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SMC Pod #214: Casablanca: A case study of how a Studio Team Built a Masterpiece · Secret Movie Club Podcast

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Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 214, Casablanca.
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This is the first time that we've ever devoted a podcast to what I hope is a
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real in-depth study of just one movie.
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I could be wrong on that. We've recorded 200-plus podcasts.
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But today we are talking about Michael Curtiz's 1942 masterpiece,
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Casablanca, which had so many contributors to it and is often held up by many
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people as an example of a happy accident that wasn't meant to be a masterpiece
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but became a masterpiece.
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I actually disagree with that read on the movie.
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It did win the Best Picture in 1943.
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It's gone on to become one of the handful of most beloved classic Hollywood
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movies of all time, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman.
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It takes place in the early days of World War II in what is still free French
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Morocco and the city of Casablanca.
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We are going to get into that in a moment.
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It is wonderful to have you. My name is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder,
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programmer of Secret Movie Club.
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Our next podcast, which will be next week, Secret Movie Club podcast 215,
1:34
will be about Soviet sci-fi classics.
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You might be saying, And Craig, that seems a little niche or not.
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The Soviet Union and Soviet satellite states were a huge part of the world from
1:47
the end of World War II until the 1990s.
1:50
I just want to do the podcast there because Soviet sci-fi films have a,
1:56
and in the Soviet sci-fi states, they have a certain flavor that's a little
2:01
different than the American flavor.
2:03
And I don't, I mean, that might sound obvious, but actually it's,
2:08
they focus on different things.
2:09
And often Soviet sci-fi films really are these crazy dives into psychology.
2:17
But today we are going to talk about Casablanca, and there you go. I am...
2:24
Relieved to announce we've got our licenses finally. We've got our first few
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Two doors down is the historic Grand Central Market. You can come and get a meal and a movie.
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Today, though, I am happy to tell you that we have launched a new website.
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Just go to secretmovieclub.com. We basically, with an amazing team,
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Our first events will be in May, and we are excited.
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As many on 35mm film as possible, though
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we are not fetishists so many
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great movies now are being made digitally if it's digital we'll show it digital
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We send that out every Monday to announce new events and all that good stuff. OK, moving.
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1942's Warner Brothers made Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman,
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and an incredible cast of character actors is often considered one of the greatest
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examples of what the studio system did better than anybody else.
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So many people have so many different feelings about Casablanca.
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We are going to really do a case study today about how the movie got made,
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when it was released, why it endures 80 years later, 85 years later.
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As I've aged, that movie just gets better and better every time I see it.
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And I don't know if you've ever talked to other people who've seen the movie, but...
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When I first saw the movie in my teens, I think, I liked it. I liked it a lot.
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But there were all these people 20 years older than me who would talk about
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it in these, you know, rhapsodic terms. And I was like, yeah, it was good.
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It was a good, you know, good, good classic movie.
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As you get older, there are resonances and rhymes and things in that movie.
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It just ages like fine wine. So many people have tried to wrap their heads around
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Casablanca. and why it has endured and why it's considered a masterpiece.
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There's a camp of people who call it a happy accident, the happiest of happy
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accidents I've heard it referred to. I think Roger Ebert may have even called it that.
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And what they mean by that is this was a movie that had, I think,
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five minimum screenwriters contribute to it.
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Only three were credited. I think actually five to seven.
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Michael Curtiz directed it, And it's definitely a Curtiz picture,
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and we're going to get into that. And I love Michael Curtiz.
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But Curtiz is, in some ways, frustrates the idea of being an auteur.
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He was an amazing director, but he wasn't a writer.
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He wasn't necessarily even a great storyteller in terms of the nuts and bolts
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of the screenplay. The actors were fluid.
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Originally, it was supposed to be George Raft. Actually, that's not true.
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Hal Wallace, the producer, nixed the George Raft idea that Jack Warner suggested
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from the beginning, but they...
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They didn't even know who the leads were going to be. The movie was part of
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Hal Wallace's independent production unit.
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Wallace had been Jack Warner's number two guy at the studio,
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and he eventually got his own independent producing deal.
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And this was one of the movies that he independently produced.
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And there were so many people.
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What I'm trying to get at is so many contributors to Casablanca that it has
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a lot of parents. Sometimes when we look at a movie like 2001.
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You're going to say Kubrick, maybe Arthur C. Clarke, but almost certainly Kubrick.
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Casablanca is not that kind of movie. Casablanca really had input from a bunch of different people.
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And it was a tough shoot. The script was not done, although that's a little overplayed.
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It's true that they were writing it while they shot the movie,
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especially the ending. And it is true that the main actors were really frustrated,
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didn't know how the movie was going to end, how they were supposed to play things.
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But the play on which the movie is based on Everybody Comes to Rick's,
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all the basic strokes of the movie are there in the play, despite what people report sometimes.
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I read someone saying, well, all we got out of the play was the main character's
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name, Rick, and the cafe.
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But that's not true. The play, even though it's different, has the basic broad strokes of the story.
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So the story had already been broken and there was a reason or cracked.
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And there's a reason why the property was purchased and why it was adapted.
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And so this is all a long way of saying that I don't really go along with it
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was the happiest of happiest accidents.
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I would frame it instead, a lot of what I'm going to talk about today,
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if not the overwhelming majority, comes from an amazing book called Roundup,
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the Usual Suspects by Haljean Harmetz.
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Haljean Harmetz, I hope I'm saying that right. Real quick read,
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but real in-depth, incredibly well-researched.
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Came out in the 1990s, and he got to interview quite a few first-person folks
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who were on the shoot of Casablanca.
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So I want to give all credit to that book, which is really going to be the backbone
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in the spine of the podcast today, along with other research.
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It was, with some luck and good timing, one of the greatest examples of what
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the studio system did well.
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And what and it shows in
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contrast today 2026 how hard
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it is to do a movie like casablanca and make it
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work the way casablanca worked and i want
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to look at that because i think there's probably something we can learn we can't
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go back to the studio system that's for sure and movies and technology and entertainment
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it's all in crazy flux in 2026 but there is something in warner Brothers,
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the Warner Brothers system,
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how Casablanca got made that I do think we can learn from.
