Casablanca-DVD Review
August 10, 2003
It’s been 63 years since Jack Warner shelled out 20,000 dollars for an obscure, unproduced play titled “Everybody Comes to Rick’s”. The play, written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison had already been passed on when Warner’s head of production, Hal B. Wallis told the boss he wanted it for his next project. Twenty grand was an astronomical price to pay for an unproduced play nobody had ever heard of. Yet, Wallis saw something special in its exotic, relevant locale, its wartime intrigue and its melodramatic, tragic love story. He changed the name to “Casablanca”, spent a chaotic few months with an unfinished script and ended up coming away with the best picture Oscar for 1943, and with a film that hardly anybody would have imagined, during production anyway, would become Hollywood’s most cherished 102 minutes. Now, to commemorate the films 60th anniversary (its official national release was ’43, though it is generally considered a ’42 picture) Warner Brothers has done its large fan base right with a new double disk DVD, packed with extras and featuring the best print seen since its original premiere.
“Casablanca” is, by most accounts, the zenith of the Hollywood studio system era of filmmaking. In the early decades, films were made at a rapid clip; it was common for one studio to put out a staggering 50 films in any given year. The Hal Wallis production of “Casablanca” was supposed to be just another in the W.B. lot, but it became much more; it became a beckon of cooperation between cast and crew in painstakingly staging a faux foreign locale on a vast back lot while working from a now famous script that was so rugged the leading lady never really knew which of the two male leads she was supposed to be in love with. Wallis had a hardened visualist in director Michael Curtiz, a contract player on the verge of becoming an icon in Humphrey Bogart, a gorgeous and talented actress in Ingrid Bergman, the top composer of the era in Max Steiner, and quite possibly the best supporting cast in film history. With such a great mix of talent it’s amazing to hear of the films famously hectic shooting troubles; stories that are repeated time and again on the DVD’s many extras.
I’d venture to say that “Casablanca” is the most famous American film of all time; even more so than “Citizen Kane”, “Gone with the Wind” or, throwing a bone to modern times, “The Godfather” or “Star Wars”. Its lines are endlessly quoted today, its theme song is instantly recognizable, and its iconic Bogart performance is still the pedestal in which we put the notion of the wounded, macho and commanding romantic hero. But for those out there yet to discover the incredible joys of this knockout masterpiece, a brief synopsis of the plot is in order.
The time is 1942, the locale is North Africa, and Casablanca is a city that harbors the world’s undesirables. On any night at Rick’s Café American you could find the French prefect of police, Louis Renault (marvelous Claude Rains) dining with the occupying Nazi leader, Major Strasser (notorious Nazi hater Conrad Veidt). While Sam the piano man (Dooley Wilson) belts out “Knock On Wood” to an enthusiastic crowd of drunkards and socialites his boss and best friend, cynical American ex-patriot Rick Blain (Bogie, in white suit with trademark cigarette) oversees his clubs welfare; the roulette wheel in the back, the pickpocket at the bar, and the all important letters of transit, a one way ticket to freedom, given to him by the criminal Ugarte (the irrepressible Peter Lorre). There is a charged atmosphere to Rick’s, where words and glances are chosen carefully and the hand you play could be the one that lands you in a concentration camp. But Rick doesn’t play the wrong hand, he plays his own; “I stick my neck out for nobody,” is his oft-quoted catchphrase.
As mysterious as any hero in film history ever was, Bogart’s Rick is a master of the cursory comeback, of the necessary character dodge. Nobody really knows who he is or why he ended up in Casablanca, which really isn’t an ideal place to be at the moment. Captain Renault mentions how he thinks Rick may have fled the States because possibly he killed a man. Not true, says Rick, he came to Casablanca for the water. Water, Louis questions, we’re in a desert? “I was misinformed,” cracks Rick, cigarette smoke blazing into the sky to meet the ominous glare of the airport search light as it queries the nighttime empty streets as if it too would make a dash at the opportune moment. “Casablanca” is the film in which the steady and unique Warner’s contract actor Humphrey Bogart simply became Bogie, the most recognizable screen presence that side of Brando. Like his character said the year before in “The Maltese Falcon”, “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”
Like all of the varied sorts in the crowded desert city, Rick does have a sordid past, and it comes back to slap him in the gut when his ex-lover Ilsa Lund (ravishing and cool Ingrid Bergman) walks into his bar. Boy, of all the gin joints, she had to pick his; and on top of that coincidence, she has her husband in tow, French resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). This is where it gets interesting; Rick loved Ilsa in Paris, but in came the Nazi’s and in flight, Ilsa jilted Rick, with a famous crying dear John letter after learning Laszlo, presumed dead, was alive and well. Now she and hubby are back, looking for the exit-visa’s that, low and behold, belongs to her scorned ex-lover. Lover is a sticky term in the sense that, in 1942, the mere thought that a married woman could have had sex with anybody not her husband was something the censorship board wouldn’t tolerate, so it’s all very subtly left to the imagination, which frankly, is where we want it.
