Episode 736: Casablanca (1942)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh he is, folks, it's show tied.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
People say good money to see this movie.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater, they are cold, sodas,
popcorn and no monsters.

Speaker 4 (00:16):
In the protection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Speaker 5 (00:20):
Off carsa Blanca city of hope and despair, located in

(00:54):
French Morocco in North Africa, the meeting place of adventurers, fugitives, criminals.
Refugees lord into this danger swept oasis by the hope
of escape to the Americas. But they're all trapped, for
there is no escape. Against this fascinating background is woven
the story of an imperishable love and the enthralling saga

(01:15):
of six desperate people, each in Casablanca to keep an
appointment with destiny. I was willing to shoot Captain Rhino,
and I'm willing to shoot you, all right, Major.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
You asked for it.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
You knew much.

Speaker 6 (01:45):
Shy loved.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
How much I still love you. I know a good
deal more about you than you suspect. I know, for instance,
that you're in love with a woman, perhaps a strange
circumstance that you both should love the same woman.

Speaker 7 (02:11):
What do you want for Salem? I don't buy and
sell human being. It's too bad. As Catser Black is
leaving commodity.

Speaker 5 (02:17):
You can ask any price you want, but you must
give me those letters version no deal, all right.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
I tried to reason with you.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
I tried everything.

Speaker 5 (02:24):
Now I want those letters more.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Welcome to the Projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
joined me once again. It's mister Bill Ackerman.

Speaker 6 (02:58):
This sort of takes a sting out of being occupied,
doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Also joining the booth for the first time is Federico Bertolini.

Speaker 8 (03:05):
Thank you so much for having me. Mike. It's a
pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
We are wrapping up another month of Patreon requests with
one from Brian to Zatori. It's maybe the most obscure
film we've ever discussed on the show, and I feel
really bad that so few people will have a chance
to see it. It's a nineteen forty two film from
director Michael Curtiz, Aasa Blanca. It's the story of Rick Blaine,
played by Humphrey Bogart, the owner of a nightclub in

(03:28):
Morocco whose place is populated by immigrants trying to escape
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

(03:50):
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?

Speaker 6 (04:00):
This is probably the hardest of all the episodes I've
done with you to think of what the first time
I saw Casablanca. My parents were big Bogart fans. I
think this was my dad's favorite movie. So even as
a little kid, some of the very first videotapes we
had where Humphrey Bogart movies taped off tea like, So
Casablanca was something that I saw scenes of as far

(04:22):
back as I can remember seeing any movies. The first
time I can remember watching it as a movie start
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

(04:42):
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

(05:04):
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,

(05:27):
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.

Speaker 7 (05:45):
It a lot.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
And Frederica, how about yourself?

Speaker 8 (05:48):
I was thirteen about the same age. I actually remember this.
I saw it on VHS, the fiftieth anniversary edition, the
white one with both of them on the cover, not
the theatrical poster, on a CRT television, placed on top
of my clothes Jessert and I loved it. It's just
one of those films that's classic Hollywood. It was made

(06:09):
even better when a couple of years after that, I
got to see it in an old movie palace with
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.

(06:29):
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

(06:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
I was late to this movie. I think I told
the story when we did the episode on the multice Falcon.
That was probably the first time I actually sat down
and watched the Humphrey Bogart film when I was probably
about twenty twenty one, and it's funny. I was just
looking up the date of the Aljan Hermit's book Round

(07:24):
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

(07:44):
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

(08:04):
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

(08:25):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:08):
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

(09:30):
of it in twenty twenty five.