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And that's my biggest hope today, as well as just to celebrate a movie and give
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you an excuse to see incredible film again.
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So let's dive into it. We'll just go pre-production, production.
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About Rick Blaine, a disenchanted, cynical, isolationist American who runs the
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hottest nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco in 1940, 1941.
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Morocco and Casablanca is still nominally run by the Free French,
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but you can tell that they are working more and more and more and more under
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the thumb of the Nazis and the Germans who are starting to take over all of Europe.
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Immigrants and refugees of all kinds have ended up in Casablanca.
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And it turns out that two transit papers, which are signed and make it impossible
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for anyone to revoke them, were in the possession of Germans and someone killed those Germans.
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And whoever can get those two exit visas, those two transit papers,
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they can get on a plane and they can go to America.
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And cut to Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart.
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We see how he runs his cafe. We meet all the main characters and who walks in
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the door, but the woman, the one who got away, the one he loved, Ilsa Lund.
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A Norwegian on the arm of political freedom fighter, Victor Laszlo,
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played by Paul Henreid, who is wanted by the Nazis.
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And when Rick last saw Elsa, they were in Paris right before it fell to the
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Nazis, and they were supposed to get married and run away.
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And Elsa stood him up at the train station.
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And Rick has been heartbroken ever since. And suddenly she comes back in the door.
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And of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk back into mine,
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whatever that line is. And so the movie becomes...
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Ilse and Victor are looking for those transit visas so they can get out of Casablanca.
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The Nazi colonel, Colonel Strasser, played by Conrad Veit, wants to make sure that doesn't happen.
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In fact, once Victor escaped from a concentration camp and Strasser really wants
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to kill him, but definitely doesn't want him to get out of Casablanca.
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And then Claude Rains, the head of police. You don't really know where Claude
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Rains is going to fall here.
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Is he with the Nazis? Is he not with the Nazis? Is he an opportunist?
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The movie started out as a play called Everyone Comes to Ricks, and it was optioned.
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As many properties are, there was a story department at Warner Brothers,
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and someone read it and recommended that it would be a good property.
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There were a lot of movies being made at that time to prepare America to get
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into the war. and really made as a kind of light propaganda.
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And so what's interesting is that if you actually go back to that time period,
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you'll find 20 other movies that basically are Casablanca.
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You know, movies like Passage to Marseille, Sahara, I'm trying to think Algiers.
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There are like all these exotic North African themed movies,
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but also continental European movies where some variation of an American who's
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on the fence gets involved in the war effort.
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There's a romance. The Nazis are bad.
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And it's interesting that so many of those movies were made that were variations
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on a theme, but it's Casablanca, really, that stands heads and tails above all of them.
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But at the time, no one thought Casablanca would probably be much more than
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a well-made Warner Brothers programmer.
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Although everyone, Hal Wallace, was kind of like an Irving Thalberg.
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Everybody really thought he had it or a David Selznick or any of those great
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studio heads who really knew how to run a studio and had a great story sense.
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Hal Wallace was one. So people probably imagine that.
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Casablanca would turn out good. No one imagined that it would turn out transcendently great.
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And my point at the beginning here was that it was originally optioned to be
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one of these programmers, one of these World War II programmers.
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Wallace, who had an amazing contract with Jack Warner, allowed Wallace to cast
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who he wanted, hire who he wanted to write the scripts.
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So that Jack Warner couldn't really interfere with Wallace's putting together this movie.
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And that's important because Jack Warner wanted George Raft,
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an actor who was a lot of us now know him as playing the second lead in Howard
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Hawks' Scarface to Paul Mooney's Al Capone character.
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George Raft is the guy who flips the coin. And Raft would appear in other movies.
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He appears in some like it hot. He was in a ton of movies.
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And Bogart, Humphrey Bogart, who was under contract almost the entirety of his
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acting career to Warner Brothers until the very end, before he got famous,
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and I should say right here,
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Casablanca was one of the movies that made him a star, along with The Maltese
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Falcon and High Sierra, all made roughly in a two-year period.
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But Bogie often would take the roles that George Raft didn't want.
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And Jack Warner thought that Casablanca would be a good George Raft picture.
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Hal Wallace was like, absolutely not. And thank God that Wallace put his foot down there.
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The writers, and this is really a key part of this movie, were the twins,
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Julius and Philip Epstein, Julie and Phil Epstein, and Howard Koch, another writer.
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And then a few other writers were brought on to polish things like the romance.
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And each writer really did. You know, it's funny in our day and age now,
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when you hear that 10 writers worked on a script, which still happens all the
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time, and most of them don't get credit.
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Often that's a sign that the scripts can be a real hodgepodge and
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it probably when you look at the majority of
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programmers back then you look majority movies now it is
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a hodgepodge but somehow with Casablanca that was like the first thing that
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broke everybody's way Julie and Phil Epstein were just wrote the the most incredible
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dialogue and Casablanca is often cited as one of the greatest movies for dialogue
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ever. And I agree with that.
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Almost every, in fact, every scene has a few lines that are now quoted by everybody.
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People refer to this kind of dialogue as sparkling dialogue,
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and I love it, but it is so hard to write.
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And usually when people try to do it, it sounds affected.
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It sounds like people at boarding school pretending to be sophisticated or something.
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You know dan oh yeah
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and but uh and there's
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nothing sparkling about what i just did there julie and phil epstein they're
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the guys that wrote you know round up the usual suspects of all the gin joints
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in all the world she had to you know play it again sam or play it sam no one
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actually says play it again they all say play it sam uh the but those aren't
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even the greatest lines.
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Like one of my favorite lines is Rick has a mistress, a French mistress,
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a wild French mistress before Elsa returns into his life.
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And she gets real angry with him. And he has great lines where she's like,
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well, where were you last night? And he's like, that was so far.
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That was so long ago. I can't remember. And she said, well, what are you doing
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tonight? And he's like, that's so far ahead.
