Episode 736: Casablanca (1942)

appointment with destiny. I was willing to shoot Captain Rhino, and I'm willing to shoot you, all right, Major.

the ever expanding Nazi occupation of Europe and Africa. He's visited by a figure from the past, Elsa Lund played by Ingrid Bergmann, who chooses his out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world to walk into with her husband, Victor Laslow play by Paul Heinried. I don't know if we can actually spoil this film for anyone, but nothing is off the table. You have been warned. So Bill, can you remember the very first time you saw Casablanca and what you thought?

to finish where I was conscious of it. I think I was already by that point familiar with the cast from crime and horror movies that I liked as a kid because Peter Lorie. I knew from the Mister Moto movies, Claude Rains, I knew from The Invisible Man and The Wolfman, Conrad Vite. I think I even saw The Cabinet Doctor Kyle Gary, and I had seen the Maltese Falcons, so

I knew Sidney Green Street and Hungry Bogart. For me, it was interesting just to see it as someone over interested in like exotic adventure kind of stories, like the kind of Casa Blank and normal tells. I think I was interested in it as like a genre film because of all the face I knew from crime and horror movies. It's one that I think I liked it the first time I saw it watching as a proper movie, but I got interested in going down the rabbit hole of

old Hollywood. Casablanca was the film that really summed up This is not a unique thing to observe, but like everything I liked about old Hollywood, it looks seemed to have every piece of it, from the sarcastically funny, brave, imperfect guys with their friendships, from a Howard Hawkes kind of move, the romantic melodrama with the atmosphere of the cinematography, like everything that I like in old Hollywood. It seems

to capture all of it. It was intimidating to agree to do this, but I think, you know, I thought about my dad, you know, when you put out the list of titles, like I should talk to Mike about Casablanca. So my first viewing like probably like thirteen years old that I can remember for sure. Yeah, no shock, I liked.

a humongous crowd and at home. The script reads one way where you're just by yourself in solitude and you fall in love with Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergmann, but in a movie palace full of people. You can feel the beats and how fast and precise

the writing is. It's almost musical in its tenor. And then having said all of that about the cultural background and learning about all the references and seeing it in pop culture and media, I think the actual reason I went to watch it was I used to see the BBC series As Time Goes By on pds, the one with Judy Dench and Jeffrey Palmer, and I always wanted to know where the song was from, looked it up and found the VHS and I watched it that way.

about twenty twenty one, and it's funny. I was just looking up the date of the Aljan Hermit's book Round Up the Usual Suspects and Making of Casablanca Bogart Bergmann in World War Two that was given to me as a birthday gift, probably the year came out, because it came out December first, nineteen ninety three, or sorry, the year after because my birthday is in April, so it was probably either a birthday or graduation present, And ironically I hadn't seen the movie at that point. I first

saw this probably in ideal conditions. They were doing a screening series down at the beautifully restored Fox Theater here in Detroit, and I went to go see that there. I saw that one, I saw Spartacus. I can't remember what else played their Citizen Pain. I believe you can never go wrong with going to see Citizen Pain for the fiftieth sixtieth time. But this was the first time seeing Casablanc was seeing it at a movie palace and

just absolutely fell in love with it. And it really kind of your guys's points, like it locked in a lot of references that I was very familiar with but didn't know that I was familiar with. And you know, now, it's like my wife and I were debating about this as far as is Casablanca still a very well known movie. And I don't know if any of my coworkers who are under forty, if they've ever seen this movie, if

they would get the references. They just don't know. But it's funny that the references are still out there in force. Like just thinking of every time you start up a Warner Brothers movie on able streaming, whatever it's got the strains of as time goes by that comes with it. But I don't know how many people realize what that's from these days. But it was very difficult for me making this request and saying, what the hell am I going to say about this movie that hasn't been said before.

I think we had the same thing when we talked about Blade Runner quite a few years ago, where it's is there anything new we can bring to the table, because it's just such a well worn documented film and I don't know how many new readings there can be of it in twenty twenty five.

Bogart movies. It's like he's still alive, I think when they start doing this, but by the sixties it becomes a cult movie, like the kind that we might think up in the Cities with Harold and Maud and Altopa and Pinklamingo's like Bogart movies were that kind of thing on college campuses in the sixties, and I think that a lot of people that were part of that cul became film critics, and so we grew up with like

people like Roger Ebert cheerleaders for this movie. So if you got into movies as a gen xer or even millennial, you probably were reading critics that have referenced this all the time, even if you didn't see it. You know the dialogue, you know the quotes and the pop cultural references, and maybe you grew up with Warner Brothers cartoons that were like making reference to it, or the Simpsons making

reference to it. I think that, yeah, the further out we get from it, the more that's going to receive, you know. And so yeah, you could be right that there's a whole generation that wouldn't know this film, even though I think there's several generations that know it really well.

I think among old Hollywood, I think it's actually had better luck than Gone with the Wind or some other films that were like inescapable, because there's elements of those films that maybe have an aged quite as well, like in terms of cultural sensitivity and blanket considering where it's set and the time it's made. It's like remarkable, Like it's a miracle, Like how unoffensive it is by twenty twenty five standards, it's also.

concentration camp. In nineteen forty two, the term concentration camp meant something different from Ashchwitz Bercanal. What happened afterwards. And it's funny too, because the Epstein's ended up leaving this to work on why we fight with Frank Capra talking all about that, but so little has changed about American politics and the bugbear of people coming to our shores.

But I think the reason that it aged so well where something like Gone with the Wind perhaps didn't in many respects, not even just the racial component, was the fact that the people that played foreigners in the film were actually foreigners. It's just something that's so rare in Hollywood.

You watch so many films from Britain and the United States, and they have vast swaths of great talent from these countries, but they prefer to have their stock character actors play them and put a little brown makeup over their face and doesn't age well. But Casablanca has it in spades.

talking about Captain America, Brave New World or something. But to have this movie from forty two still play revival houses almost like clockwork, that it is a February fourteen Valentine's Day tradition for a lot of revival houses to show Casablanca right around that time, and this was no exception. There were actually multiple screenings happening in the Detroit area. There was, I want to say, either Imagine or one of those larger theater chains. We're doing revival screenings throughout

the week. And then the Redford Theater here in Detroit area added on their big screen, and that was just a joy to be able to see with so many me just pure film fans in such a lavish setting, and to hear those lines again and to hear the audience just murmuring them as well. And this movie, like you already mentioned, it's so quotable, and there's so many good lines, and just everyone is saying their favorite ones, especially as you get to the end of the film,

and just those that speech from Humphrey Bogart. There are so many lines in there that you've just heard so many times. It's wonderful.

about this? The amount of material written on. Casablanca is so enormous that it's a little intimidated. But I thought we would just enter three movie buffs and just talk about our feelings with it.

this as a middle aged person. As far as the script and having that as part of When Harry Met Sally, it also really does speak to that whole thing as far as how your attitudes change or can change around movies as you watch them over the years. And this whole thing of Sally talking about how she would definitely go off with Victor Las though when she's younger and then later on I would never see that. Of course,

I'm going to go with Humphrey bolk Art. You change the movie, stay the same, but your attitude is definitely mature over your lifetime.

was our religion. So when you talk about like the Bradle Theater, after Bogart died, like a couple months afterward, they did the retrospective and then every week they would show Casablanca, or even more importantly, they would show it during the Finals week, and this is right across Harvard Square, and so people who are cramming for the finals, are taking tests, they would go to it almost as a lease of tension, of pressure, and that religiosity of going

to the cinema every week of it being just something that you do, you go almost to pray. And so it's almost like the litany of Casablanca, where you have all of those phrases, here's looking at you, kid, pill of beans, all that kind of stuff. And so when it happens, and it's such a short movie too, that you can just recite it all within your heart while you watch it with a bevy of other people, and it becomes basically a religion and you carry it with you wherever you go.

you know, Die Mung. But I think maybe that just that kind of sarcastic, slightly anti hero ish persona I think sets him apart from John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart some of the other people that might have even played darker characters than you know, what they're known for. But I think they didn't have the same I don't know, like the attitude or street crib that Bogart seemed to

carry through multiple generations. And it's interesting because it's maybe one of the saddest characters in some that you really get, like he's almost never in danger, but it's a film that really shows him at his most defeated. If it softens the play and like the alcoholism and the harsher side of it's a more palatable version of that character, but it's still for that to be like just the

embodiment of like confident macho lagger. There's a lot of chinks in the art for that character throughout the running time. I think he's such a.

that flashback. We get to see him as this joyous character, loving life, let's get married and all this to ilsa and then we come back to him come crashing back down with those final strains of as time goes by, as we see him just drinking there in the dark with Seam playing the piano, and we never really get his backstory. We get versions of it. We get Renault, the claud Raine's character, saying, oh, I thought it might

be something like this, or even Strasser. He gives a little we have a dossier on you, and he starts to read some things, but you don't get a ton You get a few facts about him, that he fought in the Spanish Revolution, and you get to find out that he fought on the right side, which is funny because in the Big Sleep, I think they talk about how he and Sean are not sewn archer. I can't remember the character's name, but that they were.

my contract. For six years, I've been playing the same character, and every single one of these movies of this just heavy, vaguely ethnic with some kind of pithy nickname, and he would just be mean and usually get shot by the end of the movie. But then the decided Warner Is the PR department said, Okay, we need to boost him to major stardom, so we need to focus our energy on making him a romantic lead, to which he responded,

I did the exact same thing in Casablanca. The only difference was it was Ingrid Bergmann looking at me, so everybody thought I was this great romantic lead because she's so beautiful, so luminous, and the way they photograph her and this is just spectacular.

They have this relationship where she cannot reveal her past, really doesn't want to reveal her past, doesn't want to live through that hurt again. And then once she finds out what is actually happening with her husband, with who she thought was dead, that she then has this huge struggle.

I almost wish we could see this from else's point of view, the struggle that she has to leave Rick and to leave him standing on that platform with the world the elements crying onto that letter, like doing to that letter what he couldn't do, but erasing it with the tears of the world. I just oh, it's so great. And that she comes back the way she tries to play against Rick, the way that she tries to seduce Rick at one point, and just that whole back and

forth between them. And then you've got Laslo there, who thinks he knows what's going on, but he's probably the most clueless character in this movie.

the play, he's a lawyer that's got these ideals. He's got a family, like he's got a wife, and it's a different character than all we know about him is just that he had these politically righteous kind of moments in his past, but that he's at a point that

he's neutral and defeated because of this relationship. It just as a film about stepping out of that neutrality and taking as a very simple political It's rooted in a specific war, specific time, but part of the way is carried food like multiple generations, I think, is because could be applied to so many situations. It is general, and it also it's funny it's a funny movie, and it's

a great romantic film. So it is a political film, but all the other elements are working in such harmony with it that it doesn't feel didactic in any way, even though, which because I think when I look at some of the other films that kind of come in the wake of it, they tend to foreground the politics first. And then it's also nice that they have romance and humor,

but their political films first. Where's Casablanca. I think Michael Curtiz really sought as a romance, It just happens to be political, whereas I think the other ones, maybe because we're further into the war or whatever reason, it's just a different sensibility and they become much more good propaganda films, but propaganda films.

and then some of those amazing character actors. This whole movie is populated with just some of the best faces, some that we've called out before on the show. I think at least two of the people that work at the bar, between the Professor and Sasha, were both in Ball of Fire, which is just populated with great character

actor faces. Of course, Sidney green Street and Peter Lorie had just started with Humphrey Bogarth the year before in Malti's Falcon, and then those three would continue on to work in quite a few things, and even had Mary Astor know Peter Lourie unfortunately in Across the Pacific, so a different type of war film that we had a

few years after that, I believe. But yeah, it was just those those amazing faces, those amazing accents that they have, and then the level of humor, just the little things like Carl bringing the extra glass with him because he thinks that somebody's gonna ask him to have a drink, as well as the better brandy because he wants to drink that, or the whole thing was Sasha where he's being sent to take yvon Holm and then it's like

and then come straight back. It's like, ah, all right, I will like you can tell that he's been bad in the past, and Rick knows that enough to admonish him before he even screws up anything.