Speaker 6 (09:32):
When you talk about younger people maybe not knowing this one,
I was thinking about this and how this is one
of the first cult movies in America, the cult following
at the Bridle Theater in nineteen fifty three in Cambridge.
That's an art house theater, and it's like something that's
being shown in like some of the first retrospectives of
Bogart movies. It's like he's still alive, I think when

(09:53):
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

(10:16):
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,

(10:38):
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

(11:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
A miracle, or maybe not a miracle. Maybe sad that
so many of the issues that it brought up in
nineteen forty two are still issues today, talking about refugees
and the refugee problem quote unquote, and just the way
that we have occupied territories. Just thinking about Resident Volinski
coming to the White House recently and just what a

(11:32):
shit show that was. I was like, oh, is this
If we had visited VC France, would we have gotten
the same reception back in nineteen forty two.

Speaker 8 (11:39):
Probably The crazy thing about that was seeing it in
the theater at a revival screening recently, maybe a couple
of weeks ago. I was in a tiny, little theater
with only maybe five other people, and there were all men,
which was strange to say the least. And then afterwards
one of them told me that he went to school
with Julius Epstein's granddaughter or something like that. It was

(12:00):
just strange days. But I forgot how many times they
bring up in the movie and they say the word
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

(12:24):
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.

(12:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
This is probably the first time that I've been able
to have an episode with two other co hosts where
we've all been able to see the movie recently in
a theater, which does not happen very often unless we're
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

(13:30):
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

(13:54):
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

(14:15):
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.

Speaker 6 (14:31):
One of my most influential books on me is Danny
Perry's Cult Movies, and so that was probably the first
book I read about like that film being a genuine
cult movie, as far as like people wearing costumes, quoting dialogue,
back popping Champagne in the theater, the interactivity of it,
which I think by the time I got to Casa Blank,
it was one of the classic American films, if not

(14:52):
the classic Hollywood film, Like how was this in the
same conversation as a racer?

Speaker 8 (14:55):
Heead?

Speaker 6 (14:56):
But you know, at that time it was actually something
that could be relied on as an old movie that
drew a large, passionate, younger audience that was not even
the audience that saw it in nineteen forty two or
forty three. Was it Vietnam generation kids, boomers. It's interesting
that way. I think trying to get my head around
just the cult side of it was part of the

(15:16):
fun of prepping for this coming. I was in the
same boat as you, was, like what do we say
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.

Speaker 8 (15:33):
I believe in us, I know we can't.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
I think I had seen When Harry Met Sally before
I saw Casablanca. So there's the whole thing in there
where you see them watching the film when they're younger
and then watching it again when they're older, and the
different reactions that they had to that. And Efron she
was born in forty one, so she is coming to
this as a middle aged person. As far as the

(15:56):
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,

(16:17):
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.

Speaker 8 (16:25):
Absolutely, I always take a little bit of umbriage with
the Moniker cult movies, because cult is almost like an
epithet that you give to something that is not to
the level of religion. And in my house, basically art
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

(16:47):
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

(17:08):
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

(17:29):
it becomes basically a religion and you carry it with
you wherever you go.

Speaker 6 (17:34):
Yeah, I was thinking also just about how this kind
of establishes beyond the Maltese falcon. It softens the Bogart
persona that makes it the most ingratiating version of that tough.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Guy part of his career.

Speaker 6 (17:48):
As far as I mean, I think that Bogart is
a big part of why Casablanca had that second life.
Is like the attraction to his persona I think was
something that really was kind of well served by this film.
But I think even in the sixties, I mean, you
have things like The Guard's Breathless that are also referencing
Boguard and all the things that come about in the
seventies that we might talk about play it against Sam

(18:08):
or the man with Boguard's it's the mystique of that actor,
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,

(18:30):
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,

(18:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Dynamic character that he starts off with this whole I
stick my neck up for no one. I don't let
people drink with me, nobody joins me at my table,
I don't share drink with anybody in this bar, and
just the way that he eventually starts to soften, and
then we see why he was so hard. We see
that flashback. We get to see him as this joyous character,

(19:23):
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,

(19:43):
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

(20:04):
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.

Speaker 9 (20:13):
He used to swap shots between drinks and drinks between shots,
whichever you like.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Mary respeks to you, sir, few men ever swapped more
than one shot with Sean Reagan.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
And you get a few other things about Rick, but
you don't really get how he came to Casablanca, other
than for the waters, which is probably my favorite line
of the film.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
What in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

Speaker 7 (20:36):
My health?