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Like, I'm totally butchering these lines, but it's like, that's so far ahead. I can't even planned.
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Claude Rains police captain Louis Renault has this great line where the mistress
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comes on the arm of a German Nazi soldier, a German soldier,
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because she just ditches Rick.
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And I think that Renault says, you know, she may actually end up being opening
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up a whole new front in the war.
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And that was a great way of saying something wildly sexual that you could never
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get away with if you said it directly, that the Epsteins say in this amazing way.
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You can just study Casablanca for that dialogue. But what's interesting is that
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the original play, the female lead was American and it was very crass.
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She just immediately jumped into bed with Rick at the.
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There wasn't the tension that the movie eventually had about emotional,
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personal, emotional feeling versus obligation and duty and nobility,
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all the things we respond to now.
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And that was largely brought into focus by Howard Koch's contribution.
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He made the movie much more political, much more about sacrifice and brought
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out the themes that I think if those weren't there, the sparkling dialogue,
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you know, there are hundreds of movies of that era with really well-written
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dialogue that we don't ever watch again.
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Koch really brought the weight, the gravity to the piece that it needed so that
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the sparkling dialogue could provide that contrapuntal musical levity and humor
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and, you know, champagne,
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sort of champagne to the meat and potatoes.
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But there was even another writer brought on who really brought the love story into focus.
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Over the revisions, the American female lead became a European lead,
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which allowed Bergman to be in the piece.
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And then that presented possibilities for why she had left Rick.
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She had thought her husband was dead and fell in love with Rick,
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only to find the day they were to leave together that her husband is still alive
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and out of a feeling of loyalty and obligation because her husband is fighting
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the good fight. fight against the fascists.
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She knows the right thing to do is to go back to her husband,
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even though she wants to go with Rick or does she? We'll get into that.
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But all that came through really this fortuitous process where everybody who
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contributed to that script was great at what they did.
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They got the assignment and how Wallace and his story editors were able to steer
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the property, even as it was being written while they were shooting the film.
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So that was the first break that went the way of Casablanca.
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Now, going beyond that, the casting is so huge that it may in some ways be the
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single most important thing to why that movie is a success, I think, in my opinion.
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And why I say that, despite the amazing contributions of everybody else on the picture, I.
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Humphrey Bogart, like I said, was not the obvious choice. And he often is not
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even the obvious choice to play a romantic lead.
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It's important to remember that it took some vision on the part of Hal Wallace
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to cast Bogie in that part, because as of 1941 and 42,
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Bogie had mostly played bad guys or, you know, anti-social, anti-heroes.
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He was not a romantic lead. He was rarely a romantic lead, even after he blew
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up and became a superstar. But I think that Hal Wallace saw that for that character,
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where you're going to wonder, what's Rick going to do?
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Is he going to make a selfish decision? Is he going to make a selfless decision?
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You needed someone who could be very rough, very cynical, but who you sensed
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might have a real integrity at their core.
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And that may have been what led to Bogie's casting and a brilliant stroke.
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Look, Ingrid Bergman was actually loaned out.
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And this is the weird quasi-slavery aspect of the studio system that's so unsettling
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or maybe even worse, the sort of sense of actors as sex workers being traded
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among their pimps in a way.
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Ingrid Bergman was under contract to producer David O.
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Selznick, who lent her, which is a horrible way of saying it,
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but this is a way that everyone would talk about it, who lent her to Hal Wallace.
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And Warner Brothers to play this part.
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And that happened all the time with actors all the time.
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And what happened, interestingly, is they would get a fee, but the producer,
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whoever had their contract, would charge a higher fee and pocket the difference.
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So it was a total business thing with people.
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Bergman, interestingly to her dying day, was always a little puzzled why Casablanca
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became the movie that everyone would remember her for.
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You know, there's just not enough time in this podcast, though I could talk
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to you for hours, about all the minutiae here.
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But Bogie, he was sort of a no BS guy, which comes across in his movies.
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He was a heavy drinker at the time because he was married four times.
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And the wife he was married to at the time that Casablanca was made,
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Mayo, she was an alcoholic. And they were known as the Battling Bogarts because
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she was always suspicious of all of his female leads. And they would argue.
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And Bogie was pretty miserable at this time. And he did bring that misery.
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And he was drinking really heavily. Although he was totally a pro.
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He was not someone who he would show up. There was this amazing story in the
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book where Bogey got roped into
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reading the Lord's Prayer at the Hollywood Bowl for an Easter service.
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And the night before, he went out on a bender, and some publicist had to find
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him, finds him at 4 a.m., drags him to the 6 a.m. service.
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Bogey goes on stage and masterly delivers the Lord's Prayer,
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brings everyone to tears.
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Priests and ministers backstage are crying. He comes backstage,
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he looks at everybody He's like, where's a place I can puke?
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That's like all you need to know about Bogey at that point. Bergman,
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on the other hand, what Bergman and Bogey both shared, which may be the most
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telling thing, was just a consummate professionalism.
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Again, a lucky break for the movie.
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Bergman was newly transplanted to America from Sweden.
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She was already, she'd already made a few movies, but she viewed Casablanca as a programmer.
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Her character was underwritten, and it was. She didn't know who she was supposed
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to love. Did she love Victor Laszlo or did she love Rick Blaine?
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And she did the movie. She gave it her all. But she was really waiting to do
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the next movie, which was For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Hemingway adaptation.
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And she felt that that was the one that was the real show part.
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And a lot of people know her from that movie. That's still a movie that's watched by a lot of people.
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But uh it's interesting and she would point
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this out that of all the movies she made and she
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made movies with hitchcock you know she was in notorious which is a kind of
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casablanca with carrie grant she was in you know genre noir movies elena and
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her men she was in rossolini films uh voyage to italy stromboli europa 51 she
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just did all this incredible work in her mezzo gaslight,
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Of all those roles, the one that she thought was like, that was a tough one.
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I did my best with an underwritten part. That's the one that everyone remembers.