But if Henry turned it down, which they knew he was going to, because the script they sent him was just terrible before they bumped him up and gave him third starting credit, We're going to ask, of all people, Herbert Marshall, and we talk about great supporting casts. And this has basically almost everybody from the Warner Brothers like Stock Company except for Alan Hale Senior, which would have

been just incredible to have. But the idea of Herbert Marshall as the Victor Laslow character, I think would have added a totally different dimension to this. And there's a lot of criticism that comes at Henry for his portrayal in it, no more than of course Roger Ebert, who had a lot of vitriol for what he perceived to be his lackluster acting throughout the film.

crossing the line into something else. And I was thinking about the international component of it, because part of what I love about Casablanca is how new York it feels for a film that's said in Africa, it's a film that reminds me of New York more than anything else

because of the references to New York. I know that when it opened in New York and Bogart has the line about there's certain parts of New York City that I wouldn't recommend you try to invade that would generate cheers from the audience when that opened in nineteen forty two. And I just think about how Scarface inspired Pepula Moco. Pepula Moco becomes remade as Algiers. Algiers becomes definitely something they have in mind when did they acquire everybody comes

to rix. Casablanca then inspires people like Jean de Godard, who look at these casts and all these great faces and all those new wave guys are looking at Claude Rains and Peter Lori and Sydney green Street, like we needed faces like this in our movies, Like in that international conversation that these films were having. I find so interesting even though it's yes as American's any film I can think of, but it has this international kind of mixture in the cast and the production, like behind the

scenes Michael Curtiz, But it's an interesting dialogue. I don't know, you really have the same thing happening with Hollywood hits today that feel that influenced by world cinema and give back in the same way.

see this movie in totality. And it's remarkable to me that it even plays in totality in the US, just because the way that it skirts some of these rules from the censors, just that the Claude Raine's character is freaking incredible. Some of those lines like oh there's another visa problem, oh, show her in. There's no subterfuge right there at all. And it's like the only question I have as far as like, did he sleep with the Bulgarian girl or did he not sleep with her? I'm

not exactly sure. I know that she talks about how her husband's still just a boy and that she needs to protect him, and I'm like, I think she might have ended up sleeping with her in now in order to try to get these visas. I don't know what you guys think.

trying to get their English down. It's like different versions of the same idea, of different stages of life trying to escape that town. The Bulgarian couple is more central to the play, and it's darker because the Renault character is trying to get her to drink more. It's a little bit more aggressive, a little more creepy than what Claude Rains ultimately plays.

the hell out of town. I just I think that's the moment where you realize what a knight in shining arm or this guy secretly is.

you crazy Russian. Because it is that moment, and it's incredible to me too, because I'm pretty sure it's Julius Epstein said he based that whole Roulette thing off of a story of somebody that he knew who played roulette in Las Vegas, who worked in La and they said, put the number there, and they knew it was rigged. It was like a mob joint and they say, Okay, you won today, but you're never coming back here ever again.

And I just wanted to come back to the thing that you guys talked about, the ethereality of Rick's backstory of talking about the Epstein's in the way that they wrote, how they're responsible for most of the humor in it. But they very consciously decided not to go into the backstory. And like classic Hollywood has that tendency it can be didactic, overly didactic, but like this movie and just the way it tells Rick's backstory is just so open and ended.

And I'm sure we'll get into it later with all of the supplementary material and all of the quasi sequels that people have tried to make, but it's just it's just ruining the mistique of it, all of him as a character.

We're going to have a full orchestra. It might have been Jack Warner himself actually that gave that piece of advice when it came to the editing of the film, just to bring that orchestra in, bring it so loud and so powerful, and the way that everyone is joining in there, and especially that shot of Yvonne so Vane's a very interesting character for me. Where she starts off

the girlfriend of Rick. She's drinking too much, he tells us to take her home, and then the next time we see her she's on the arm of a German officer, and that whole thing where people are saying stuff to her in her native language. And I love too that this movie is not subtitled whatsoever. We just have to pick up everything through context clues unless you happen to

speak you know, French, German, et cetera. And that when she is the one who's standing there singing the Marseillas and the tears are coming down her eyes, You're just like, Okay, she's probably not going to be going home with that German tonight and making the right decision. And I just love the lady with the guitar and how she's chiming in the whole room, going wild at that moment, and just that unity, and you feel like it's such a

magical thing. And it just even though it's a movie, and even though it was so pre planned and everything, it just feels so organic to the story. And again, I also love that whole way that it's put together through the editing and just that little look of the orchestra to Bogart and Bogart given that little nod, and then they're able to start playing along with what Victor Laslow wants them to do, and it just turns into magic.

who liked it gets you in the heart strength. It's like those moments of people being decent because you don't have a lot of reminders of that.

purpose in this movie. There's no moments where I'm just like, oh boy, we could have done without that, And little things like how we see Garti being trapped and arrested and then we just hear about him later on, and when you hear about him, it just hits you right in the heart. Even though we didn't see the guy die, I didn't need to see the guy there. There are a lot of things that happen off screen where I well, we don't get to be privy to that. But that's okay.

Most of the time I'm complaining about the whole show. Don't tell things like, oh, you should have shown no Guarty being killed. No, no, it was absolutely perfect the way that we just get that little piece of information and that wonderful line from again Claude rains I'm trying to decide if he was killed trying to escape or if he died by suicide. I'm like, oh man, it's just so.

I look like a milkmaid. I just look. I'm not that perfect type. And that's the beauty of it is there are so many scenes in rewatching it where somebody else is talking, but it's just Bergmann on screen and they have that incredible like what is it like twenty three twenty four second long take of her just listening to a song like that just doesn't happen anymore where

you have that much time. But the other twin gun is just Rains, Like Rains is the lynchpin in terms of the comedy and how fast everything is because he was a machine and he worked with Kurtiz so much. They made eleven films together out of like fifty six that he made overall, like some like basically a fifth of everything that he made. And he was the one that always knew his lines, and they would play tricks with him all the time. He would be horribly, horribly

anxious about not knowing his lines. So Peter Laurie, the ultimate prankster, decided one day get everybody to prepare for a scene. And then of course they started the scene and he looks over at Laurie and he's like, oh, something wrong, Peter, I don't know all these lines. And they just crack up laughing.

just you despise me, don't truck. I just love that whole thing that he's doing there.

either way. But I think that in the play again, it's like it has that line tell Rick that even a pimp can die like a man and commit suicide, like that character's ennobled in the play in a way that Peter Laurie just plays it as desperate and sinister,

just because that's what he's that's his gift. But I think that as a kid, he was the star of the movie for me because he was like I knew him from cartoons and things like, and he just seemed like so exaggerated in his that Rick Rick hide me like that was the That was the movie to me for when I was a little kid. It's just that scene, and it's easy to forget that he's only in, like you're saying, the two scenes, whereas like Paul en Reid

is like is the third billing? But I don't. I think of Claude Rains, and I think of Peter Laurie. I think I've Sidney Greenster, I think of like Conrad Vit, like all these great character actors as like the real

stars to me. Over han Reed, I think he's just when you talk about like Ebert's criticism of that character, I think it's just maybe just that that character is unrelatably perfect and noble in a way that we don't see ourselves in him, like he he needs to be that, and it makes it harder to judge Ingrid Bergmann for going with him versus like Ivia he was as equally flawed as Rick. But I think that we all see ourselves in Rick, whereas we don't see ourselves in in Laslow.

But he's necessary for the story. But yeah, all the colorful supporting characters I think are part of the joy of that movie for sure.

There's one other Nazi the I can't remember the character's name, but he's Heinrich. Yeah, fatter, shorter, with the mustache. But he just seems like, I don't know, he reminds me a Toath from the Raiders of the Lost Arc. It's just like, yeah, that guy doesn't look like much, but he's probably very, very evil, And probably just the name Heinrich doesn't help either.

other men, especially like Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogert. The famous thing is, of course that Humphrey Bogert had to wear three inch lifts for this film to deal with the five foot nine in ingru Bergmann, which five foot nine doesn't sound that tall, but Humphrey Berger was this diminutive, like I have to admit that he's a kind of weird looking guy for the romantic lead or a classically he's now Gary Cooper, is what I'm trying to say.

But that height difference that they play with, well, you brought up earlier the tears and the rain at the train station with a note, and I read Allen kde Rhodes biography of Critiz, and like the major thing in terms of Casablanca and then I think we'll probably maybe talk about Passage to Marseille afterwards. Was that because of his lack of understanding of the English language, he really

couldn't deal with writers that well. Like I don't want to say that he was terrible at the English language, but he just couldn't communicate as well as he could in Hungarian in his native tongue. So he primarily focused on visuals, and so that's why you get those incredible shots. Famously, he was the one that came up with the Vshi water at the end of Having Reins. Curtis is just this incredible visual storyteller. Where the one shot that really stood out to me this time was when we actually

enter Risk for the first time. We're almost like this ghostly presence outside of the door and then we are invited through this floating camera. And there are so many push ins and dollies in this film, especially layered with crossfades, that that's like part of the construction. It's not just that the script itself is firing on all cylinders and it's fantastic, it's also the visual linking everything together.

so well. And then you have the music that isn't related to those three other pieces of music, and those work wonderfully too.

thing that you can't get back to. But you know, just as you get further out from Casablanca itself, it becomes increasingly like this nostalgia item as far as embodying, not just romanticizing like the pre invasion period, but romanticizing the forties and forties movies, and like it becomes this kind of totem of everything that we lost. Culture evolves and it becomes this perfect version of what we think

the forties was. I was thinking about that, like watching if we talk about things like Played against Sam where the man with Bogart's face, Like what how this becomes this totem. But yeah, it's built into the original film itself as far as that melancholy nostalgia element of it, which is interesting how it becomes kind of part of the reputation of the film itself, but it's built into the narrative.

he that's why he put in the play. You know, this whole entire film is just steeped with nostalgia and like aching pain and loss and like you talk about Pepelamocho and Algiers where you know you're stuck in North Africa and you want to get back to in those cases France, but in Casablanca he just presumably he wants

to get back to America and he can't escape. The one that I always go back to specifically with that is Wages of Fear, where they also have that thing of being stuck in South America but wanting to get back to quote unquote civilization. And there's that also, like that really strange kind of racial aspect to like Pepelamocha, where he's like basically losing his mind because of all the noise and the foreignness of it, and he wants

to get back to the familiarity. They don't play with that too much in this I guess he decides to go out into the hindul In and join the Free French and fight in Europe. But there is that aching pain at the heart of it all, and that's classic Hollywood sell that to everybody.