Speaker 9 (20:37):
I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
The waters? What waters? We're in the desert?

Speaker 7 (20:43):
I was misinformed.

Speaker 8 (20:46):
Absolutely, I love that. That was probably one of the
biggest laughs in my theater, my small theater this time
around you and the five other guys O the size
of course shocked, shocked to find there's gambling here. That
one's the other big one that probably has to be
my favorite. So you were talking about how soft Bogart
is in this, and it's funny because he has a

(21:07):
little pithy remark where he said, I was at Warner's
under a contract. It was like the seventh year of
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

(21:29):
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

(21:49):
and this is just spectacular.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Oh yeah, she looks amazing in this. And she also
is such a great character that she knows she lies
to Rick, or let's say, she hides the truth as
far as what her past is, and this whole thing
that they have where it's like no questions and that
doesn't even it's not even like upfront, but you get

(22:13):
this whole thing where he starts to ask her more
things and he's, oh, yeah, I remember, no questions, and yeah.
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.

(22:35):
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

(22:58):
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.

Speaker 6 (23:12):
All the mystery of that character is also partly, i think,
because they couldn't tell the story as it is in
the production code reasons, and so by carving away the backstory,
they leave so much more that you can fill in
with your imagination as far me you know, because in
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

(23:34):
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

(23:56):
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

(24:16):
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,

(24:37):
but propaganda films.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Federico, you mentioned the immigrant cast, and I totally agree
with you that that really makes a huge difference to
see all these very authentic looking people, even when they're
looking up at the plane that's coming by that ultimately
is carrying major Strasser, but they're looking up at this
plane like that could be us. Someday we could be
on that plane. We could be go to Lisbon and

(25:01):
then to the United States, and then all of the voices,
the language that you hear inside of the actual cafe,
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

(25:21):
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

(25:42):
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

(26:03):
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.

Speaker 7 (26:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (26:27):
The Kinsky, the bartender who plays Sasha the Russian of
the film. His big major Hollywood debut was Trouble in
Paradise by Lubitsch. And the most amazing thing I learned
doing research for this was that Paul henryed. They originally
wanted Philip Dorn, who was under contract at Warner's, but

(26:49):
he was already in Random Harvest so they couldn't pull
him from that production. So they decided, okay, we'll get
a real like European foreigner, probably Eastern or Central European.
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,

(27:10):
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

(27:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
If it had been Herbert Marshall, I might have gone
away with Victor Laslow as well. And that's even worried
about Vitrick Blaine. But because Marshall was so great, unless
he was wearing a goateee, because we can't have him
with facial hair.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
I certainly it wouldn't wear a beer either.

Speaker 10 (28:03):
What well, I wouldn't or you wouldn't.

Speaker 11 (28:07):
I noted any of my business, but if I didn't
have anything to hide, I certainly wouldn't appeared.

Speaker 6 (28:12):
When you talk about the real life emigres in the
cast and the famous La Marseille is singing scene, and
the fact that so many people in that scene, this
is part of the legend of it, were real life
exopats fleeing Nazi persecution gives it almost a documentary quality
to it because those are real people who's real tears.
That's capturing something more than just movie characters, like that's

(28:33):
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

(28:54):
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,

(29:16):
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

(29:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
I completely agree, And yeah, to hear how this movie
traveled around the world and when it played and how
it played, and just said it was of course in
Germany for many years, and then when it did finally play,
it was not the rape version of it. Just that
it took forever for people to actually be able to
see this movie in totality. And it's remarkable to me

(30:11):
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

(30:33):
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

(30:55):
to try to get these visas. I don't know what
you guys think.