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Now, the thing that Harmetz points out in his book that I think is the key here
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and why I say that the casting was most important was all of the character parts are amazing.
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And you don't get that anymore. And that's the real loss. One of the big losses
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of the studio system was Warners had all these incredible character actors under
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contract, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, Sidney Greenstreet.
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And they often hump like Bogart, Greenstreet, Lorre, the Reigns.
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They often would be in movies together and they just sort of shift their roles around.
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So it's funny when you read the book, all these movies we no longer remember
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where they also star, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains.
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But more than this, there were all of these European actors who were themselves
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immigrants and refugees who filled out all the supporting parts. S.K.
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Skoll, the head waiter who brought incredible humanity and humor to the picture.
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And Paul Henreid, who played Victor Laszlo, who was an anti-Nazi Austrian who
27:04
came to the United States.
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Konrad Witt, another anti-Nazi German who got his start in the cabinet of Dr.
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Caligari and so on and so on.
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One of the things when you watch the movie is every part down to the smallest
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part is brilliant and just filled with just great actors.
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And it gives the movie this incredible atmosphere and flavor that you just don't get a lot now.
27:32
And you couldn't get, you know, back with Warner's, they, they,
27:35
here's, here's our, here's all the actors we have under contract. You'd pick them out.
27:39
They'd all worked with each other. They were making movies like every week.
27:43
And we're going to get into this. But the thing about the studio system was
27:47
even if you didn't feel a movie, you it was like you were a musician who played every single day.
27:54
Like when the Beatles went to Hamburg and got in their 10,000 hours,
27:58
those actors, they knew the camera, they knew the lens.
28:01
Even if the movie was dud or clunker, they were getting working experience.
28:06
Think about now even the best actors
28:09
are not working every single week uh with
28:13
only a month or two off a year the but
28:17
actors back then they the and all the technicians the director everybody was
28:22
once you were done with the movie you had a weekend next monday you're on a
28:27
new picture and you figured it out and i think you can sense that duly wilson
28:32
who plays sam the piano player.
28:35
Just everybody in that movie just brings something to it.
28:41
Now, this all leads up to Michael Curtiz.
28:44
I am a huge Curtiz fan.
28:47
I think there is a pretty direct line from Curtiz to Steven Spielberg.
28:52
You can see it most, I think, in the Indiana Jones movies, which are self-consciously
28:58
homages to Casablanca and Curtiz in a way.
29:01
But Spielberg's use of shadows, Spielberg's movement, his choreography,
29:05
you can see a proto version of that in anything that Michael Curtiz does.
29:10
Michael Curtiz was a Hungarian movie maker.
29:13
I think he made like John Ford and like a few other filmmakers,
29:17
he made a hundred plus movies in his career.
29:21
He lived to direct. He was notoriously hard to understand. He would say things
29:27
that people never understood. I read that he used a phrase, devil up,
29:31
that no one knew what that meant.
29:33
He had a thick Hungarian accent. He would say, devil up.
29:36
And people were like, what does devil up mean?
29:38
He would yell at everybody. He was a bit of a tyrant. He would sometimes come
29:42
on the set with a riding crop.
29:44
He loved to ride horses, like riding crop in his riding pants,
29:47
kind of treat the actors like horses.
29:49
He was not though a writer and this
29:52
is the interesting thing it was even though he was amazing at
29:56
visual storytelling and he made too many great
29:59
movies not to be good at storytelling i mean michael curtis is responsible for
30:04
the adventures of robin hood uh captain blood the seahawk mildred pierce casablanca
30:11
later on white christmas we're no angels so yankee doodle dandy Holy moly.
30:17
There are just too many great Curtiz pictures for him not to have been great at storytelling.
30:23
But his genius was in his staging.
30:27
No one could move a camera like Curtiz. No one could choreograph like Curtiz.
30:31
No one could pace a movie up like Curtiz.
30:35
And when you see his movies, I read another great story where he was shooting
30:40
in one direction. There was a grand piano.
30:42
Then when they turned the camera around, he said, get rid of the grand piano.
30:45
And somebody was like, Isn't that going to ruin continuity?
30:47
And he was like, if people notice the grand piano in the reverse shot, I'm not doing my job.
30:53
Curtiz was one of those people. Hawks is another one. It's actually interesting
30:56
how related Hawks and Curtiz are in a way.
30:58
But they both understood the importance of pace in a movie, keep it moving.
31:03
And when you see a Curtiz picture, never drags.
31:06
And Casablanca is really a shining example of Curtiz's ability.
31:12
And when you think about Casablanca.
31:14
This is a movie that's mostly dialogue. It's mostly people talking in a restaurant, basically.
31:21
And yet you never think about that. You never think of Casablanca as a talky
31:27
picture, a dialogue picture, although you love the dialogue.
31:30
You do think of it as a movie movie, a moving movie.
31:33
And that's just the genius of Curtiz. And again, I think to a certain extent,
31:38
the genius of Hal Wallace in using the studio system and saying,
31:42
OK, here are the stable of Warner Brothers directors.
31:45
And remember, at that point, you had people like John Huston and Raoul Walsh
31:51
and other directors who were often making movies for Warners.
31:54
And now curtis was the star
31:57
director so probably a no-brainer for wallace to
32:01
be like i want the star director but there is again
32:04
another stroke of genius to say okay this is a a movie of two to three person
32:11
scenes mostly in group scenes and talking let's get curtis from there there
32:17
are so many people that worked on the movie a young don siegel who would go
32:21
on to direct invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry.
32:23
And I loves me, Don Siegel. Charlie Varick, Skate from Alcatraz,
32:28
Skate from Cell Block 11.
32:29
No, Riot. Sorry, Riot and Cell Block 11.
32:32
Madigan, Two Mules for Sister Sarah. I even like the bad Don Siegel,
32:36
sir. He's so good. He did the montages on this picture.
32:41
The cinematography is incredible. Max Steiner, the composer,
32:45
most known to people for King Kong, Gone with the Wind, was the composer on
32:48
this. And here's another stroke of luck because,
32:52
The Max Steiner did not like the song they used as time goes by,
32:56
which was a old song that was already like 10 or 15 years old from an old play.