Sam and as piano. You've got Asians, Europeans, Americans, people all different racist countries, colors and creeds all in here, and nobody is getting into battles about who's right, who's wrong. You've got Nazis and you've got everybody else. You've got the Vshi in there as well. At heart that Renault eventually is going to come around and do the right thing too. But I like that they have that, and I love that Sam is such a friend to Rick. He is probably the best friend that Rick will ever

have in his entire life. And those things where he's like trying to protect Rick from Elsa, the way that he's like, oh no, he went home early, and just lying to her through that, and then when he comes back and sees Rick and he's just like, come on, let's get out of here, let's go get drunk, let's go fishing. Trying to get him away from this whole situation. I love Sam and I think he's such a great character and such an unusual character for a nineteen forty

two film. The other line, besides the more unfortunate boy that references race is I don't sell human beings right, which you know. And also he makes the case for make sure he gets like twenty twenty percent of the door or whatever, he gets paid like a proper star attraction. When he sells the club to Sydney Green Street. He's looking out for him to not only be moved over like an indentured servant. No, he's your star entertainer. You pay him correctly.

because they have that kind of snappy pattern. I think about class in Casablanca and how you have that stuffy British couple get pickpocketed and you might like to pickpocket

a little bit more because he's just so braceen. Or you have the couple get offended because Rick won't have a drink with them, but don't you know who he is, Like he's you know, the second most important banker, and it's like your money is not what makes you cool in that place, Like it's a chic nightclub, but it's not really favoring the wealthy somehow, which is another kind of thing that makes it interesting, just because it's it's inviting maybe that working class audience to see this kind

of like more glamorous picture than Scarface, but you know, or you know, something like the Warner Brothers, like Little Caesar or something like that, but it is it is still slightly gangster adjacent, you know, as far as like the fixed gambling and just like the corruption and like

the the slippery morals of the characters. Like it's friendly to the audience for those films, even though it's about something nobler, but it's not forgetting that audience either, which I think even all the faces that we know from crime films. I think that's another reason why it's so great, is because it has that connection to pulpier things.

a joke, they actually beat the Warner chief in Berlin and then they stole his car and beat him in the street and left them basically to die. Eight months later he died of his injuries, and Warner's basically decided, Okay, yeah, we're withdrawing from the German market. And there was also this component of Jack Warner being the most devout Jewish of the moguls, and there's this anger that is underneath casta blank at this righteous anger of something horrible is

happening and we need Americans to take heed. And of course this came out after Pearl Harbor. I mean famously, the script came across Stephen Karna of the Reader's Desk December eighth, nineteen forty one, the day after Pearl Harbor, so they knew already that they were in it. But that Warner Brothers thing of like the low criminality, the scum element, but also there's just the anger, the righteous anger.

They even funded the Anti Nazi League way toward g Robinson held at his house and then Graucho Marx equipped that Warner Brothers was the only studio with guts, so they didn't have any like financial incentive to cow tells of the Nazis and kind of papover what the true malice that they had, so they could show them for the scumbags that they are.

the perfect studio for this story. And the timing is golden for every step of Casablanca's when it comes out, when it's announced, when it comes back into reissue, like Casablanca is in lockstep with important events in world events, and it's just a charmed film on a number of levels in terms of the timing, which you know is part of what makes a film a hit.

We have to be nice. We cannot openly criticize Hitler and Nazism. And I love that the Warner Brothers just didn't give a shit, and it was great that they did that, but there were so many people that were just falling right in line and going, oh no, no, don't worry if you can censor our films, We'll make sure that we don't say anything bad about you. And yeah, not this one. I love that line too that Rick has when he asked Sam what time it is?

into this fight. It's just like when the Habbits were talking with tree Beard, kind of hold back this storm.

bit more of him. Actually I think three scenes, right yeah, because we have Rick coming in and talking with him and then saying to Laslow, oh yeah, he's the fat man and the fez in the corner or whatever, and then comes back and starts that whole mechanism in order to have all those dominoes fall into place at the end,

of the film. And I love how quickly everything resolves itself in this film too, and that there's just that moment where you're like, Okay, I'm going to do this thing he says, and he's already thought through every single possibility, it feels like, and everything just works out exactly the way that it should, even when Renault tries to pull the rug out from under him and call stress Or rather than calling the airport, and that just helps us

basically get stress Or killed, which I'm all four killing Nazis. And Conrad Veitt, yeah, is just phenomenal in here, and I love his whole thing. I love that story about how when he was still in Germany and he had to fill out a card or something where he was filling out his passport and for religious wrote jew and all apsents like, oh that's great even though he wasn't Jewish, but he was married to a Jewish woman. He's just like, fuck you.

Then thirty three real early, he leaves to England, becomes a naturalized British citizen, and then when he's working in Hollywood. During this entire period, he was the highest paid person in the entire cap. He gave his entire estate, most

of his earnings to a British war relief. Not only that, there's little things too where Paul Henried, who was Jewish, had to leave and he got stuck in England when thirty nine fell, and since he was an Austrian national, the immigration police came to him and they're likes, hey, we need to know on which side you're going to be. We don't know your background, all this sort of stuff. And it was Conrad VT that actually vouched for him.

He actually vouched for Paul Henried and said, no, I know him, we have a background on the stage.

helps too. When it came to Passage to Marseilles, which you mentioned a little bit earlier, you get to see that symbol a bunch more in there, and it's like, oh, okay, now I know what this is. It had been a while since I'd seen Passage to Marseilles, so I'd forgotten what that that they were fighting for the Free French as well.

I love John Quaylon every single movie. I know him primarily from Groups of Wrath. He has that incredible scene at the beginning where he's a farmer basically made completely insane by the devastation of the dust bowl, and he has this weird, weird, like little ting accent, and it's because he's Canadian and his family is Norwegian, each and every single person. Basically, the Americans are the minority in this can I.

When it came to watching that movie, I was like, oh, yeah, this is very familiar with all these faces and names in the credits.

the production manager at Warner Brothers. He was like the ultimate dictator and he told Curtis, there is no way I'm pulling James Wong how to come work on Casablanca. But then you look at Passes to Marseille, and the visuals of that movie absolutely floored me. I like within five minutes, I was like, Okay, this is why Curtis

is oh special along with How. Of course Edison is all right in Casablanca, and the visuals are beautiful, But there is something to be said for a true like luminary like How.

right notes just coming together. That phrase lightning in a bottle. That's what this movie ended up being, and had things that played out the way that they played out, might not be talking about this movie in twenty twenty five.

world and slightly more popular audience. But the Casablanca book was from the very beginning, written with an eye towards it's a trade book. It was commissioned by Norton, and I was very happy to work with my editor there, Matt Wiland. It's from the Twin Cities originally.

you really was made for you. You've got this emmigrade cast and crew for that matter. It's just a story that continues to resonate with audiences and one that you know that I held, especially Dear. It's when we were talking about my mom moments ago. I think it was my mama first showed me the film when I was young, and I think it was actually quite resistant to it initially,

but obviously came around to appreciate it. I overcame my teenage rebellious years when I thought that anything like Casablanca was just that was strictly for old people. Strange out things change over time, but anyway, and so it was her idea, and I initially was going to try to pitch it to that series. The series, however, went it came to an end. We don't want to say it

went belly up, but it no longer exists. And so at that point in time, I had done a fair amount of freelance writing for different publications, meaning for in this case popular publication, so for the New Republic, for the Nation, for the Time, for their Times book review, and for places like that. And I'm married to a writer and editor and critic, and so I watched from afar how the trade press process works, and I figured,

what the heck, I've got some credentials here. I've written pre lance stuffin actually was really Molly's encouragement too, So why not, if you're not going to do it for a university press, why not try and go to the

trade path. And I did, and I'm very happy. I don't think it was too gimmicky but there was the hook, which was that the seventy fifth anniversary was coming up, and so that I mentioned moments ago that the Omer project was very much a labor of love, which is not to say that this wasn't as well, but the only project was one that also took me, oh god, a decade and a half from start to finish. It

was a really long project. I conducted research on at least two contents, if not three, I can't remember now in the end, but it was just it.

semi documentarily in Casablanca. I've been retracing those steps and following the different paths that led to Hollywood from Middle Oil, but from Central Europe, largely German speaking Europe, but also French speaking, and while in the case of Sasha the Barman, Russian speaking, though he had to eat as he claims his German was the least of the coffee clutch variety,

so hanging with the Teutonic set. But that was the chance to write a book that had a my way of characterizing, I guess would be a blend of journalistic breeziness with scholarly air udition. And that's it's funny. Those are my twin pillars, a tween goals. I'm trying my best not to finish up the follow up project on some like it hot, which the culture does do some might get hot, and basically trying to continue in that same vein writing on that most storied of screwball comedies

and great, great, the great American sex comedy. And so the lessons I guess that I learned in writing this book have have stuck with me. I wish I were a faster writer. I wish, and I wish I didn't have these other things that are attention. I've been doing a lot of university leadership stuff sharing and was associated DAN last year and now serving as executive director of these programs.

translator friend and colleague of mine, Shelley Fish. It's a superbly talented translator, award winning translator, So that was a lot of fun. But yes, if I can just get some like it hot book out the door, then the interpretive biography of Wilder and maybe my Wilder three Ways.

be so cynical, but the scary times. Anyway, I was lucky to have one of those for an entire year, so that that made it possible, and I would work on Washington Square in Bolk's Library. I was not I'm not affiliated with NYU, but with my new school idea, then you could go in there and just and hammer away, and it was great. Managed to just really knock that one out.

But for whatever reason, I don't know why. Maybe it's but maybe it's hardheadedness, stubbornness, not sure, but I like to write on subjects that hold my attention and that animate me and about which I have a large degree of passion and really take pleasure and write. It's a very foreign idea, anathema to academics call it usually academic colleguere.

So you picture the Monty Python skit. It like the intellectual wrestling with himself or something or this, especially in the humanities academic scholarship, has often thought if he's completely stripped of all bleacher But for whatever reason, I never gave up on that, because I also figured I'd never finish anything unless I unless it gave me a certain amount of pleasure, and unless I was engaged to the

degree that it held my attention. And more specifically to Casablanca. Sure, with Altine Harmitz's book, Who the hell Needs to write Another book? She really covered a lot the anchor if we go, the Dude's rug, and the big Lebowski that kind of ties the whole room together, the anchor in this the chapter on the refugees such much, which for me is really all up the wait. I was just

tie up the te together the entire room. But can tie together my interests that I've been pursuing over the past several decades, essentially since entering into the whatever hallowed walls of academ and teaching classes on exiles in Hollywood, and teaching classes on Bresh and on and all these filmmakers that I've been including Omer, including Wilder, including zennemn and Lang and more Now for that matter as well.

That was Omer's beginnings were led to Omar and led to more Now and working on more Now's storied American debut at Fox Studios Sunrise, one of the most beautiful, silent pictures ever made. And so the such much chapter was a chance for me to.