Speaker 6 (30:58):
I always interpreted it as that the money was preventing
that from happening. That basically it was implied that she
was going to pay with sex for the visas. But
because the game is fixed with the gambling, he's able
to come up with the money. And this is why
Renault is a little bit miffed at him.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
You're right, yeah, I'll be coming by with the beautiful blonde.
Make sure she doesn't lend.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (31:22):
That's also softened from the play because in the play,
though that the Bulgarian couple is much more central to
the plot and Renault is a lot more upset about it.
It becomes much more of a plot point than in
this It's a much briefer kind of situation. In a way,
it's almost like there's multiple versions of the couple trying
to get out of town, because you have the Bulgarian
couple and you also have older couples that are just

(31:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
That scene in the casino with the roulette, that's the
moment for me. That's the moment where you get to
see Rick's true colors, that he actually helps out these people.
He has no reason to at all other than just
because of the heartfelt sentiment that she brings to him.
And I loved the way that that plays out. I

(32:24):
think it is just absolutely wonderful to see that and
that is just two spins of the roulette wheel and
he's able to a for this couple's visas to get
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.

Speaker 8 (32:43):
I always cry well, yeah, Kinski comes from behind the
bar and starts he's talking to Carl. Carl like is
so excited finally that his friend and his basically his
boss has grown a heart that he tells Sasha, and
Sasha starts like yelling in Russian and he comes over
and kisses him and he's like, get your paws off me,

(33:03):
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.

(33:24):
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.

(33:47):
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

(34:10):
just ruining the mistique of it, all of him as
a character.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
And you talked about the Marseillas scene with the people crying,
and I'm right there with them every single time. I
am a sucker for that scene when the orchestra comes in,
and I love that. Albie Wallace, I think it was
Helbi Wallace was the one that was just like, I
don't care that it's only this many people on screen.
We're going to have a full orchestra. It might have
been Jack Warner himself actually that gave that piece of

(34:36):
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

(34:57):
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

(35:20):
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

(35:40):
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

(36:01):
then they're able to start playing along with what Victor
Laslow wants them to do, and it just turns into magic.

Speaker 6 (36:08):
Yeah, for a quote unquote war movie. It's the only
battle scene, but it's a musical battle scene. That's what
makes it kind of stirring. And yeah, I also will
join the Yeah, I cry in this whole sequence of
the film as well, because it's the scene of him
being generous with the Bulgarian couple followed by the Marseilles
kind of seems so back to back, like these moments
of generosity of spirit, which I think as you get older,

(36:29):
it's like not really romantic tragedy or death of characters
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.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
And the other thing about that is you're talking about
it was this scene, then this scene. This movie moves
along so quickly and there are no dead scenes to it.
There's nothing where I'm just like, oh, yes, this scene,
I guess I'll go use the bathroom. There's none of that.
Everything adds to the next thing, and everything has a
purpose in this movie. There's no moments where I'm just like,

(36:59):
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,

(37:19):
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

(37:42):
just so.

Speaker 8 (37:43):
Callous every time that happens. Though, the problem is I'm
the only one laughing in the theme.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
I laugh as well because mayn Claude Rains is fucking
phenomenal in this movie.

Speaker 8 (37:54):
No Claude Rains like for me, there's two like you've
got Ingrid Bergman. Without her, this fear would not work
or it wouldn't reach the heights that it was because
I think, Bill, you brought up Peppolelimoco and Algiers and
the connection is they wanted heavy lamar. She's got that luminosity.
She's absolutely gorgeous, but she doesn't have the earthiness that

(38:15):
Ingrid Bergmann has. And Bergmann like, years and years afterwards,
she was actually watching herself on screen and she said,
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

(38:35):
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

(38:56):
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

(39:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Oh God, Laurie. You guys know, and anybody that listens
to the show knows. I cannot say enough nice things
about Laurie. And he's in here for just two scenes
and just steals the show the way that he moves
his face. He plays his instrument so well, and you
just get to see those little and I always talk

(39:54):
about that when he raises his eyebrows and his whole
forehead will move, and just those little things where he's
just you despise me, don't truck. I just love that
whole thing that he's doing there.