33:01
And but they couldn't Max Steiner wanted to write a new love theme.
33:05
But Ingrid Bergman had already cut her hair for whom the bell tolls.
33:08
They couldn't reshoot it.
33:09
So Max Steiner, to show you genius, he initially didn't like as time goes by
33:14
when he realized he was stuck with it.
33:16
He made it the centerpiece of all of his thematic motifs in his composing.
33:21
So the whole movie musically is woven together with as time goes by in major
33:29
keys, minor keys, along with La Marseillaise and other themes that Steiner wrote.
33:34
And the music in the movie is as important as almost anything else.
33:39
So this is all a way to say that this movie was that team.
33:45
You just had the best of the best. You had bangers. And again,
33:48
that's something because of the studio system.
33:50
But it's that kind of thing of like, I got Curtis directing.
33:53
I got Steiner composing.
33:55
I got Bogie and Bergman in the leads. I got Phil and Julie writing the script
33:58
and Koch doing the polish. You're like, oh, this thing's going to be fine.
34:02
We'll be okay when you hear that. I mean, so there you go.
34:07
The movie gets put together and uh
34:10
starts shooting the movie was
34:14
one of the last movies to really have a budget basically once we were full into
34:20
the war there was rationing there were curfews lights had to go out because
34:25
we were afraid the japanese were going to bomb us in los angeles all that changed
34:29
how movies were made casablanca was one of the last pictures to really get the
34:34
pre-war Hollywood budget gloss.
34:38
And that ended up being a real help for it when it got released.
34:41
And we'll, we'll touch on that a little later, but they were lucky.
34:45
They were lucky in all sorts of ways.
34:48
Now, again, the script, the second act, but really the third act,
34:54
how it was all going to end, was being written while they were shooting.
34:58
So Bogart was cantankerous because he didn't know how he was supposed to play things.
35:02
Bergman was not thrilled because she didn't know whether she was supposed to
35:06
love Laszlo or whether she was supposed to love Rick.
35:09
And so Wallace and everyone told her, play it down the middle.
35:13
And weirdly another that i would say is
35:16
a happy accident because one of the things
35:19
but not because bergman was so good ingrid bergman was so good she played it
35:24
down the middle because that ambiguity is introduced to the movie that ambiguity
35:28
is key to the movie and it was a kind of ambiguity that you know they tried
35:33
to do in other movies uh retrospectively when casablanca became a hit But you can't fake that.
35:38
There was real ambiguity because Ingrid Bergman didn't know.
35:41
And that ambiguity comes across in the film.
35:45
Again, tension on the set with the actors for some of the reasons that we said.
35:50
Bergman and Bogart did not get along great.
35:52
They didn't get along poorly. But there was no, for two people who had such
35:57
incredible chemistry in the movie, they didn't really have offscreen chemistry.
36:03
And Bergman did have a number of affairs and she did have chemistry with a lot
36:09
of her co-actors or her partners but Bogey,
36:13
they were just professionals they just showed up Bogey was dealing with
36:15
his own marriage Bergman was dealing with her own marriage and there was not
36:22
really a spark between them but they were pros Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart
36:26
got along famously they really loved each other and they made a bunch of movies
36:30
together And one of the weird aspects of Casablanca, when you see it a lot,
36:34
is that it is as much a love story between Rick Blaine and Captain Renault as
36:41
it is between Rick Blaine and Elsa Lundt.
36:44
The Renault and Blaine admire each other. They're both cynical in a way.
36:49
They're both survivors.
36:51
They're both dealing with a bunch of people they don't want to deal with.
36:56
And I think that you can tell from the beginning of the movie that they admire each other in a way.
37:00
And one of the fascinating things is the last line of the movie,
37:04
Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,
37:06
was I don't think written by the Epsteins.
37:09
I think it was actually written by Hal Wallace, of all people.
37:11
But it was recorded after the fact.
37:15
If you watch the movie Louis and Rick walk off and there were two lines that
37:20
they recorded. The other was not as strong.
37:23
They ended up going with The Beautiful Friendship. So.
37:26
That also, you get this great chemistry that did exist between Bogart and Reigns
37:31
and really does provide a ballast in the movie.
37:36
And Reigns is this amazing actor.
37:39
We just don't have time to go down the rabbit holes about everybody.
37:42
But Claude Reigns, who everybody knows from Invisible Man and Casablanca and
37:47
Notorious, again, he was in, again, opposite Ingrid Bergman,
37:51
Lawrence of Arabia, so many movies.
37:53
Claude Reigns was actually a Cockney. He came from poor Cockney beginnings,
37:58
but went through training and just sheer willpower to give himself that regal
38:05
air that he carried about himself.
38:07
But he was a Cockney, a working class Cockney, which is amazing.
38:11
And the funny thing is that he was working class Cockney, but often played up, played regal.
38:18
Bogie actually came from upper middle class parents and often played down,
38:22
played working class, played scrappy. and there was some kind of great tension
38:26
and admiration they had for each other.
38:28
Well, the shooting happens and it was fascinating reading the book just how
38:34
much penny pinching there was.
38:36
But that makes sense. If you're running a studio, of course you got a penny pinch.
38:41
But there are all these fights for shooting days, for how things are shot.
38:46
There are all these memos that go back. Why are you shooting it this way?
38:49
We're not getting what we want. We need this. We need that.
38:52
And what you see in the production is again
38:56
something that doesn't quite happen anymore you have
38:59
a bunch of people really good at what they're doing giving each
39:03
other notes having to work together but not
39:06
precious because they're making like seven films
39:10
that year and so even though they're all divas in their own way they're all
39:14
auteurs in their own way they're all tyrants in their own way they also are
39:19
part of this studio system where they got to make the movie And so it's fascinating
39:23
all the memos that flew back and forth between Hal Wallace,
39:26
between Michael Curtiz, between the actors.