But the book, I think, in particular that chapter struck a certain chord. Now, of course we're in trunk two point zero. That's funny. I'm writing on cross dressing and drag performance, and once again, there seems to be a certain almost subversive quality was never intended that way writing on refugees I wasn't tend necessarily to be any way subversive or transgressive, but that was my way of making

the material really into my own. Of course, I follow some of those well trodden paths of production history, my sort of almost they're not exactly capsule biography or thumbnail, but I've got I need to account for the biography all these different actors and film professionals whose biographies had either been written or were, in the case of Critis, we're in the process of being written. I'm thinking about

Alan Roady's wonderful biography of Critiz. So this was really my chance, I think, to give it my own spin, which is not to say that's a massive augmentation of the material that that Aldi Hermetz was dealing with in her round up the usual suspects, but it does take it into some different directions of a different places, and in particular that the chapter such much the kind of anchors the book. Yeah, I mean, when this some like a hot book, would have do my best to get

to finish line. It's there too, where so much has been written about that movie, and we've had all of these and thankfully it's not in this case that I don't need to worry about an anniversary. So it's not identy specific anniversary. But so much has been written about it, But what hasn't really been written about it is what

precedes Some Like It Hot. So again, taking me my having trained began at Berkeley as a student of Weymar, Germany and writing on Vymar culture and the sort of the film and literature and music of that period, theater of that period, Some Like It Hot is enormously laden with Weimar culture, so to speak, with Billy Wilder having begun his career, and that's why, Actually it turns out that Billy wildern assignment was a great precursor to the book on for me to write in the book on

something like It Hot. But in that case too, it's incumbent upon me to give it my own kind of angle. Whether or not I succeed in either case or and in any case, is really up to the reader to decide. But I will try to bring breathe some sort of fresh air into it and have it come to life in light of some different material that I don't think has been brought into conversation with a movie like Some Might Get Hot. And I tried to do much of this much the same in the book on custom Black.

I mean, it's funny when I think this through. I've been now teaching and in academia as a after having finished my degree. I'm hitting the thirty year mark, so I'm beginning to get a little bit wistful, and I'm

reflecting upon everything. I wonder, whether being in Berkeley in the first half of the nineteen nineties when this new historicism was really taking hold, and my dissertation advisor Anton Kays Tony Kayes, who wrote this wonderful book called From Hitler to Heimat, taking his title from the crack Hour from Calgary to Hitler, but this is on the new German cinema, from Hitler to tim and it was very much steeped to the kind of new historicist approach, meaning

taking different moments, different different excuse me, different like kind of cultural artifacts from a given moment and bring in the conversation with in this case, in his case as well as in my case, with film of the period, but bringing other kind of philosophical debates or sociological but trying to do this, I have to say I'm also

very indebted to him as a mentor of mine. Because he often, even though he was very much a extremely erudi film scholar and still is to this day even though he's retired, he always often wrote with a kind of almost playful and a lighter touch. And it's funny, so number of the newest stores is especially Burgler at that time, like Stephen Greenblat, the great Shakespeare scholar, also wrote with a lighter touch, and I think also wrote, ultimately, in the case of green Black, more than my mentor

for popular audience. Ultimately wrote and continues to write about, whether it's in the New Yorker magazine or whether it's his books that are again dealing with the long life after life, so to speak, of good old billy Shakespeare, but doing so for large endings. I don't know. I haven't thought that one through entirely, but I've begun to recognize certain reflexes, I guess our tendencies that you that I can spot in my work, and I think it's actually on display in the Casa Blanca book as well.

that it has. Look Madeline le Beau, the last surviving cast member who died now several years ago in a Spanish coastal town. I think it was, you know, she was nineteen at the time. She and her husband had just escaped, her husband of course, playing Ami the Coupier, who was a great star back in France. In a number of Rules of the game and the Grande Lucina, but she had actually followed that path, and so when she's belting out La marseillees, those are real tears. That's

the Dan Seymour line. Dan Seymour plays Abdul the door Man. It was born Chicago. It was Dan Seymour Katz I think was his name, figured up off the cats that maybe didn't seem so ethnic. But anyway, he said he couldn't believe that they're watching, and he's looking around the room and suddenly the real tears were streaming down her faith. They were reliving it in many ways. And so I think that the souch Much chapter is in so many

ways the anchor for the book. But it was also I think that was the chapter that felt to me. And maybe it was also the political moment which the book was released in all of that, but it felt there was a kind of urgency for me in that chapter. And look, you're absolute right. Look, most people watch this movie and I guess it's still technically February now today, the twenty fourth, but it's usually about ten days ago on the fourteenth, on Valentine's Day, where you have these

screenings and it's really It's all about the romance. It's all about that bitter but also magnificent romance between Rick and Ilsa, I guess by turns bitter and magnificent, and the wish fulfillment that is suspended in a way at the end, the need to repress one's libidinal and personal desire for the greater good, something that is so anathemach of the current political age, it seems. But that's what

people tended to focus on, and why not. But I think what was much less recognized and much less had really made its way to kind of the popular imagination. The way that these iconic images of Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac, or Rick and Ilsa in the Breisian flashback, or Rick and Ilsa when she comes and meets him in his man cave, his layer above Rick's cafe, those are the images I think that people hold dear and

have held dear over now eight decades. But I think that the refugee story is something that for most people is utterly unknown. It's I think it was Andrea Asimon, who is a great novelist, critic, memoirist. Is He's got a new book out. No I'm chilling for Andrea Asimon's I had a wonderful book. I just read it recently. I called my I think it's called My Roman Years when his family first he did out of Egypt, which

is the family of his story, leaving Alexandria Egypt. But this My Roman Year is really terrific in any cases, Andrey Asimon, who told me, I interviewed a lot of people for this project. I couldn't interview those who passed, unfortunately, unless we communicated somehow beyond the grave with one another. But I didn't manage to interview Ondre Ausimon.

Monica would kill me who were anti Nazis. In case of Paul Henry, who plays one on screen, many of the others, including no and Tina he gets to play Jan Brandel, so she still he plays a Nazi. Of course, Miss he plays a Nazi flyer the air men in Miss Miniver. But connor Veit, who plays a major Strasser, he had experienced the Nazis person and was married to a Jewish woman, Lipraga, who is a famous theater stage actress. And there was so much invested I think in this production,

in that regard on the emotionally invested money. It was run of the mill, Warner's Warner Brothers picture, nothing terribly lavish in terms of budget, and as people have told and told again, nobody had any idea what it would go on to become. They were making a movie, and obviously, as we now learned, I think is especially with respect to the refugee question, so to speak, I think there

was tons invested on the part. And again whether it's Mike Curtiz who had fled himself, Peter Lourie again, a lot of the sort of the day players as well. The title such much comes from Ludwig Stirussel and Ika Kgrouni, who were both Austrian. Accuracy were unknown, utterly unknown, and they have that little cute exchange you know what, Hinder vaner Fassbender only slightly exaggerated, les, this is the most beautiful piece of dialogue ever written in the history of

motion pictures. When they have this sort of banter back and forth learning their English for America, preparing you know what, watch can watch such much. That's just it's wooden and literal translation from the German into English. And what's the sort of sly in joke for the emmigret set. And I guess for audiences that at that point in time too. This is you know, released Thanksgiving Day in nineteen forty two, not very far from where I'm seated here in Midtel, Manhattan,

the old Hollywood Theater now ay a parking garage. But I think people were studying and in your parts for sure, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, no doubt, Minnesota, throughout the Midwest, people were still studying German. So I think that it wasn't at all in common, especially if you were educated in college educated specifically that you would have taken some German.

So I think so much of the German banter in this movie is left entirely untranslated, and either you're getting it or at least you have enough of an idea to get it. And I think today they wouldn't do that. I think we've become increasingly monolingual. It's not a very profound statement, but I think at that point in time again, because of our history of migration and the enormous German speaking community throughout, not just the Midwest.

just in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio and elsewhere. I think that, and I'm not suggesting that the Amish were actually flocking to go see get me wrong, but people I'm sure were at least vaguely familiar with some of that. As leonit Kinski, who plays Sash of the Barman as he called it, that sort of cafe Klutch German. You would have heard it around the way, so to speak, and it gives it that texture. It really does the scene.

So when Arthur Edison's camera pans the interior of Rick's cafe, and we have those sort of snatches of dialogue in all of these foreign languages, including Leonid Kinsky's native Russian.

When he wishes the brit who does a little cheerio to him, he gives him a nostrova when they're and you have the Chinese who are speaking to one another, you have French spoken, you have Italian for the sort of the comedy almost bought Borsch Bulkshtick where the Italian can't get in a word edgewise with And so I think that those you know, again, I returned to build pulline Kale's comment, which I think is is such a valid one that with if you had American actors who

are faking those accents, it just it wouldn't have that that veneer at least, if not more than just a veneer, but that veneer of authenticity, right or it just it feels and that even from the very opening of this film, and that's what I was joking moments ago and seeing this sort of this semi documentary touch of the film, which is it opens and it's got that newsreel style announcing what's happening in in Casablanca and these refugees, from the very beginning with tipped off, Aha, We've got a

crisis on our hands and throughout it. Look, this is a film that had to, like any film made after Pearl Harbor, had to pass through the Office of War Information and get the sort of the seal of approval that it lends support to the Allied war effort. This film, too, is very much aimed at galvanizing support. Rick is, as we know, and is that right in the book, is really a sort of almost a cipher of sort of

American foreign policy, right. And it's the character arc of Rick Blaine that moves from that the Professions of isolationism. I stick my net out for nobody, which he others two, possibly even three times, I can't remember now. I think it's certainly twice. I think even at least then he

intimates it maybe the third time. But to that principled engagement, the support for the Allied war effort to such a degree that he's going to put ills on that plane to head off with Victor to fight the good fight, and he's going to march off with his panion with Captain Renault with claud Rains and heads to the Free French garrison. The whole film is so economical and moves

so swiftly. But that's a very tidy way of ending the film and not running into hot water with the Production Code administration too, because Ilsa has cannot stay with Rick, even though audience is like, no, you can't leave him all this, she stays with Rick, and that production is going to have to get shelved. You're more than It's like a full throated endorsement of adultery, and you can allude to adultery, as the film abundantly does numerous even

on the tarmac. When Rick says to Victory, this is it's funny. It's almost like John Tarture. I keep coming back to Labowski. I don't know why, but John tarturos that Jesus with his bowling ball there, when Rick is like, yes, she came, and she Ilsa she wanted. She claimed that she was still lovely and I let let her show it. I don't know. I don't know if that's a definition of peacocking or what the right term is for that, but basically, it's like I had her too something. There's

a lot of much cheese bummy. Course it's bogie and there's a lot of swagger. But you can do that and get away with it. But you can't have Ilsa stay with him on that darmac and let her husband, God forbid, board that playing without her. So it's a very neat and tidy way of ending it and leading to the audiences the viewer's imagination what's going to happen next?

