1943 by American studios promoting participation in the war against Germany. There was William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver, To Be or Not To Be, the comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang's Hangman Also Die. I've got a couple of questions on this. Several of these films suggest that the audiences would have known very well what was happening in Europe, especially to the Jewish populations. And yet, after the war, there was an argument that we didn't realize what was going on in the Holocaust. And yet, these films seem to counter that, that people would have known. Have you got any thoughts on that?

• 46:18Speaker 06

  We've mentioned Ernst Lubitsch, and the film that he made. And Charlie Chaplin also made The Great Dictator. And both of these directors said, you know, they made these films, but had they known the scale of what was going on, they would not have made them. And so there's a sense, if you look at the newspapers of the time, there were reports on concentration camps, but they're not what we were, they're not giving the full story that we know now. So I think one of the strengths of Casablanca is it makes these very references. You know, it mentioned the Poster of Petan, and it mentions concentration camps. But looking back at it now, we have a fuller, more difficult, and perhaps a far more difficult story to put behind the film.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  So, Sheldon, you wanted to come in.

• 46:56Speaker 05

  Ernst Lubitsch, the director of To Be or Not To Be, which you mentioned, had said that, which is a comedy set in Central Europe. And he said afterwards, had he known what was going on in the concentration camps, he would not have been able to make the film. He would simply have been paralyzed by the severity of what was going on.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Because it was a comedy. I mean, To Be or Not To Be is extraordinary from that perspective, that you can make a comedy about what's going on in Warsaw in 1939, 1940. Quite astonishing, really.

• 47:31Speaker 07

  But really important to do, I think, as a comedy. I was talking recently about the man who was actually the production designer of To Be or Not To Be. That was Vincent Corder, who was the brother of Alex Corder. And the Corders had moved to America.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  They were Hungarian.

• 47:48Speaker 07

  They were Hungarian.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Alexander Corder, of course, the founder of London Films.

• 47:51Speaker 07

  Precisely. They were classic Hungarians who created the British film industry, or recreated the British film industry. But they moved to America in the 1940s to complete Thief of Baghdad, the film that they'd started in Britain. They could see that making a technicolor fantasy wasn't going to be possible under wartime conditions. And they stayed in America, or at least two of the brothers stayed. And Vincent contributed to a whole series of anti-fascist films as an art director. And I was just looking at the scenes that he made for To Be or Not To Be. And it's quite chilling when you think about a Jewish

• 48:29Speaker 07

  Hungarian refugee, in effect, doing the decor for a Nazi state.

• 48:37Speaker 05

  And Vincent's brother, Zoltan Corder, who was also active in the film, and was a director, made a number of films in Hollywood in the 1940s, including Sahara in 1943 with Humphrey Bogart, which is a classic kind of lost patrol platoon movie, in which the patrol represents a kind of microcosm of the Allies. So you have some American soldiers, you have some German soldiers, you have a sympathetic Italian, all coming together to fight the Nazis.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  And do we know how much pressure the US government and the Office of Information was imposing on Hollywood to get behind the war effort?

• 49:23Speaker 06

  Well, they had a series of seven questions they wanted film producers to answer. And the very first question is, will this picture help win the war? So if you're going to refer to the war, it has to be in this very specific way. And it goes on to sort of talk about wholesome representation. So you have a level of encouragement and a push. It doesn't really affect a film like Casablanca, because it was sort of made too early. But, yeah, going forward, if you're going to make a work that's going to be seen by so many people, such a huge swathe of the American and worldwide population, that it's very important that we're all singing from the same Allied hymn sheet, despite whatever decisions people came to later.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  The other, which now seems bizarre in retrospect, is that they were worried about how the film would play in Vichy France. Because at the time the film was made, America still had diplomatic relations with Vichy France. And it was a foreign market, you know. They were worried about how it would go down, and how the government would respond to it.

• 50:22Speaker 07

  Rightly, I think, because actually, I just checked several French encyclopedias and collections of critical writing. Guess what's missing from most of them? Casablanca.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  Really?

• 50:34Speaker 07

  I have a sneaking suspicion, which I will confirm later, I hope, that actually Casablanca did not play very well, even in post-war France, because of the representation of Vichy France.

• 50:45Speaker 05

  The OWI actually prevented its being shown in North Africa, oddly enough, on the advice of Robert Riskin, who is best known as Frank Capra, screenwriter, which he became an executive with the overseas branch of the OWI. And it was suppressed because of the likely French reaction to it.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Pamela?

• 51:04Speaker 06

  I was looking at some of the reviews of the film when it came out. And when film reviews tended to talk about the message of the film, rather than the romance, the intrigue, they said, "And it's anti-Vichy," or "Good on it for having a pop," as it were. Vichy said, "That is what I think the critics were taking from it," rather than "Let's all join the war effort." It was that critical tone.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Now, one of the surprising things about many of the cast and crew in this film is, a few years later, they were hauled up in front of the House of Un-American Activities, the McCarthy witch hunt, as it's been called. Why were they accused of being un-American when they had produced this extraordinary cultural icon?

• 51:50Speaker 07

  There's this extraordinary phrase, which is so ironic, premature anti-fascism.