Speaker 8 (40:06):
If I ever thought about you, I would the.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Way that he is trying to get Rick's approval and
just this whole like, oh have you heard about these
German couriers? And when they find out or when Rick
finds out that it was probably Garty who might have
killed these guys, is like, oh, I underestimated you, like
you've just gone up in my book. And I think
Hugardi really gets off on that. I think he's very

(40:29):
much wants to not be despised by Rick.

Speaker 6 (40:32):
Yeah, I could never tell with that line if he was.
When he says that he's impressed by him. Is he
happy that he's killed Nazis or is he judging him
for being that ruthless and trying to get something to
sell that he's murdering people for it, Like, it's unclear
to me which I like that. I could read it
either way. But I think that in the play again,
it's like it has that line tell Rick that even

(40:54):
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

(41:16):
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

(41:36):
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.

(42:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
I think it's also very smart the way that they
shoot Reins when he's with the Nazis, and that difference
between him and kybrant Fit, and just that he's dwarfed
by all of the Nazis and you get to see that,
especially when he's sitting at their table, and how they're
all taller than him, and even when he greets him
at the airport and Wight is to his right and
he's walking there and you just see that major height

(42:29):
difference between them. He's just this little officious guy. I know.
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

(42:50):
Heinrich doesn't help either.

Speaker 8 (42:52):
Yeah, there's a little bit of like a blending of
names where you associate them the same thing with Strasser,
because Strusser was an actual Nazi that was purged during
the Night of the Long Knives. And that's what I
always go back to. And there's a few like political
articles talking about the background of Casablanca and the ramifications
of it. But yeah, the thing with heights in this movie,

(43:14):
like the dynamic of men and women and men with
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

(43:34):
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

(43:54):
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

(44:15):
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

(44:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
Some of those pushings are just incredible, and some of
them are pretty subtle, and then you get towards where
he's drinking alone, and you get that really nice push
in that's on him. And I want to say that
it's is there a push in when they go to
the flashback that will always have Paris flashback.

Speaker 8 (45:20):
With a rise in the music, you know, with the
Steiner music, that's like the big dig in the knife.
Here we go, Oh, we're actually going to get into
the backstory.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
That Steiner score is just so great, the way that
he plays with as time goes by, the Marseilles and
then the German national anthem, the Deutsch lenober Ales, and
you get those just little snatches of those throughout the
whole thing, and like just to use the d as
like something bad is about to happen, or we're setting

(45:50):
the mood here that things are not right in Casablanca.
I just really thought that he used those different motifs
so well. And then you have the music that isn't
related to those three other pieces of music, and those
work wonderfully too.

Speaker 6 (46:04):
Before I forget, Heines is the other Naze not Heinrich
by the similar name, like Heine's the ketchup, Yeah, like
hands the ketchup and.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
If Humphrey Bogart was five six, how tall was Peter
Laurie because he howers over Peter Laurie every single time
they're on stage.

Speaker 8 (46:23):
Oh, Peter Laurie is like diminutive. I want to say
five foot two maybe, but then of course you get
into the camera angles.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Oh yeah, definitely five foot three, five foot three.

Speaker 12 (46:34):
Ah.

Speaker 8 (46:35):
I was off by one inch.

Speaker 6 (46:36):
Yeah, you're close.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
I guess a few inches makes all the difference, That's
what she said.

Speaker 6 (46:40):
I was thinking about the music, and of course as
time goes by and thinking about like memory, because one
thing I was thinking about with this film is just
that it has that built a nostalgia component just from
the outset, with like you must remember this as the
opening line, and that kind of holding on to some
romanticized version of the past, which is something that you
also have in Papularmcnalgae is like that kind of romantic

(47:02):
view of Paris as this thing to escape to, this
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

(47:22):
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,

(47:44):
which is interesting how it becomes kind of part of
the reputation of the film itself, but it's built into
the narrative.