Is Ill's going to return? And that's why people have all these sort of spin offs and all the Simpsons whatever it is, half a dozen more than half a dozen episodes that have little Casablanca spokes in all of the New Yorker cartoons and all that is that it allows you to imagine, oh what next it So if you're David Thompson and you're writing in his novel or it's more of a collection of aphorism, but it's fictional,

all based on different films. When it gets to when it gets to Casablanca, though, you imagine that it's really it's Rick and Renault. They are the true lovers that Rick is marching off with Claude Rains, and that they will consummate their love. And there's so many moments throughout the film where Claude rains as Captain Renault professes his love of Rick. Right, were I a woman? And all

these yes, Oh they're y ricky. The banter between the two of them, it's more than even the I think homo eroticism between Barton Keys and Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, which is also laden with I think as Parker always transposed those two days. One of the early film critics, Parker Tyler, who wrote on homosexuality in Cinema.

it just stayed in it part of his toolbox. But I was in the mountains last month and we had a DVD player, remember Them, and it was in the place where were staying, and you could check out movies, and we got the box set of Raiders that lost the whole Raiders franchise, and I had seen not all of them, but a lot of them, and I just couldn't believe how many of them have a certain almost a Rick's Cafe or a kind of There's so there just seem to be so many, either subtle or in

certain instances even more explicit allusions to Casablanca, and I think that you just it's.

and then I interviewed him as well. He said that he wasn't even sure he's actually ever seen the movie start to finish, but he could in the writer's room. He could riff on it and they would come up, both, let's put such a let's go drink it the well again of Casablanca. We get what's there's there? I think there's more to drink there. And so as you go back to it, because they you can spin off another

thread of that Yon part. The subtitle is only slightly hyperbolic, which is the life legend in After Life Hollywood's most beloved movie, And I look, is it really the most I think in many precincts that it is. And and one of the things that makes it so widely beloved is that I think that it speaks to people. It speaks to people in all different ways. Umberto Echo when he was in Bologna with his sort of laboratory of Semutitians,

of people who are studying the science of science. So they just went through as to use another sorry academic term, when it's unpacked all of these different archetypes and sort of layers of meeting these different figures, and through that lens you can just see why it is. As he puts it, it's not one movie, but it's movies. It's a movie that radiates moviness. And so it works well for Shorthand in that regard to you'll see a sort

of a stray obviously, and play it against Sam. You've got all sorts of especially bogie posters, and there definitely must be one from Gass and Block, but there are other from a camera will track and you'll see on a wall and image there. In a way, it betrays a kind of synophilia or film geekdom, or whatever the hell you want to call it, on the part of whoever it is who's inhabiting that space or something. And so it works, I think nicely in that regard to

we Obviously it's funny. So the book came out in twenty seventeen. That was for the seventy fifth. So five years later, fast forward to twenty twenty two, I'm doing all these interviews for the eightieth and it hasn't really lost steam, teach, and so I've talked with a lot of and I've got a nineteen year old myself and

a fourteen year old. But I talked with a lot of young students, and even they like me when I was a teenager, when I rejected it, they overcome that, and they when watching it together, especially, which is the way I like to watch movies always, in the way I do in class, whenever possible, watch together. Suddenly they're seeing things too that they had never realized they heard people talk about, but Denver had realized, Aha, this is

what they're actually referencing. And again, I think because of the I mentioned this sort of how economical it is. And I think that the critiz was one of the most proficient directors and prolific for that matter too, of his generation. But he, together with his DP, with his cameraman Arthur Edison, shot the Maltese Falcon just the previous year with John Houston his directorial debut. They it just it moves swiftly. It just moves swiftly from beginning to end.

I think that for especially in this age of distraction and compression, it really it still works for audiences watching TikTok videos and vines or whatever the hell we watch these days, but still it moves so swiftly that you can really allow yourself to just be drawn in and swept up in its taken by the I don't know, undertow or something, but it was Jim Hoberman, who great critic,

former critic of the Village Voice many years. He said that he when he would be at home and imagine probably TCM whatever turn of classic movies, which is really, if we want to be honest with ourselves, the Costa Blanca channels just always on. But he says, when you can step in at any point over the whatever is crisp one hundred and three minutes or whatever the runtime is of the film, and you just start from there. It doesn't matter where, what point timey, just you're in it.

And that's also I think something special about the film. It definitely rewards repeat viewing that much. We know. Roger Ebert was famous for talking about that as well, and it was famous. Look in a way, it's not to the late great Ebert this notion of the beloved movie, because he was often asked, what is your favorite movie? And he always felt obliged to say, sure, if you're going to talk about craftsmanship and film form and master

and so forth. Maybe it would be Citizen King, But he says, what's the movie that you really want to watch and enjoy watching. It's Casa Blanca.

pleasurable experience, I would argue, because it is not. We don't have Greg Tolan's camera shot at a low angle, placed the low angle behind the fireplace. You don't have this sort of almost neo expressionist touches with the mirror. You just don't have all of that, which is is brilliant and visually rich and stimulating. But Gossablanca is more about pulling you into It's what good old Jack Warner said, one of the three most precious ingredients of making movie story, story,

and story, And I think that's it. It really privileges now narrative over the sort of the visual acrobatics that you have in a in a film like like Kine. Again, no, no, I'm not meaning in any way to disc Kaine. But Caine is much more about virtuosity, right than it is about story.

to write about Mike Curtiz. He was my champion. And then right around the same time, McGilligan reached out to me, a biographer who became a good mentor and a friend, and he said, you should write something about a director. Originally I thought of Jules Dason, because I had a correspondence with Dason, and I not only admired his movies very much, but I admired him as a person very much.

He was in his nineties, and we sent several letters back and forth, and he would write in small font in print, these detailed responses to my kind of silly fanboy questions. Looking back in retrospect, but then and starting to think about Julie, I would have had to spend a lot of time in Greece. I would have had to spend a lot of time in France, and that

wasn't really viable. So between those two things, I started researching Michael Krtiz, and I found out that there was a considerable amount of what I would call anecdotal mythology about the fact that he was a tyrant on the set and all these other things, but very little of anything substantive other than Andrew Saris in his book dismissing him Directors and Directions book that film geeks and film students carried around like holy scripture during the nineteen sixties,

and he was dismissed by what I called the auteur school of film directors, which I go into in my book and take the opposite view of the autor theory. But in any event, that's how it started and it ended up. I was going to do something that was like two hundred and seventy five pages and two years, and it ended up being over seven hundred pages and

six years. And it took me to Hungary, to Budapest, to all over the place, and I found grandchildren because he had I believe four or five different children by women who he was not married to, including his the mother of his last child, who I think is still with us, and certainly was still with us because I interviewed her, and he has a daughter that's younger than me, and that considering that this is a man born in eighteen eighty six. So any rate, that's how it started.

So I would I would credit Pat McGilligan and Richard and Dick and my late really good pal for steering me towards Curtz. And I'm certainly in retrospect glad that they did.

and all of this relative melodrama of plane flights. But I was glad that it was able to be worked out because I got There is a film writer over in Buddhim best named Laslow Kristen, who I befriended, who was really invaluable to me because he went through one hundred year old magazines and discovered that a relative of Curtis was an editor of one of the movie magazines during the teen years in Budapest, and Curtes was written

about in a lot of these magazines. In his films, he practically invented the film industry in Hungary and directed his first film in nineteen twelve when the director either got ill or quid and so forth. And I was able to go to the Cafe New York where all the show biz people hung out in the studio, and then I was able to go to the Hungarian Film r Guide in Budapest and they had all this Curtes material laid out, were very nice to me. So it was a very invaluable trip from that perspective.

But there was a counter revolution and the Nationalists took over and people were being arrested, and there was a colleague of as a director who was beaten to death and so forth, and a lot of the Hungarians, including Paul Lucas Abelle Leegosi famously said, I left there because I did not want to be part of a Necktai party.

So Curtiz, Alexander Korda was arrested for a time, and then they all ended up in Austria working for an outfit called Sasha Films that was run by this count Colorad who basically turned Curtiz into an early version of the David o'celznik in Austra making these spectacles like Moon of Israel and Sodom and Gomora before that and so forth.

So he was making a film in Paris with Lily Demita and Harry Warner came over on a talent search because Warner Brothers was starting They had started up their studio and was expanding, and Harry Warner ended up on the set and at first Curtiz said, who's this stranger? Get him off the set, and somebody said, this is mister Warner for America and he wants to talk to you about coming to America. So Curtiz came to America

in nineteen twenty six. There's a fabulous story that he came in on an ocean liner during the fourth of July and all the fireworks were going off, and Harry Warner met him on the pier and Curtiz said, oh, you did all this for me, a celebration that everything, and that was written in studio biographies and written by Jack Warner in his notoriously inaccurate My First Thousand Years in al How Wallace turned out, Curtiz arrived in New York on June twenty six and not on the fourth

of July. And it's another Hollywood story, but he came over to make this spectacle, Noah's Ark, and he got to Hollywood, took the train. This was the four Union Station was built. He ended up in the Central Station and that was when Warners had their studio on Sunset Boulevard, and he managed to get a street car there. Walked in. Jack Warner was getting the kinks worked out on massage table, and he says, I am here, I have my script for Noah's Ark, and Warner looked at it, tossed it aside,

and he said, we're not going to do that. You're going to make something called The Third Degree about America crime and jurisprudence. Her taste couldn't even speak English, or read English or do anything so he quickly got the script translated somehow into Hungarian. He went down and talked with the under sheriff and watched lineups and fingerprinting and all of this procedure, and he directed the third degree. Hal Moore shot it for him, and he did a

lot of tricks with the camera. He also incorporated all this circus stuff because he had been as a kid, he had been in a traveling circus back in Hungary. And Jack Warner always says, he said, Curtis made two pictures, a crime mystery and a circus picture which was in the script, and he did a lot of things with the camera because he was already a master with the camera. And the film was successful, and he stayed at Warner Brothers.

What I did find out is his immigration status was really weird, because I think he came here on a WORPBZ and so on and so forth, and he didn't actually become a citizen I think until like nineteen thirty six, end of nineteen thirty five, and the Warners of course used that to control him. There was always a sense of fealty with Curtiz, and particularly Harry Warner, who he felt loyal to, for bringing him to America. But that

was a way of keeping the leash taught. And when you look at some of these early contracts that he signed, I mean they even had control, like anything he thought of was the property of the studio. This is incredible. And if they wanted him to do anything regarding the studio or a movie, including sweeping up litter on a sound stage, he had to do it. These contracts back in the day of the studios were really in terms

of intriment. But he found a home at Warner Brothers and was very successful there.

There's the coronation of the new emperor, and they're all marching in Budapest and they're filming this street, and then all of a sudden you see Curtiz look around and look at the camera. And so he was filming the coronation of the new Emperor in Austria Hungary. So I had to add that right at the end of the

book as a credit. And there may be I'm sure there are other films that he had something involved with directing that haven't surfaced, because so many of his early films that he did he directed I think like upwards of eighty films on the continent before he even came

to the United States and worked for Warner Brothers. He as I said in the preface, I think paraphrasing my own words, but there was a belief also considered the European man's prerogative of sex was something like breathing or eating.