39:30
And everybody is just trying to do their best, dealing with the notes and not
39:35
being precious and improving things as they can.
39:38
And all of that, all it's just fascinating to see that tension and collaboration,
39:45
but also the way that work happened in the studio system allowed for changes to be made,
39:53
people to go along with them and be like, well, we got to do this.
39:56
And so the movie was constantly being improved
39:59
in production you know rushes
40:03
and dailies are being watched and even though
40:06
there were fights there were fights on the set for sure bogart refused to do
40:10
a few things he didn't understand why he was doing them but once he understood
40:14
he did them bogart was not an untalented diva it's weird he was one of those
40:20
actors who he wanted to do good work.
40:23
So he just, he knew enough having been in like 40 movies already that this doesn't
40:28
work. I'm going to look like an idiot here. Why am I doing this?
40:31
And he helped with his contributions. There was an office that was created during
40:36
the war, the OWI, which I think is the office of war information that ended
40:41
up overseeing the movies in the 1942,
40:45
43, 44, 45.
40:47
And it really, the movies got more didactic. They became more overtly propaganda.
40:54
And weirdly, they were not as good. And the OWI was staffed with really liberal
40:59
people, sometimes with communists and socialists.
41:02
And what they wanted was, they wanted the movies not to be realistic portrayals
41:08
of the war because in the first few years of World War II, we were losing.
41:12
And in the first few years, we were failing.
41:15
We were losing battles. We were leaving the Philippines. It was miserable.
41:20
And there was always racism in the military. There was always sort of an uncomfortable
41:26
detente among people who didn't want to be with other races and things like that.
41:32
But the OWI, once it really got up to speed, it wanted people,
41:36
it wanted to show a fictitious, diverse army that respected the humanity of everybody.
41:44
Wanted to present an image so that people felt good about the boys fighting
41:47
the war, about the war, about things happening on the home front.
41:50
Now, what's interesting is
41:52
that Casablanca was made right before the OWI really flexed its muscles.
41:56
And even though there is a, I think you would call it a light propaganda to
42:03
Casablanca, Rick does join the fight.
42:07
Rick does cease to be neutral.
42:09
Rick comes down on the side of the allies against the Nazis.
42:13
And remember, at that time, there were still a lot of forces in the United States
42:17
that was pro-fascist, pro-Nazi.
42:19
We're still burned out on World War I, did not want us to get involved.
42:23
So Casablanca definitely has a political agenda and is light propaganda,
42:30
but it's not heavy-handed.
42:32
It's not didactic. and its themes are universal.
42:37
This could just as easily have been a Shakespeare play 500 years ago.
42:41
It's not really about Roosevelt's New Deal or liberal democracy versus fascism,
42:51
even though it is about that to a certain extent.
42:53
But what it really is about are people who realize that they're swept up in.
43:01
History-making events. And if they don't make decisions, those events are going
43:08
to define them or they're going to be defined by them.
43:12
And they have to make a decision. Am I neutral?
43:15
Do I just go along with the Nazis to get along? Or do I fight and risk my life
43:21
at what at that point did not look like a winning cause?
43:24
It did look like the Germans might take over all of Europe. It did look like
43:28
the Japanese might dominate in the Pacific.
43:30
It did look like the fascists might win. And America was, a lot of America was
43:36
fascist sympathetic and didn't want to get involved.
43:39
So all of that has to be acknowledged. And everybody making the movie had pro-ally
43:45
get involved in World War II, fight the Nazi sentiment. Many of them did.
43:50
Kurtz definitely did as a Hungarian immigrant.
43:53
Many of the actors involved in the movie as refugees and
43:56
immigrants wanted america to get involved in the war jack warner
44:00
warner brothers was the most pro let's get involved world war ii studio all
44:04
that's there but i think again the genius from the the epstein dialogue to the
44:10
the phil and julie epstein dialogue to everybody involved was the movie was
44:15
still made with a light touch and the themes are universal and so.
44:21
If people want to see that movie and want to get involved in the war,
44:24
and you do often when you see it, you want to get off the fence and you want to do your part.
44:29
There's a great scene where the Germans are singing a propaganda Nazi song and
44:36
Victor Laszlo, with Rick Blaine's blessing, gets the house band to play La Marseillaise,
44:41
the French national anthem, the song of freedom.
44:43
And everybody gets up and sings and everybody's crying.
44:47
And the actors really were getting into it. I mean, that scene is rousing.
44:51
That scene makes you want to join the fight for sure.
44:55
But it touches on some kind of universality of people awakening to putting aside
45:03
their personal desires for the greater good.
45:07
And that's really what makes Casablanca sing. What's
45:11
fascinating about Casablanca When you see it Is One it was all shot In LA In
45:18
Burbank That's That's crazy When you see the movie It's supposed to take place
45:22
In Morocco French free Morocco North Africa But it has a great sense of atmosphere
45:28
Even though it was all shot here.
45:30
It has, it's an incredible romance, many people's favorite romance.
45:35
And yet what's fascinating is the lovers do not end up together.
45:39
It's very atypical that way, but it's not that they don't end up together in a downer way.
45:45
It, they don't end up together because they realize, as Rick says at the end,
45:49
the problems of three people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
45:53
You know, Rick and Ilsa, you realize the dilemma they're in.
45:57
Rick has the transit passports, but he wants Ilsa, and he doesn't want her to go away with Victor.
46:05
But Ilsa knows that if she leaves Victor, their marriage is helping him fight
46:11
the fight to be the freedom fighter.
46:13
And Bogart really, in the end, admires Victor Laszlo.
46:16
And they all realized that, I think in a weird way, Rick and Ilsa could not
46:23
have a long-term romance knowing that they had left Victor Laszlo in the lurch.
46:30
They realized that it's going to all be for naught anyway if the Nazis take over the world.
46:35
And so in this weird way, the romance is so beautiful because it can't be consummated
46:44
again. It can't be realized again.
46:46
Now, there's always debates in the movie about whether Rick and Elsa do consummate
46:50
it again because there's a well-timed dissolve to leave it to your imagination.