Speaker 8 (47:52):
Even before the making of the film. Like Murray Burnett
writing the script, he was nostalgic of a time when
he went to I think it was yeah, and he
was in his dorm and he would listen to the
disc in the thirties of as Time Goes By, like
he that's why he put in the play. You know,
this whole entire film is just steeped with nostalgia and

(48:12):
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

(48:35):
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

(48:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
When they sing too you're talking about the way that
Gone with the Wind plays a little different. Now, there's
not a lot of if any racism in this movie. Yeah,
Ingrid Bergmann calls Sam boy at one point, just like
who's the boy on the piano. There's a little questionable there.
But you've got all of these Arabic people, all these
I would assume Islamic worshippers here, and you've got people

(49:31):
from all different areas coming in and you see them
all in the audience and they're all singing along to
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.

(49:51):
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

(50:12):
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

(50:34):
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

(50:55):
looking out for him to not only be moved over
like an indentured servant. No, he's your star entertainer. You
pay him correctly.

Speaker 6 (51:02):
When I think about films of the forties, I think
like val Lewton, and there's only a handful of people
I think of that, like, they seem to be a
little bit more progressive on race than unfortunately a lot
of what you have to forgive a lot when you
look at old Hollywood, but not this one.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
That's one of the reasons too, why it's so enduring
is that we're not sitting there cringing at times, so
it's very really I think the boy line just goes by,
and yeah, the selling of people. I think is as
appropriate with Sasha and the Professor as it is with Sam.
But yeah, I agree that there's more of a pointed
line there. Especially Americans were great at selling people back

(51:37):
in the past, and maybe it'll come back.

Speaker 6 (51:39):
We don't know, We don't know. I was gonna say,
I don't know. This is a generalization that I'm speaking
out of turning saying. But like when I think about
Warner Brothers films of this period, I think that they
seem to know the common guy in the street, and
like they specialize in like these kind of harder edged,
working class appeal kind of stories. I think that's why
their gangster films have never really completely gone out of date,

(52:02):
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

(52:23):
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

(52:44):
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,

(53:07):
is because it has that connection to pulpier things.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Oh yeah, the people of status. The people that he
breaks his rule for are Victor Laslow and Ilsa, And
I think that he would have broken the rule for
just Victor Laslough. He knows of Victor Laslow in the
way that he says the exploits are known everywhere. I
think he really respects this guy.

Speaker 8 (53:28):
In speaking to the people that I saw the film
with at this recent time, I tried to explain to
them that I was learning about the vitriol that the
Warner brothers had for the Nazis and how different it
was at that time and how ahead of the ball
they were in regards to the rest of the studios,
because in reading about Critiz, I had no idea that

(53:49):
in like in nineteen thirty three, right when the Nazis,
like they were just starting out and they were basically
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

(54:12):
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

(54:34):
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

(54:57):
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.

Speaker 6 (55:11):
Yeah, I think Wonder Brothers always reminds me of Roger
Corman in that they're both concerned with entertainment first, but
they always have that socio political kind of element buried in,
even in the less overtly political films, like less political
than Casablanca, but it's always in there, like that social
commentary is, they don't forget to be entertainments first, but
they smuggle in these other elements all the time. And

(55:32):
it's not just this one. But yeah, I mean, they're
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

(55:54):
part of what makes a film a hit.

Speaker 8 (55:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:57):
I've brought this book up before, and I really have
to recommend it again, the Thomas Storty book, Hollywood and
Hitler in nineteen thirty three to thirty nine, and just
the way that you're talking about how there was that
financial incentive and a lot of people didn't want to
have their movies withdrawn from Germany because Germany was such
a huge market and pretty soon Nazism was taking over Europe. Gosh,

(56:20):
we're going to lose that market. We can't offend these guys.
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,

(56:43):
not this one. I love that line too that Rick
has when he asked Sam what time it is?

Speaker 9 (56:48):
SAMs bose it was December nineteen forty one, and Cash
a blank at what time was in New York?

Speaker 1 (56:55):
We my watch stuckleep in the yark?