So his thing was he liked the fuck and he liked the direct movies, not in that order, and he liked the skeet shoot, and he was a great polo player and had a great estate here in Woodland Hills, actually very close by to where I live, and had like a two hundred and fifty acre estate back when the San Fernando Valley was a two hundred and thirty square mile of Canilo feel than chicken ranches, and a

lot of movie star estates. And he had a polo field, a skeat shooting range, a studio for his wife, bes Meredith, and he married best Meredith, I think in twenty nine, but they were together and he met her. I think she worked on the script of The Third Degree, and she was a founding member of the Motion Picture Academy. She wrote the scenario for The Silent Ben Herb. So she started out to be a lot more well known in the American film community than Michael Curtiz, and their

marriage endured. It was far from a conventional marriage. It was more of a professional partnership. And one of the things I do bring out in the book is that Michael Curtiz's career would not have been the same without her, because her council on studio politics, on scripts and so on and so forth, particularly during the early years, was invaluable and really shaped his career.

directors at Water Brothers. So when someone would go on vacation, someone would get sick, or they'd have to go back and do retakes, Curtines was always there, willing to work. He never said no, and so he directed the courtroom scenes. At the end of the climax of that were Buguard and the whole Black Legion gang is brought in. And I can't remember whether it's either seems like all those movies, the judge was either Samuel S. Hines or Henry O'Neal

as the district attorney. But at the end and then Bogart is in his cell regretting everything that transpired during the balance of the film, and so on and so forth, and you had a nice, tidy, happy ending. But I do have to say that the Warner Brothers were the only studio that would make a film like that during those days, and of course scrupulously there had no mention of although it was a kate k thing, it was

all aimed at foreigners. You didn't see anybody of color in a movie at Warner Brothers in nineteen thirty seven unless they were doing something racially stereotypical, like shining shoes or something like that. But taking that in the context of its time, Warner Brothers was the first studio to come out for square against the Nazis during the nineteenth thirties, and this was when LB Mayer was giving Goebels staff tours of MGM because the other studios did not want

to lose the German marketing. And in fact, the last Warner Brothers film that was shown in Germany until the war ended. Was I was a fugitive from a chain gang, which was made in nineteen thirty two.

think about that, and had experienced anti Semitism. At the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, he was trying to get his mother and two of his brothers out of Hungary. He was very patriotic about America and it was a very genuine feeling. And I think part of Yankee Doodle Dandy, where Cagney is George M. Cohan is touring in Baudeville with his parents. My father, thanks you, my mother, thanks you.

All of that took Kurt back to his days of touring in the provinces in Austria Hungary with a theatrical group. Although he could be very tough on concertain actor Jersey, he was also a very sentimental, emotional person. Cagney had become a major star. Going back to Public Enemy in nineteen thirty one, there was a series of quarrels that he had with Jack Warner. Cagney grew up in New York. He spoke fluent Yiddish and his name for Jack Warner

was the swonse. I will let your audience translate that word. But there was a series of suspensions lawsuits. Cagney left for a while and made pictures with an independent studio, but since the major studios had distribution and had their theater change locked up, they really didn't do much. So Jack Warner ended up wanting him back because his pictures in Cagney. This was the star system and Cagney was

money in the Bank. So in nineteen thirty eight, Cagney returned for the second time to Warner Brothers, and he had quite a contract where he had his brother as associate producer under Wallace, he had script approval a lot of things, and he also had what was then revolutionary called a happiness clause, where if he was unhappy, he could just declare his contract null and voidn't leave. So nobody really had that power that Cagney had in nineteen

thirty eight. And when he made Yankee Doodle Dandy, Curtiz was directing, and by that time they had worked together on several films, and Curtes knew better than to try to tell James Cagney how to act. And James Cagney was not going to tell Curtiz how to block off the scene and move the camera or construct sets or any of that stuff. So they were very simpatico, and

of course Cagney didn't take any crap off Curtiz. In fact, then he told John mccaid for he said, he said, Mike didn't know how to treat actors, but he sure as hell knew how to treat a camera, and he couldn't need photograph and do everything with a camera that needed to be done, and if you got through a picture with him, you knew it was going to be well done. But he didn't know how to treat actors, but he knew how to treat me, because if he didn't, he knew I'd knock him on ass. That was cagnate.

But so they got along, and you had Jimmy Howe behind the camera and so forth, and Wallace started. Wallace was a great producer, there's no one of the great Hollywood producers. But he was a micromanager to the extreme. And the Cagney and his brother Bill really resented how Wallace because they saw him as a front office shill for Jack Warner and meddling and micromanaging, and they started, this, are you going to use a horse in this scene?

And I think you should do this. So Cagney just said, I think after this picture's over, I'm going to leave Warner brothers. And so Wallace and Warner backed off, and they essentially let James Cagney and Michael Cartiz make the

picture and left them alone. And one of the great stories about Yankee Doodle Dandy is the first day of shooting was December eighth, nineteen forty one, the day after Pearl Harbor and Joan said that they were all gathered around the radio on the soundstage, Walter Houston, Gene Cagney, Joan, etc. Listening to President Roosevelt's speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war and the famous Day of Infamy speech, and then Cagney and Curtiz walk in and Cagney said,

I think we should turn that radio off. I think a prayer goes in here, and everyone there was a moment of silence, and then Critiz said, well, boys and girls, we have very sad times, very troubled times, so we do have a great story to tell, so let us make this movie. And so they did with that, Yankee Doodle Dandy became one of the biggest hits in the history of Warner Brothers. It won Cagney as Oscar. I think Curtiz was nominated and didn't win for Best Director.

He was nominated for Four Daughters, Captain Blood, Four Daughters, Angels with Dirty Faces and as he said, always the bride'smaid, never the mother, and winning the Oscar so in any event, then came Casablanca after that, which is a film that's been written about, and I gave it its own chapter in about forty odd pages, and I called it Fundamental Things. And I tried to write and discuss Cosa Blanca from the perspective of Michael Curtiz and what he did with that film.

Champagne being opened and all of that other business. One of the other things Curtiz did is he insisted on casting his fellow countryman SZ cuddles Zacal whose real name was Jacob Garro, and he was a Hungarian music hall comedian an actor and they knew each other from way way back in the day, back in Budapest, and he really created Zcal's humor. He thought that Zakal, as Carl the manager of Rix, would add that to the film,

and he was absolutely right. And it turned into, as usual, a financial deal because Sekal was asking for more money than how Wallace was willing to pay him, and so he essentially said, if you want ce Cow, you're going to have to convince him to take less. And so Curtiz got involved in that situation and mollified Wallace and mollified the Cows. And if you watch the movie, Zakal has one of the major parts aside from the principles in the movie, and his humor does lighten things out,

and so that was important. Of course, Curtiza's worked with the camera with the flashback, with the smoke of the cigarette, the ending when vishy water gets tossed in the trash tents, and just that opening scene when they go into Rix, and that long tracking shot and you see this what I call the choreography of bustle, and then all the character actors going from table to table trying to figure out how to get out of Casa Blanco, all these

European refugees. And the amazing thing was or not so amazing, was that most of these people that played these small bits parts were Jewish refugees and they were personally cast by Curtiz. So when you see the scene of La Marseille and people crying, Dan Seymour, who was the massive character actor, who was the doorman going into the casino, who ended up being used in a lot of Fritz Lang's movies and ended up being Fritz Lang's estate executor.

Believe it or not, dan Seymour said, he looked around and he said, those tears were legitimate with people. And I go into a lot of detail about the different people, Mister and missus Lutsch tag Elka Groening was a refugee from that and Ludwig Stussel, who was distantly related to me, who ended up doing commercials in the nineteen sixties for Italian Swiss colony wine wearing Leat knows that little old winemaker me. Curtiz cast all these people, and also for

someone who was supposed to be notoriously hard hearted. One of the teamsters that knew if a colleague of mine who worked there for years, said Curtiz would always hire all these bid actors and extras, particularly during Christmas, to make sure that they got paid and they got some Christmas money, and so on and so forth. And if you look through the production files on Cosa Blanca, Wallace was always trying to get him to let certain actors

go so they wouldn't have to keep paying them. And Curtiz would always connive to keep people on the payroll as long as possible. And in fact, I think that he had Sydney green Street there for a long period of time, and Sydney green Street was getting almost three thousand dollars a week. He was very well paid. And of course Wallace would get apoplectic. Wallace could squeeze a nickel hard enough to make the buffalo collapse in the crowd. Cosablanca would not be what it became and what it

still is without Michael Curtiz and Julius Epstein. The Epstein's and Howard Kotch wrote the Balance of the script, said that he wished he could have recorded some of the script conferences where Curtiz would say, oh, you know, and then he scratched his head and he says, oh, I forgot what Beskie told me last night. In other words, he was going over the script with best Meredith and she told him something and he had to try to remember what he was told and so on and so forth.

But yeah, he was that. And Curtiz always gave credit to Hal Wallace for Casa Blanca because the script was a work in progress during the movie, which is not the way how Wallace and Warner Brothers and Curtiz liked to make movies, but that was how it happened. And one of the interesting things is the ending of Casa Blanca, where who is ingwd Bergmann going to go away with and so on and so forth. And Bergman always said, I didn't know whether I was going to stay with

Bogar or leave with Paul Henry, her husband. She probably believed that, but there was no way that she was going to abandon her noble husband to go off with her boyfriend who was a bartender. That wasn't going to happen in terms of the censor's office, in terms of the audience, in terms of anything. So it was like, how are we going to make sure that she goes

away with her husband? And on the last day of that there was a violent argument between Humphrey Bogart and Kurtiz, so much so that how Wallace had to come down to the set to arbitrary. And Wallace rarely visited the set of his movies. I think he had three or four movies in production at the same time, so he didn't have time to go down to the set and hold hands with directors or actors or any of that. But he had to go with this, and what actually

transpired has been lost to history. Kurtiz's last significant other told me that it was about how the scene was to be played. Also, Bogart did have a habit that was revealed later on of where he would come in the morning and not know his lines, so he would stall around to come up with some reason where he could take some more extra time to learn his lines. Maybe that was the reason, we don't know, but eventually

the argument was settled. And the whole thing about doing the greater good by staying with her husband and you're the person that keeps them going, and his work and the war and the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, and that was the perfect coda, and they came up with the right way to end the movie.

So Bogart was not going to do that. But Bogart did not like the way Curtiz could be mean to quote unquote the little people and be dismissive, and sometimes he would use big players as a way to vent pressure because the pressure that he was put under by Wallace and Jack Warner. Jack Warner, I think his contribution to the pictures he made during the nineteen forties could be summed up in two words, and those are hurry up, you're shooting too many angles? Why are you taking so long?

Why are you doing this? And before every movie he would send the letter, oh, I know this is going to be a bigger hip than the last one. And the pressure that was under for the most part, he sloughed it off. But one of the things I found in writing this book was that you had people previously wrote off Curtiz as a vocational mechanic of the studio system. We just shot the script. And by the contrary, he

would agree with Wallace to do whatever Wallace wanted. Then he'd go down to the set, he drop or change dialogue, try to add sets, change wardrobe, and he, particularly in the thirties, drove Wallace round the bend with some of these the tuper production memos, particularly during Captain Blood and

Charge of the Light Brigade. Wallace almost fired him off of that because he would Curtes would do whatever Wallace wanted to see clean lines of soldiers and arrow Flynn in his uniform, and Curtiz was using four ground pieces

of a water wheel turning and all of this. You know what I would call artsy FARTSI stuff, and he and Wallace really bumped heads, but they came to an accommodation, and as it turned down, Wallace and Curtis became very close friends because they were both totally the OCD, obsessive, compulsive people about movie making, and they shared that. And they also loved horses, and Critiz kept Wallace's horse, Freckles, out at his ranch and they went riding together and

so forth, and they became very close. And in fact, near the end of his career in the seventies, Wallace was a guest at AFI where young filmmakers they'd have people like Billy Weiler and Wallace so forth to come into the students and somebody said to Wallace, you didn't have very many great directors and Warner brothers like Curtiz, and Wallace got pissed off and he said, I don't

think you know what you're talking about. Michael Curtiz was one of the great directors, and it stole him because Al Wallace's legacy as a producer was tied to Curtiz's legacy as a director. They were, as I wrote, they were the yin and yang of Warner Bay.