• 52:08Speaker 07

  And that was one of the phrases that was used to pillory the right-thinking. They didn't need to be very leftist to be right-thinking figures in Hollywood who believed that Hollywood had been too passive and too late in many ways in getting the message out because it was such a powerful ideological machine. So, yes, of course, when HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, got underway, among its leading opponents were Humphrey Bogart.

• 52:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, Humphrey Bogart was very vocal against HUAC and he was one of the founders of the Committee for the First Amendment and they led this delegation to Washington DC. He wrote this article, he spoke very brilliantly about how he wasn't interested in whether people were communists or not, he just cared about free speech, the kind of American values that ostensibly, you know, the war is fighting for. And he was forced to recant all of it. He had to walk back and say, no, communism is serious and I shouldn't have got involved. And despite being forever captured on film as the heroic man who stuck his neck out in real life, even with the stardom that he had at that point, he had to walk back because the atmosphere was so paranoid.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Sheldon, one of the paradoxes about this film is it is a marvellous example of ensemble filmmaking, notwithstanding the presence of Bogart and Bergman. And yet, the people involved barely spoke to each other off-screen. Why was that so? Why were they all so miserable?

• 53:40Speaker 05

  From all accounts, it was a very difficult production because it was continually being rewritten as the movie was going along. And so they gave various accounts about how confused they were about the course of the narrative. Ingrid Bergman, in interviews afterwards, said that she never knew who she was going to end up with, that she didn't know what the ending was going to be. And I think you have to be a little sceptical towards that because the ending is in the play. And in all of the script drafts, incomplete as they were, the film ended up in the same way, what was called the sacrifice ending, whereby Rick gives up Ilsa for a greater good, a greater cause.

• 54:22Speaker 05

  But how they get there was the difficult bit. Making it plausible that Ilsa would leave Rick, the love of her life, and fly off with Victor Laszlo. And so the screenwriters and the director and producer focused on trying to make that work, to make it plausible that she would behave as they do.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  But off-screen, Henry was jealous of Bogart.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  Henry doesn't come out of it well because he seems to have been a bit jealous that he was not the lead.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  That's Victor Laszlo, the actor playing Victor Laszlo.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  He claimed afterwards that he had it in his contract that he would get the girl. In all the films that he made at Woodrow, he absolutely didn't. It's not true at all. It's not true that he had it in his contract either.

• 55:10Speaker 07

  But it's also a tribute to the power of the film, isn't it? That we want to believe in this entirely imaginary community, which is Rick's Cafe. It is astonishingly believable and you can see interviewers who, Ingrid Bergman gave many interviews and I was looking at one made many years later, which the interviewer clearly wants her to say that they were one happy band. And she said, well, no, they weren't. We hardly spoke to each other. But that's the power of the film, that we want to believe that they have a sort of life and even relationships off-screen as well as so powerfully on-screen. The question that's often asked is why Casablanca has become one of the world's favourite films?

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Yes, why does it stand out above all else from the wartime films?

• 55:53Speaker 07

  I mean, I think its qualities are very considerable, but we should remember that actually it got revived for much younger people when Woody Allen made it the subject of a play. Play It Again, Sam, which is also the source of the misquotation, the famous misquotation of the title. And when that was filmed in, what, 72, it's got a, for those who don't know it, it's got a kind of ghostly Bogart figure who appears to Woody Allen and gives him advice about his romantic life. And I think that reinvented the film for a lot of people, for much younger people who'd never seen it first time round, probably had never even heard of it.

• 56:35Speaker 07

  The fact that Woody Allen was kind of making it this legendary film in the 70s must have done a lot, I think, to carry it on down through the generations. And then, of course, comes video and TV and it got shown a lot on television.

• 56:49Speaker 05

  Yes, apparently the most requested film shown on American television. It got something like a 73% audience share when it was first shown on TV in New York. It was one of the most requested films by broadcasters as well as by the audience.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  And of course, it has all of these memorable lines and which are quoted by other films and in other...

• 57:13Speaker 05

  It's incredible that we've got through this discussion without actually falling into a quotation, you know, semi-quotation. In fact, I'm shocked, shocked.

• 57:20Speaker 06

  What with these usual suspects, yeah. If you're interested in Hollywood history, you probably listen to a podcast called You Must Remember This. I mean, if you would listen to it in our time first, obviously. But, yeah, you know, it's absolutely everywhere in our understanding of how we imagine a Hollywood Golden Age film to be.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Well, thank you very much for coming.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  In Our Time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. If you're in the UK, you can access episodes 28 days early by subscribing to In Our Time on BBC Sounds or watching on BBC iPlayer. If you're outside the UK, you can listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 58:12Speaker 07

  This Cultural Life from BBC Radio 4. I will never go into anything so deep like that again. The world's leading artistic figures reveal their creative influences.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Disobey, disagree, disavow.

• 58:24Speaker 07

  I'm John Wilson and my recent guests have included the sculptor Anish Kapoor, photographer Annie Leibowitz, the actor Kristin Scott Thomas.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  It has made me good at telling stories about people who have a secret suffering.

• 58:37Speaker 07

  And former children's laureate Frank Cotrell-Boyce.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  If art's got one function, it's to point to what's wonderful and say, look, this is your world, it's insane.

• 58:46Speaker 07

  Listen to This Cultural Life on BBC Sounds.

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• 59:34Speaker 03

  It works with your files and the tools you already use, like Gmail and Slack. And whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategising your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/solve. That's claude.ai/solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai/solve.