Speaker 9 (57:02):
Better sleep all over America.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
I can really see where you're coming from here. It's
time for us to wake up. And just Rick is America. Basically,
he's the guy. I stick my neck out for no one.
I'm not gonna get involved in this fight. Leave me alone.
I just want to sit here at my bar and
have my little world. I don't need to be part
of any of these other problems, and then eventually realizes, no,

(57:29):
you're a part of this world. You have to get
into this fight. It's just like when the Habbits were
talking with tree Beard, kind of hold back this storm.

Speaker 7 (57:40):
We must weather such things as we have orways done.

Speaker 11 (57:45):
How can that be your decision?

Speaker 9 (57:48):
This is not our war.

Speaker 10 (57:52):
But you're part of this world, aren't you. You must help, please,
you must do something.

Speaker 9 (58:11):
You are young and brave, Master Maty, but your part
in the.

Speaker 7 (58:18):
Street is over. Go back to your hope.

Speaker 6 (58:26):
Sam has the most haunting delivery of the line, my
watch stopped. That is maybe the most propaganda ish sounding
like speech he has, as far as like I bet
they're sleep all over America. But it still works. I
still must to find it effective. As far as like
the alright that we're touching on it. We're not gonna
be too on the nose with this stuff too much.

Speaker 8 (58:43):
Yeah, it doesn't Sydney Green Street even have like a
direct response to Rix like ambivalence. He says, isolationism is
no longer a viable position to have anymore.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Green Street is another one where I just again to
two scenes right at the beginning, where we have him
making those propositions to take over Sam and to buy
ricks Barr, and then later on we get a little
bit more of him. Actually I think three scenes, right yeah,
because we have Rick coming in and talking with him

(59:17):
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,

(59:42):
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

(01:00:03):
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.

Speaker 8 (01:00:22):
He's incredible in this. Only a couple of days ago
I watched The Man Who Laughs Again with him and
what an incredible career he had and what a like
his like morality where he is he left Germany to
come to America to work in the twenties, he was
in all those like Universal films. Then sound came, his

(01:00:43):
accent inability to learn English made him go back. He
was like one of the highest paid people at UFA.
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,

(01:01:06):
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.

(01:01:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
That's great.

Speaker 8 (01:01:37):
I just wanted to bring up the fact that one
of the first things that you see after the opening
montage was actually the minaret of the cul to prayer,
like somebody's actually up there. You were talking about a
Muslim adherence in Morocco and how it's just part of
the background and you don't hear the call to prayer.
In peppeal Imoco you do, but in Casablanki you don't.

(01:01:58):
But just there.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
As an American born in the seventies, I wasn't sure
who Marshall Patan was. I believe that was a gentleman's name,
the guy who is running Vichy France, and that the
guy is shot in front of that big poster of Batana.
I was like, Oh, that's nice, that's very telling. And
they've got that whole the double cross symbol and we

(01:02:22):
get to see that there and then we get to
see it in the guy's ring later on, and that
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.

Speaker 8 (01:02:43):
Yeah, the cross of Lorrain. I love it. In Passage
to Marseille at the beginning, it's emblazoned on the side
of the B seventeens, and it's just you see them
in Russian service, you see them in English service, but
for free French service, it's really something else. And I
just want to point out that the guy that up
to them at the table burger, the character's name is
John Quahlon. Like we talk about this supporting cast, of

(01:03:06):
all supporting cast, this is the all time cast. But
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

(01:03:29):
every single person. Basically, the Americans are the minority in
this can I.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Think he worked a lot with John Ford. If memory serves,
I would not be surprised.

Speaker 8 (01:03:39):
John Ford also had a stock company.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Yeah, and that was the thing I liked about this
one as well, and talking about having your green streets,
your lories your Bogarts and then even the yeah Claude
Rains to be able to see him show up in
Pastures Marseille and just say, oh, okay, here's this guy again.
One of them isn't in there, but even Michael Cartoo's
directed that one, and I want a six Steiner might

(01:04:02):
have done the music. It was like an old home week.
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.