46:55
And I lean, I lean to the fact, this is kind of odd.
47:01
I'm sure everyone thinks differently. I lean to the fact that they,
47:04
they consummated in the sense that they admit that they still love each other.
47:09
They really do love each other and they want to be with each other and they
47:14
embrace in a way that then kiss in a way that is a kind of consummation.
47:20
But I'm not sure that they sleep together or you're even meant to think that
47:24
they sleep together or even have that hint of sleeping together. Cause that would be.
47:28
That'd be, that'd be, that'd be a thing now they might. And I don't even think
47:32
that that necessarily, uh, tanks or torpedoes their nobility either.
47:38
I, life is complicated. Things are complicated. And the movie shows that,
47:42
you know, Rick and Elsa fell in love.
47:44
Elsa thought her husband was dead when she found out the day she was going to
47:48
go marry Rick, that her husband was alive.
47:51
It puts her in an impossible situation, but she makes the right choice.
47:55
She goes back to her husband. And Rick, faced with the same thing,
48:00
he thinks it through, and he,
48:03
The story, I think, also is so powerful because it's a resurrection story.
48:07
It's a redemption story.
48:09
Rick was basically, in a way, cynical and dead and lost to the world.
48:14
And he comes alive again, and he joins the fight, and he makes noble decisions,
48:19
which allows him to believe in himself again.
48:23
And, you know, Renault does the same thing. So it's an incredibly complicated,
48:28
beautifully realized set of emotions that we, I think we all respond to the truth in it.
48:34
The sense that the most important thing is to make the right decision as tough as it is.
48:40
And that becomes its own redemptive reward.
48:44
And in a way, Rick and Ilsa, you know, he says, we'll always have Paris and
48:49
they will always have Paris.
48:50
But I think what that line means in a weird way is they also know that the person
48:55
they fell in love with, the person whose character they admired,
48:58
because Rick, you know, he is somebody who has always fought on the anti-fascist
49:02
side. That's clearly established.
49:04
He's not just like some playboy.
49:06
Rick has devoted his life up until the point that he got his heart broken by
49:10
Elsa to trying to help the anti-fascist. So, you know, if there was no Victor
49:17
Laszlo, then of course, Elsa and Rick would be together.
49:20
But Rick can go and be the kind of person that Elsa would admire.
49:24
And Elsa can go and be the person that Rick could admire.
49:28
And in that way, they can continue to love each other and know that they did
49:32
love the right person, that they loved a person.
49:34
It's just such a, I could go on forever about it, but let's,
49:37
let's go and briefly talk.
49:47
Everyone's responding to it. Everyone was invested. Everyone felt a certain urgency.
49:53
And the movie turns out better than anyone could have imagined.
49:56
Some people involved in the movie, like the Epsteins, actually didn't think
49:59
the movie turned out all that well.
50:01
Maybe because their contribution to the screenplay was changed in a way.
50:05
But most of the people have a sense they've got a hit.
50:08
Hal Wallace, the people editing it, the publicists, everyone feels this thing.
50:13
And the Casablanca gets the greatest gift a movie ever can get that you, unfortunately,
50:21
that you cannot manufacture this, which is the timing of its release is crazy fortuitous.
50:30
The allies take over Casablanca and they go into North Africa to fight the Nazis
50:36
right before the movie is released.
50:39
So the marketing campaign writes itself, which is we've taken Casablanca and
50:44
now see Casablanca as if the movie was made to talk about the event that just
50:49
happened a few weeks ago, even though the movie was years in production and development and stuff.
50:54
You just can't buy that. It just it happens or it doesn't happen.
50:58
Now, what is true is that the movie is a monster hit was not expected to win
51:04
Best Picture, but it does. And so everyone senses something about this movie
51:09
from the very beginning.
51:10
Now, that being said, there's no
51:13
reason why the movie necessarily de facto endures for 80 years after that.
51:19
There are many timely best picture winners or many timely movie hits that we
51:23
don't talk about anymore, that people rarely watched.
51:27
That at the time were viewed as incredible hits and masterpieces and timely and all that.
51:33
And I think that's because there's a difference between being timely and being universal.
51:39
And Casablanca, weirdly, was both timely and universal.
51:44
So as the timeliness wore away, the universality carried it to the present day.
51:49
And again, my Desert Island book would be The Collected Works of Shakespeare.
51:55
And the thing I always say, if you're into Shakespeare, is yes,
52:00
you know, his writing, his dialogue is great.
52:02
Yes, of course, it's wonderful to say.
52:05
But his plots, even though they're often taken from other stories and other
52:10
plays, his way that he takes a plot and he tells a story is forever modern.
52:16
And I think that's because he's writing about universal things,
52:21
not ideological, dogmatic thing.
52:24
Now, he did. There were other elements of that. You can't avoid that when you're a writer.
52:28
When you read a Shakespeare play like Coriolanus, not one of the well-known
52:32
ones, but I love Coriolanus.
52:34
Coriolanus comes out of some history from the Roman Empire and an admired military
52:40
man, Coriolanus, who is being groomed to be the leader, maybe the consul, but he just hates,
52:47
what you have to do in a society to get voted.
52:50
He just, he feels that to tell the plebeians what they want to hear is beneath
52:57
him and And it gets them into a lot of trouble and other people demagogue the voters.
53:01
And it's really about the nasty side of democracy or the system.
53:07
It's not a convenient play that fits into anybody's ideological framework.
53:13
You can be enraged by that play if you're a liberal or you're a conservative.
53:16
You can be enraged by that play if you're a Democrat or if you're,
53:19
you know, some kind of authoritarian.
53:22
That play annoys everybody. But I think that's because of its universality and
53:27
the brilliance of its acknowledging the flaws of everything,
53:30
which is what I love about it. It shoots in all directions. Yeah.
53:34
And Casablanca, it just, everybody clocked and locked into the universality of it.
53:40
And I think that's why it's carried it to this day.
53:43
The final thing I'll say here is I also think that because romance or falling
53:49
in love or unrequited love or the one who got away, those are things that affect
53:54
a huge part of the population.