And in fact, Jimmy Leighton who was in Life with Father and I think he was the one courting Elizabeth Taylor. He said, Mike arranged every camera setup. He said, the dop didn't do it, Mike did it. You know, he arranged all the camera setups and so on and so forth. He knew instinctively because he was an actor. He started out as an actor in Budapest, and he understood acting and so on and so forth. What he didn't have

patience with is prima donnas. Again, he didn't get along with Betty Davis at all because Betty Davis, they called her the fourth Warner brother, and Betty Davis was about Betty Davis in a lot of cases. She was a great actor, but she always felt, Curtis isn't paying enough attention to me, He's paying too much attention to the

camera and so forth. And when he directed Joan Crawford and Mildred Pierce that she went on the Oscar for and it broke her down because he viewed her as a poor substitute for Barbara Stanwick, who he wanted, and he thought that she was an MGM pretty girl with shoulder pads and everything. And as Crawford said, he gave me a postgraduate course in humiliation and then he started training me, and she ended up becoming very loyal and very appreciative of him because he knew what he was doing.

He knew what he was doing, and he ended up respecting Crawford a lot because Crawford was about making the picture better, not just making herself better, a key difference between say Bert Lancaster and Kirk Douglas back in their day.

So he did things with the camera. He did inventive things like if you watch The Breaking Point, which I think is his greatest post World War Two movie after nineteen forty five, and the ending of the Breaking Point where you have Wana Hornazz's son by himself and the pier looking for a father who he doesn't know has been murdered, and how the crane shot pulls back. I mean, that ending would make a stone cry. It's just unbelievable. So he knew actors, he knew what to get from

a script. He could take a bad script and make it better, which I think is the sign of a great director. But he made so many movies, not all of them can be great movie. He was particularly in Warner Brothers in the twenties and thirties. He was a contract director and they would tell him go make this, and so he would to do the best that he can. And some of those movies are really really good, and some of them are like, well, you know, the runtime is sixty one minutes and it's a programmer and so

on and so forth. But when he became really successful, I think his real breakout picture was Captain Blood with the spectacle and everything. And he needed pictures. You know that old cliche, You're only as good as your last picture. The only way in Hollywood then and now to keep making movies is your movies have to make money, have to be successful. That's a fact, and so his movies were.

He became like the cash cow of Warner Brothers from like the mid thirties through most of the forties, and then after the war was over and after nineteen forty six, the box office tanked. These studios were going to lose the control of their theater chains through the anti Trust Divesseger decision. And then you had the Blacklist, which ruled out swaths of probably the most talented people in Hollywood because of politics and so forth. And that was rice.

He prevailed on Jack Warner to start his own production company, and unfortunately, for a number of reasons, his production company was temporarily successful. He made The Unsuspected, which was didn't lose money. He wanted to make something along the lines of Laura, and it didn't come up with that. In that particular movie, Curtiz did more with the camera and Woody Burdrell and Critiz go crazy with the camera in

that movie. That's that's one of the great visual film More movies is the Unsuspected, The plotting of a head scratcher, but the visualists is really great. But then he discovered and signed Doris Day and made a Romance on the High Seas, My Dream Is Yours, and then A Flamingo Road, which was the most successful picture coming out of his production company, which I just showed last Saturday at the Egyptian Theater for Noir City. But it was not the time.

First off, Critiz was an artistic man, he was not a businessman, and it was a bad time for movie box office generally. And then of course Jack Warner pioneered creative bookkeeping and charging off stuff to Curtiz's company and all this other stuff, and then envy he wanted to get Doris Day under Warner Brothers contract, not Michael Curtz Productions, and I write all about how that transpired. So Curtiz

went back to being a contract director. He had right a refusal, but of course Jack Warner reviewed anyone that worked for him as someone and Ben Hurr chained to an oer more or less, you know, go back to your forty one and you know, I know you refuse this, Michael Curtiz, but I want you to make it, So go make this anyway. So he had. He still had to make some pictures he didn't want to make, and the ones he did want to make took too long. Like he really wanted to make the Will Rogers biopick,

but that went on for years. Originally it was going to be made with Mark Hellinger producing it and so on and so forth, and nobody. The actors who knew Rodgers and redeared him were horrified at the idea of flying Will Rogers. Fencer Tracy said no way. Gary Cooper and Joel McCrae told him, I'm not going to do this. I'm a good man at a horse on a horse. I cannot play Will Rogers. And so finally he got Will Rogers son, Will Rogers Junior to play the role.

And he doesn't do too bad. I mean, this was somebody who was not an actor, and Curtize actually got a credible performance. But the problem was by nineteen fifty two, Rogers had been dead since nineteen thirty five, and this most famous and revered of Americans people had forgotten and moved on. And so the film is very handsome. It's not bad. It sure made Harry Warner happy, but it

didn't it. But I think if they had made that movie like in nineteen forty three, it would have been much much more of a hit than it turned out to be. And then finally he left Warner Brothers in fifty three because the creative bookkeeping, you know, oh, none of your pictures except for one made one well that

was blowny and that was Warner Brothers. And there was that, and then there was also a lot of people had left that he was comfortable with, and this his brother David or though he had been a second unit director there and had done good work and so forth, and he was also billed as David C. Gardner. I think he changed his name either at the behest of his older brother, to make himself different and not feel that

it was nepotism. But Deso Curtiz was the ad and the breaking point on The Enforcer did good work, and Warner Brothers was going to cut his brother loose. His attitude was, hey, I've been here I've been loyal to you all these years and you're treating my brother this way. And so, long story short, he left his last movie at Warner Brothers, The Boy from Oklahoma, which was another stupid title that Jack Warner came up. Will Rogers Junior

was the hero. He wasn't a boy. Jack Warner was very proprietary when it came to contracts, publicity and the title of films, and he insisted on this, and so Curtiz left and he went to Paramount on a term contract. But then he directed The Egyptian for his old producer and good friend Darryl Zanik, and that was a spectacle. Unfortunately, Xanik insisted on using his mistress in one of the main roles who could not act, and he's took his mistress and cast her as Queen Nevertidy. It's still there,

you have it. But his post war movies were a lot of people have written off that part of his career. But there's films like King Creole, which I think is clearly Elvis's best film, and The Proud Rebel with Alan Ladd, Olivia Davil and my buddy David Ladd who plays Alan, who is Alan Ladd's son in place his son in the movie. He did do some good work, and of course White Christmas, which was the biggest hit I think in terms of box office that Curtiz ever directed. Unfortunately,

he did not have a percentage of the film. Bing Crosby of course did, and Irving Berlin did, and they had to give it to Danny k because I think Donald O'Connor got sick and they needed someone of equal heft, so they gave Danny. But Critique got a nice salary, but he did not at a piece of that movie. He would have been in good shape.

it's called the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. And I started out way back in two thousand and one assisting Arthur with the festival, and when he passed on in two thousand and eight, I took over for the programming and hosting. So I'm going to have Rory Flynn Errow

Flynn's daughter there. I'm going to have my friend Wyatt McCrae for one of his grandfather Joel McCrae film, The Unseen, And I am scheduled on Sunday to do a special screening of the twenty twenty one version of Nightmare Alley and have the director mL del Toro and my friend his wife, the screenwriter Kim Morgan. There, so thirteen films over Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, May eighth through the eleventh. The best way to celebrate Mother's Day in Palm Springs.

So doing. I'm working on another short book about a Western movie for the University Press of New Mexico that I have to deliver before the end of the year, and then after that we'll.

pick this up? Whenever they were on the phone, whoever they were talking to was speaking English, but it was backwards, and I'm like, why are you doing that? I guess it was to make it sound maybe like a foreign language or something, but I was just like, what are you doing playing these It was just like on the other end of the line, I'm like, what the hell call the Red Room? I guess so the little man from another place on the other end, I've got good news.

lightning in a bottle, unfortunately for both shows. And it seems like such a natural because it is one location full of colorful characters hanging out and getting into intrigue. It seems a natural premise for a television show all these kind of films, But yeah, it's down at the casting.

ip that we can mind more stuff out of? And of course after it win's best picture. That's the natural predisposition of these just make it again. But it's that isolationist tendency in American culture from World War One and World War Two, and it's that specific moment, and you're going to make it into a weekly television about the battle in someone's heart to be a part of the world's community, you end up going into banalities.

the actual show itself. I would love to know how that came about, because it feels almost like Raiders of the Lost Are was popular, then we start making all of these Raiders rip offs, including television's one of my shows when I was growing up, when I was ten years old watching Tales of the Gold Monkey, and it

feels almost like this. Casablanca in nineteen eighty three was subar Tales of the Gold Monkey because it's David Sell as Rick, doctor Alizondo as Louis, and then you've got It's so bizarre to see Radiotis show up as Sasha and then Arthur Mallet who ralli O. Arthur Mallett, who most people will remember is like the old man who loses his marbles and hook who also did just a ton of great voice work he did I think it was mister Mystic and Secret of Nim and then he

got Scatman Cruthers is sam very thankless role, barely on screen a lot of times. And yeah, it was just it's five episodes, and from what I saw in this video, there was no plan for this to become a regular series. It was announced as a limit series, five episodes, no real beginning, no real end, and God help me some of those boring episodes at first Seed. It was so tough to get through this thing.

two setting. I was thinking for Hovid and Fosspender as I'm watching it, although obviously not as.

relationship spectators have with film. But I would say that the opening where he's just sadly watching the film and like that masculine ideal that is so the opposite of the neurotic, woody persona. I find that to be not funny but the most touching part of the film. And then it becomes a broader character than what he'll do, and like Annie Hall forward, like it's bringing that character down to earth from bananas and take the money and run.

But it's still a heightened cringe comedy kind of persona, Like it doesn't feel as grounded as what he gets into a few years later. But it's interesting, like as a transition film, but it's a rough watch. I think more than that. I remember it being, you know, from what I saw it as a kid, but as a Bogart thing. It's just interesting how like the idea is like that he represents a kind of prefeminist, pre neurosis, kind of idea of what men are supposed to be.

And it's a weird guardian angel figure for the Woody persona. It seems totally disconnected from the cinema of Woody Allen and the characters he plays, So I don't know, it's comparing it to something like The Man with Bogart's Face, which I watched for the first time before talking to today.

It's just odd, like how these are both films that are I don't know, the same era, something like The Long Goodbye, which is already like taking this whole idea of the Bogart Detective and turning it on its ear. So to go back to something that is still very reverential to that idea is so interesting to me because I think about, like the nostalgia for old Hollywood in

the New Hollywood. I think about films like the Peter Bogdanovitch films or The Late Show or things like or all those Garbo Speaks kind of movies like like Dave the Locusts or all that kind of reference for old Hollywood that's starting to emerge in that post Vietnam era.

And I think about played against Sam sitting within that, and just maybe the first film that's trying to speak to that Bogart culp in such an eccentric way that I I don't know I made it through it today, but it was a little bit disappointing after, like, oh, I was looking forward to seeing that again. Beyond the polarizing nature of Woody ell and in his own life, I just think as a film it's probably not one

that he's even that proud of. I think in retrospect it's also weird to see him in San Francisco.

