Isenberg - Well always have Casablanca: the life, legend, and afterlife of Hollywoods most beloved movie

To Melanie, Jules, and Bruno

I feel about Casablanca that it has a life of its own. There is something mystical about it. It seems to have filled a need, a need that was there before the film, a need that the film filled.

INGRID BERGMAN

W hen Casablanca premiered in 1942, in the middle of the war and just two weeks after the city of Casablanca itself had surrendered to General Pattons troops, even the most optimistic of Tinseltown dreamers could hardly have predicted that it would go on to become perhaps the most beloved of all Hollywood movies. And yet this picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap, as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it at the time, would go on not only to win Oscars for best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay but to enjoy more revival screenings than any other film in the history of cinema. Seventy years after the films release, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences selected Casablanca to inaugurate its Oscar Outdoors series at its new open-air theater in the heart of Hollywood. As Umberto Eco once said, Casablanca is not one movie; it is movies.

Like so many other fans, I was reminded of the movies indelible place in our cultural lexicon in the spring of 2016, when news arrived that cast member Madeleine Lebeau had passed away in a small Spanish town on the Costa del Sol. Not yet twenty when the film was made, the French-born Lebeau turned in a spirited performance as Yvonne, the young woman who gets snubbed by Humphrey Bogart in the films first act, only to return defiantly to Ricks Cafshifting her allegiances with the speed of a Vichy opportuniston the arm of a Nazi officer. She ultimately reveals her true colors by singing a vigorous rendition of La Marseillaise during the pivotal scene in which the caf patrons sing the French national anthem with increasing fervor to drown out the competing Nazi chorus of Die Wacht am Rhein. Tears stream down her trembling cheeks, shot in luminous close-up, as she cries out, Vive la France! and Vive la dmocratie! Three decades after the film was released, Leonid Kinskey, the Russian-born actor who played Sascha the barman, remarked, I think it was the most moving patriotic scene ever played in any picture. Without Yvonne, without her inimitable voice and her tears, the scene is unthinkable.

In the obituaries published in newspapers and posted on websites across the globe, Lebeaus age was given as ninety-two, and she was widely presumed to have been the last surviving cast member. A striking shot of her taken from the Marseillaise scene accompanied many of the death notices, and, in an official statement delivered soon afterward, French Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay said of Lebeau: She will forever be the face of the French resistance.

Yvonne (Madeleine Lebeau) singing La Marseillaise.

That sentiment encapsulates the magic of Casablanca: a scene from a film that was first brought to life in the dream factories of Southern California in the summer of 1942 is still, some seven and a half decades later, considered representative of a real political and historical epoch. During my research for this book, I spoke with dozens of peoplefilmmakers and family members, film critics and fanswho, like Minister Azoulay, felt that a specific scene or a specific character, or even the film as a whole, had come to mean something much larger with each passing decade.

Well Always HaveCasablanca is an attempt to capture the story of not just how this most remarkable movie was madeand of the indispensable role that refugees from Hitlers Europe had in making itbut to explore how and why Casablanca continues to live on in our collective consciousness, as affecting to our hearts and minds now as it was from the start.

Like all movies, Casablanca is not without its imperfections. There are undeniably corny lines and a healthy dose of Hollywood hokum, in the parlance of the day. But its spectacular achievement, whether its the result of the genius of the system, as the great French critic Andr Bazin once termed it, or the good fortune of historical timing, prodigious talent, and a host of factors that often elude classification, remains indisputable. As Paul Whitington observed in the Belfast Telegraph weeks after Lebeaus death, Maybe there are better films than Casablanca, but there are probably none better loved. It flickers, as bravely and beautifully as ever, in the glorious black-and-white shadows of our imagination.

WELL ALWAYS HAVE

Casablanca

C asablanca began its fabled career as a modest, unproduced, three-act stage play, Everybody Comes to Ricks, written in 1940 by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. An English teacher at Central Commercial High School in midtown Manhattan, Burnett was at the start of his career as a playwright. Hed only recently finished his undergraduate degree at Cornell University, and reserved his skills as a dramatist mostly for nights and weekends. A few years before, based on his experiences at his day job, hed finished a draft of a play he called An Apple for the Teacher, which would later be known as Hickory Stick. Cowritten with Fredrick Stephani, it would eventually earn an abbreviated run on Broadwayfive days total at the Mansfield Theatrein May 1944. Sometime in the late 1930s, Burnett met his writing partner Alison at the Atlantic Beach Club, one of the many cabana-lined enclaves that dot the South Shore of Long Island, which they both frequented in summer. They quickly began a happy collaboration that lasted many years.

Almost a full decade his senior, a divorce with three small children, the far more cosmopolitan Alison (ne Leviton) read Burnetts work, offered him her wisdom, and shared her network of precious contacts within the New York drama scene. She introduced Burnett to her friend the Broadway producer Delos Chappell, who already had a handful of successful stage credits to his name. Although Chappell was unable to find an immediate home for An Apple for the Teacher on Broadwaythat came half a decade laterhe gave Burnett the necessary encouragement to keep at it. Newly married to his young wife, Frances, living in a rented apartment, and still making car payments, Burnett held on to his day job, continuing to write on the side, often with Alisons aid.

Something had occurred in the summer of 1938 that left a profound impact on Burnetts life, and ultimately on motion-picture history. At the age of twenty-seven, still relatively innocent, unsophisticated, and nominally Jewish, Burnett journeyed with his wife across the Atlantic during his school break. I had inherited $10,000 from an uncle, he later recalled, and it was one of my romantic dreams to go to Europe on a big ocean liner. My wifes family lived in Belgium. I had read headlines about Hitler, but they were meaningless until we got to Antwerp and my wifes family asked us to go to Viennathe Anschluss had just happenedto help other relatives get money out of Austria. By that point, Jews in Nazi-occupied Austria, at least those who were fortunate enough to leave, were prevented from bringing money and other assets with them. I went to the consulate to get a visa, he recounted further, and he said, Mr. Burnett, I dont know why youre going to Vienna and I dont want to know, but I want to warn you that if you get into any trouble in Vienna this government cannot help you. He gave me a small American flag to wear in my lapel, and he said, You must never go out in the street without wearing this. Burnett went to Europe that summer, hoping the journey might serve as a belated honeymoon for him and his wife. He returned with a story he never forgot.