53:56
And a lot of us think about those things our whole lives.
54:00
And i think that casablanca gets
54:03
at that too so many movies try to
54:06
do that in romances and the romances come off
54:09
as convenient or a little too rosy or the movie ends when the you know they
54:14
get together they get married as orson welles said you know shakespeare romances
54:19
always end comedies with put on the apron and shut up kind of like the marriage
54:24
you never see beyond the wedding.
54:27
And of course, the whole romance, really, or the whole relationship is what
54:31
happens after the wedding, in a way.
54:33
It also does something I've noticed many other great movies do.
54:37
Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is not just a little influenced by Casablanca,
54:41
does the same thing, and I would wager gets it from Casablanca.
54:44
The movie starts after the relationship has happened.
54:48
So when Rick and Elsa meet each other, yes, we do a flashback of their romance in Paris, but.
54:54
The story starts in media res is the term. It starts in the middle of the story.
55:00
So all this stuff has already happened. And I love stories that do that because
55:04
you then sense all this history between people and it's just so much richer and more complex.
55:10
Another brilliant choice they made in the, I mean, it was in the play as well,
55:14
but that's brilliant. We all relate to that.
55:16
And, you know, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy and Marion had a relationship
55:20
and that starts in media res.
55:22
You will take your own lessons from it uh you
55:25
should watch it you should read how gene al gene
55:28
harmitz's book round up the usual suspects you
55:32
should do your own studying if you're so inclined i
55:35
will tell you here are the lessons that i got out of it one is
55:39
you need to be great at what you do it
55:42
helps to do it all the time and there's so many things
55:45
from the studio system we should not turn our noses up
55:48
at when we should find a new however we
55:51
have to find it paradigm idiom to take
55:54
that old magic and
55:57
find a way to make it work in the new system and those are
56:00
things like we should all probably be working constantly uh
56:04
even if it's on our phones even if we're just sketchbooking things
56:07
that's number one number two we should
56:10
all acknowledge that movies are a team sport you were
56:13
forced to acknowledge that in the studio system but you had the
56:15
benefit of just not getting precious about it because you were just
56:18
making so much stuff you were turning out so
56:21
many movies uh now you know
56:24
people fight for 10 years to get the money to make one movie of course you're
56:28
going to be precious about it of course you're going to dig in your heels about
56:31
everything of course you're going to have these crazy fights if you've just
56:34
given like a tenth or you know an eighth of your life to this one project and
56:40
i think though that the casablanca shows that whatever the disagreements.
56:43
Whatever the grumpiness, everybody there was making movies so often.
56:46
They just were more inclined to let's hammer this out. Let's figure this out.
56:50
Let's get this thing shot and let's come up with the best collaboration we can
56:54
come up with here. Let's fix it. That's another thing. The other thing, and this is a.
56:59
A byproduct of money, but the studio system also allowed things to be reshot,
57:04
scenes to be reshot, lines to be added, things to be played with,
57:08
like a Broadway play, pull this out, try this.
57:10
There was even, it's fascinating. They were even, because of Casablanca,
57:14
when the Allies landed there, they were toying with the idea that they had to
57:18
shoot a new scene where you saw Rick and Captain Renault.
57:24
Going to the barracks where they were going to fight.
57:28
And they were even thinking about making a sequel which they announced but they never made,
57:33
and you know it was this notion that then you're going
57:36
to see renault and and blaine fighting
57:39
with the allies when they landed to make it like of the moment but everyone
57:43
was like no that's not what the story is about you're like starting a whole
57:46
other movie and they blessedly did not do it but it'd be fascinating to read
57:50
all those things but what i'm getting at is that from the very beginning with
57:54
all the screenwriters through the production,
57:57
through the editing, they were constantly working to make it the best it could be.
58:00
And the studio and that it was all centralized, that it was all there allowed
58:04
for that tinkering and the add this, add that, take this out, do this.
58:08
And I know it's tougher now, but if you really want to get to a great movie,
58:13
some version of that has to happen. You have to do that.
58:16
And lastly, I'll just say that the casting, so important, no amount of CG or
58:23
AI, and look, they're tools.
58:25
I'm not a grumpy old man about this, but no amount of CGI or AI can replace
58:31
all those amazing leads and character actors and humanity and everybody's energy
58:37
is bouncing off everybody,
58:38
everybody making these choices based on their acting training.
58:42
I mean, Casablanca is just a masterclass of what an amazing ensemble of talented
58:47
people, how that makes you feel.
58:50
And never, ever, ever underestimate.
58:53
The importance of casting. All right. There we go.
58:58
There's the case study. Casablanca in the books. Thank you for listening.
59:03
Secret Movie Club podcast 215 will be about Soviet sci-fi, just amazing science
59:09
fiction films made in the Soviet Union from the very beginning.
59:12
We'll probably talk about a silent film called Alita all the way through movies
59:17
made in the late 80s, like a Polish movie called Sex Mission, a comedy,
59:23
and On the Silver Globe, which was shot in the late 70s but released in the
59:27
late 80s and everything in between.
59:29
They are amazing movies. You should check them out. That'll be next week.
59:33
Please, to this week, if you would, check out our new website.
59:37
Go to secretmovieclub.com. Create your free account.
59:40
We're going to be doing parties, after parties, pre-parties,
59:43
meeting at speakeasies, in real life events, speakers, workshops.
59:47
If you are a movie lover, if you're a movie maker, cinema is better together.
59:51
Go to our website, get the account, sign up for the newsletter.
59:55
We are going to be announcing events in the next week or two.
59:58
I hope it'll be great. As always, you can write us at community at secretmovieclub.com
1:00:03
and we work to respond ASAP.
1:00:06
I hope everyone is doing well. I wish you all the best. Fight the good fight.
1:00:11
Keep the faith. Run the race.
1:00:14
Like Victor Laszlo says to Rick Blaine, welcome back to the fight.
1:00:20
And, you know, yeah, maybe it's a little corny, maybe it's a little cheesy.