Sam this time around. I do have to admit that I watched it again on VHS not long after watching Casablanca, and I was just like taken in by the idea of somebody acting against somebody else playing Bogie, like I really love the meta textual elements of It's a movie about film. And then of course later I watched Purple

Rose of Cairo, which is a great point. But the major factor in that is that that is a woman perspective of being serenaded by a man coming off of the screen and played against Sam is so wrapped up with sexuality of a man, and I enjoyed it for what it was of like a nebbish guy versus like the image of Bogart and Mike. I thought that you would relate to it because like or at least I relate to it where it's like making fun of you. For anybody who watches way too many movies, we never

go out anywhere. We never do anything. We just go to the movies, and it's like, what do you want I write about movies? But I really enjoyed the scene of them in the grocery store where his ex wife is on one shoulder and the guy that they got to play Bogart in played Againsam. I thought was one of, if not the best versions of that kind of character. And he tells him like, no, don't pick up the Jewish votive candles for a holiday, pick up the romantic ones.

And it's just the ridiculousness of Bogart being like your friend in everyday life. I really liked it. And I will say, having watched a lot of parodies of the ending scene on the tarmac, I will give Alan credit that he does not wear the macin the fedora. We do have to admit that Casablanca is like one of those films that is like famously responsible for a lot of men trying to act and dress like Bogart, and there are very few people who can pull off the

macintosh and the fedora and not look goofy. And Alan doesn't take it to that point. But that's another thing that he didn't direct it too. He just wrote it. But it is odd that he started his career putting it on stage as the Casablanca Rap Project.

in the French Sex Murders thing. But yeah, this was the first time I saw it, and it really was pulling from all of those parody films that were so popular at that time, like The Cheap Detective or The Blackbird or Murder Can Hurt You or Murdered by Death, those types of movies, And yeah, I liked some of the things I liked the very beginning with the plastic surgery because it reminded me a lot of Dark Passage, And I was waiting for the doctor, Philip Baker Hall

showing up as the doctor. I was waiting for the doctor to talk about I could make a man look like a booda. You know that line from Dark Passage.

and that was something I did not see coming. But there's so much dialogue that's calling attention to how characters in advanced echo classic Hollywood movies that it almost has like this desperate edge to the film because of just it's it's at odds with the nostalgic whimsy of it, like just reminding you so much about the references that it's making, like by him telling you what they are, and it's just like this is a very strange choice

to do it. It's a very eccentric movie for something that's trying to be so lighthearted than whimsical, it feels like peculiar in a way that I thought was interesting.

the Gene Tyranny thing. Maybe it's somebody who looks like another actress, somebody that had been in a Bogart film. Try to find a Bacall, try to find a Bergman somebody. There were some weird choices in that film, and then some of the cameos that they had from like George Raft, and I'm just like, I feel so bad for you, George Raft, Like, weren't you just in like the Thinks ten years prior to this. It's like your whole career in the seventies was like doing weird cameos and things.

I'm sure you were in I'm sure he was in Sextead as well.

Street impersonation. I thought that was very smart. And I don't even remember seeing some of the people that they called out in the beginning to be like and cameos from Yvon de Carlo and I'm like, yeah, I don't really even remember her being in the movie, but I definitely remember Olivia Hussey, who I thought named Elsa in here. Who And I was just like, Okay, she's going to be the main love interest. No, no, it's actually I guess it was Michelle Phillips.

remember the name of the book that came out. Actually, there have been a couple books, right, There was an official Warner Brothers book that was both a prequel and a sequel, and then there were at David Thompson book that was kind of like short stories about what happened to these characters. And I love that he really plays up the whole Captain Renault was gay thing, and that like he and Rick end up living together and movie any kind of thing. I was just like, Oh, that's nice.

I love that whole thing, Like, well, if I were a woman, I should be in love with Rick.

to Marseille. I just have to say that, like that was probably like the biggest standout in terms of like preparing for this episode was just going back to another Curtiz film. They have Steiner back. They even have Don Siegel, who I don't think we talked about, the director of the Lineup and Dirty Harry. He was the montage director at Warner Brothers at the time, so he worked on

Passages to Marseille too. The ending is really the kicker of it because at the end spoilers they Warner Brothers decides to go one further and they have Humphrey Bogart, their leading man, commit a war crime by shooting unarmed Nazi pilots on the wing of a reconnaissance aircraft in what is it like the South Atlantic? I got the coast of Portugal and Coole movie is like structured incredibly

like propaganda. But that moment I was cheering and yelling and screaming, I was just like you have the guts to finally say no, this is actually total war. And so much of American media during like during the war and afterwards was kind of milk toast about that. They don't really want to say, like, oh, no, this is a battle to the death. But having Humphrey Bogart gun down unarmed men, oh what a film? What a film?

And Claude Rains, Oh my goodness. Like the most amazing thing I learned afterwards was Claude Rain was in a gas attack. He was injured in World War One and he was like ninety percent blind in his like right eye. So in Passage to Marseilles, in Passage to Marseille, they just have this like eye patch over him. So he's like this monocular like French like air wing captain. And he's fantastic in that film. I mean, he's always fantastic, but it it moves, and Peter Laurie is incredible in it.

Everything about it is just glorious. Yeah, it's like.

I say, like Casa Blanca in New York. As far as Bogart, it's got Conrad Weid Is the Nazi, it's got Peter Lourie. But it's also they're not quite gangsters. They're like, you know, involved in you know, gambling in such in that. But they uncovered this Nazi conspiracy in New York and it's a great kind of just I'd

never heard one. I mean, also, you know it's maybe be tier Bogart, but I thought that was a lot of fun as far as like films trying to cash in on that Casablanca energy, because it doesn't feel like it's trying to be anything grand, Like it's just a solid little crime film that just happens to be tapping into that anti Nazi sentiment that Casa Blanca does, and just like character that is maybe out for himself becoming you know, motivated to stick up for America in this

kind of circumstance. But yeah, I thought that was a great.

It's basically a remake of Casa Clanka. And as we're watching it, I'm just like, see there's Captain Renault, Xander Berklaye, See there's Major Strass or Steve Rail's back, you know, like as they're doing this and like, oh, yeah, we need these contacts or whatever to make us not be retinal scanned, it was just like, those are the letters of transit. So that was fantastic being able to see that movie again. I've fucking loved that film. It's so

stupid and so great all of the same time. Man, Oh and I'm there and I'm just quoting lines and I hadn't seen it since when did that come out? Like ninety six eighty seven, probably from the trailer, but especially the guy that played a little Bruno and swamp things. How he's like her BDSM customer.

a meteor role. I really like Steve Railsback, though he was likebsolutely chewing the scenery and making the US government a bunch of Nazis that literally live in the decayed Capitol building. Is like, doesn't seem so far mentioned any far from nineteen ninety six.

taken those contacts or whatever. But I was getting a little bit more horror from Udo Kir, And yeah, he's fantastic. He could. I mean, his voice is so similar to Peter Lourie's a lot of times, and I think if he just turned it just a little bit, he would be exactly Peter Lourie. You test me, don't you, Barb.

what they were trying to go for. But that director is primarily a music video director, and it has that aesthetic of like a heavy metal video get merged with Casablanca's political themes, and but also an approach to action that feel like kind of campy but trying to be cool.

It kind of it felt like the amount of slow motion in that movie is just like I was thinking, because Pamela Anderson has had this kind of resurgence in the last year with the Last show Girl, and I wonder if this is going to be reassessed, you know, as a forward as an ahead of its time kind

of cult film. It's very over the top, so it's a different kind of It's not gonna be a Golden Globe nominee kind of movie for her, but yeah, it's interesting, and yeah, I would have never thought of this for Casablanca episode until you put it on the list.

of stuff, but it felt tactile. They have a few digital effects in it, and like Matt paintings and stuff like that. I think the pivy remark that I had when I realized what I was watching was like giving the Humphrey Bogart character from Casablanca giant implants is quite the choice.

know you mentioned Barbarrella. I can totally see that and just yeah, those ridiculous opening credits where it's just all guys hosing her down while music's just pumping and she's not really stripping. She's one of those strippers who doesn't strip, kind of things like Strip Teas and a few other movies from the time. It's like, okay, yeah, I don't know what her she is the entertainment as well as the person that owns the bar. I guess they just saved a little bit of money. There was no piano

player that they necessarily needed. They just could throw barb up on stage.

all that kind of stuff. You know, people complain about Zeppo in the March Brothers movies, and they just replace them with the most whitebread couple in the world. I just wanted to die every time they were on screen. And I feel sorry for bringing it up now because I bring up the memory and now we're going to

talk about it. But I did want to bring up the one interesting thing about Night in Casablanca in relation to the original, because it's not really a parody, you know, it's just set at Casablanca, doesn't really have the same thing is that there are people in brown face in A Night in Casablanca and like from forty two to forty six already, like they've just decided, oh no, we're not casting base on nationality and having people speak in the original language. And I actually looked up most of

the cast for A Night in Casablanca. Eighty percent of them are from the Midwest, and they're putting on these ridiculous accents. Harpo, Groucho, Chico, they have their scene, especially the musical sequences. I love you know, they're just simple, but yes, I'm right there with you where you can

tell that they did not hammer this out. And it's a real shame because Groucho is still fast with the jokes and there are great sequences in it, but you just have to have the structure to hang those jokes on, and it just absolutely completely falls apart.

of this movie were the music sequences. I love watching Chico play piano and how he was able to go from what was it Hungarian Rhapsody Number two to the beer Barrel Polka and the orchestra like doing that whole hopping thing that they're doing as he's like coming down hard on the piano, and I love the way that he plays the piano where he's using finger guns to hit the keys. He's just amazing and I could just

watch that for an hour and a half. But then they, you know, all these other things, and I'm like, Okay. I also like the part with the German and how he's hiding out and that he can't leave his room because Harpo has sucked his two pey into a vacuum. I thought that whole thing where he's really fucking with that guy, I thought that was great. I love what a force of anarchy Harpo is. But yeah, it just

wasn't seeing. It just took it a long time before we got Groucho, and then a lot of times in these movies, it takes a long time before Groucho and Chico have a scene together. And just the way that Groucho is com constantly putting down cheeks go some of the best insults of all times where they just rang hollow.

just destroying whatever they can get. That ending was was mildly and from the perspective of watching of watching those people, but yeah, no. The thing about the March Brothers that I always go back to and I can always always talk about is that there's a moment each and every single March Brothers movies where Chico and Harpo they start playing their instruments and the mask basically falls from their face like they're no longer the character that they play

every other time because they have to focus and you can tell that they've been drilled from childhood playing on stage endlessly and they are laser focused, and you know, he doesn't smile, he doesn't like do goofy faces, and Harpo either, and I just love that dropping of the mask where you can tell, oh, no, these people are consummate professionals.

the able for our movie with Chris O'Neill. So these are all things I've just come out in the last few weeks. So that's some of the stuff that I've been working out is keeping me busy.

neatly mentioned during the recording. But I do write for a substack called Air the Sunrises, and you can find it at e TSR. Dot substack dot com. That's Echo Tango Sierra Romeo dot substack dot com. On there, you can also find a little article about how much the Projection Booth has meant to me and why this was

such an honor. So Lastly, if you'd like to get in contact for any reason, even if it's to tell me what you thought of my comments on this show, you can reach me at four through four nine six four eight four one seven. I want to thank you again Mike Bill, and I look forward to speaking to you again.