How will this impossibly messy situation play out? Will Rick leave with Ilsa and the letters of transit, or will he possibly let her go, giving a speech about nobility, bean hills and always having Paris, before walking off on a rainy airport tarmac and starting a beautiful friendship with Louis? Well, you know how it goes, the story is pure melodrama, but it’s unbelievably professional, oddly humbling, and perfectly realized. By the time Rick does say “Here’s lookin’ at you kid” for the last time, we’ve realized (with tears in our eyes and joy in our hearts over the masterpiece we just witnessed) that, per the song, the fundamental things do apply; that no matter what the future brings, this fight for love and glory will rightfully live on, as time continues to go by.
The new “Casablanca” DVD is something of a godsend to both the casual fan and the diehard film buff. It’s filled with all kinds of information, albeit repetitive and already well known, on the production, the lore and myth, and the principal crew. Much is made of the script (officially credited to Julius and Philip Epstein & Howard Koch); how the Epstein twins were called away to help Frank Capra with his “Why We Fight” (remember, this was right around the time of the American involvement in WWII) series, so Koch, a contract writer with Warner’s, was called in to patch up the resolution. The script is the films glorious backbone, Julius Epstein, in one of the documentaries, talks about how the ending simply didn’t work, until a light bulb struck in his brothers head to resolve three strings at once with the killing of Strasser by Rick while Louis turns good and famously says, “Round up the usual suspects”. Epstein notes that Wallis and Curtiz hated how the scene played out, so two reaction shots were added, one of Rick and one of Louis, and the rest is history. As for the films most famous line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” the best final line in film history? That is credited to Wallis himself, who, nearly a month after production, called Bogart back because he felt a simple fade to black didn’t cut it. What an instinct, it’s no wonder that it’s Hal B. Wallis who is often given the most credit for the outcome of the classic.
On an entertaining and loving commentary tract our countries best film critic, Roger Ebert, waxes poetic about why the film is so revered today, even by a younger generation allergic to black and white. Ebert feels its incredible longevity is due, in part by all of the now famous scenes, but also because its characters are so good. We can forgive the plots machinations and falsehoods (why, if the Nazi’s were so ruthless, didn’t they just kill Laszlo?) because the story of Rick and Ilsa is so enthralling. We can marvel at how Laszlo is so good he’s almost angelic in his stiffness (Ebert notes how Henried seems less than thrilled to be billed third) and how Rick is first a wounded cynic, but ends up the romantic and patriotic anti-hero. In his commentary, like in his print reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebert speaks with a conviction of a man who has seen the film some 50 times, and has been moved by it every time around.
There are some interesting tidbits that come to light in the informative extras. One well known fact is that Max Steiner really didn’t like “As Time Goes By”, but couldn’t get rid of it because reshooting the bar scene (“Play it Sam”) was an impossibility due to Bergman’s newly shorn hairdo for her next role in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Steiner had to keep it and decided to use the song as the major motif of his score, and in doing so made an old song into a top ten hit. You can’t hear “As Time Goes By” today without thinking of Rick and Ilsa, of Dooley Wilson at the piano, and of Bogart’s face as he reads the painful good-bye letter that day in Paris when she wore blue and the Germans wore gray.
For all of the excess and flash of the DVD, what is still the crown jewel is the film itself, and the stunning digitally restored print. Highlighting Michael Curtiz and cinematographer Arthur Edson’s stark noirish shadows and slick camera movements, the transfer is as gorgeous as the “Citizen Kane” double-disk transfer put out two years ago. An apt comparison if ever there was one, for if “Citizen Kane” is the auteur’s vision of the greatest film ever made, than “Casablanca” is, easy to say, the team-effort, studio system equivalent.
by Adam Suraf