Speaker 8 (01:04:10):
It's incredible because that was lensed by James Wong Howe,
one of my favorite cinematographers. You want to talk about
foreigners in Hollywood, James Wong how was a Chinese American
working in Hollywood and he had an incredible career. By
nowadays we talk about how hard it is for people
of certain backgrounds to get into roles of cinematography. But

(01:04:31):
he was supposed to lens Casablanca, and they put him
on a different project. And I think it was Tenny Wright,
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

(01:04:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
And that's the thing that can't be understated is that
Casablanca was not set up to be some big prestige picture.
It was just another Warner Brothers movie. People were assigned
to it, people got picked up for it. It wasn't
like there was a big casting call for that. It
wasn't Who's gonna be Ilsa? You know, it was just okay,

(01:05:31):
it could be this was it could be that person. Okay,
we'll go with this one. It wasn't that big of
a deal. And it just ended up reading all those
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.

Speaker 6 (01:05:53):
Anytime they tried to vote Casablanca in contemporary films, whether
it's Havana or The Good German, and then it always
feels weighted down by this kind of pressure to be
a classic, whereas part of what makes Casablanca so great
is that it's so light on its feet and races
along and it doesn't feel like it's trying to be
something important. It just winds up being important. And I

(01:06:13):
think that all of the films that try to evoke it,
they fair best when they don't seem to be trying
to do it exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Yeah, let's talk about that attempt to recapture that lightning again.
We're going to take a break and we'll be back
with a pair of interviews. First up, we'll hear from
the author of We'll Always Have Casablanca, Noah Eisenberg. After that,
we'll hear from Alan k Roady, the author of Michael Kurtiz,
A Life in Film, and we'll be back with both
of those right after these brief messages.

Speaker 13 (01:06:49):
Hello, everyone, this is Malcolm McDowell. I just want to
say that this is a request to listeners of the
Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Patreon dot com, p A T eo N dot com.

Speaker 7 (01:07:10):
Slash projection booth.

Speaker 13 (01:07:12):
That's pretty simple.

Speaker 7 (01:07:14):
I think you can do that.

Speaker 13 (01:07:15):
It's a great show, and Mike, he provides hours of
great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
a sip of the old Molocco, and then.

Speaker 7 (01:07:29):
You'll be ready for a little of the.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Old in out, in out, real horror show.

Speaker 11 (01:07:35):
Bye bye.

Speaker 2 (01:07:42):
I know last time when we talked, we were discussing
actually two times, I believe we had you on the
show to talk about Edgar Olmer because of your biography
of him. I'm so curious how you went from Olmer
to Casablanca.

Speaker 11 (01:07:55):
Okay, the Olmer book, which I'm happy to say sorry shamelessly,
is now out on paperback, which is great. Ten years
later they brought out a paperback edition that was a
labor of love and a labor of many years. The
Casablanca book came as an opportunity to write for a
more popular audience. Not strictly, the ome biography was an

(01:08:20):
attempt to straddle both a slightly more scholarly film geekish
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,

(01:08:42):
Matt Wiland. It's from the Twin Cities originally.

Speaker 14 (01:08:45):
And.

Speaker 11 (01:08:47):
I was talking with Molly Haskell, and Molly Haskell the
great pioneering feminist film critic from Reverence to Rape, among
many other fabulous titles. She's a a great mentor and
friend and support. And we were having lunch not long after. Frankly,
my dear, her book on Gone with the Wind had

(01:09:10):
appeared in the American Icon series at Yale University Press,
and we were talking about different movies, and somehow we
got to Casablanca. Didn't take us very long, and she said, no, she didn't. No,
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

(01:09:31):
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

(01:09:54):
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

(01:10:18):
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

(01:10:41):
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,

(01:11:04):
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.

Speaker 8 (01:11:15):
It just did.

Speaker 11 (01:11:16):
It took on various shapes and morphed, and I ended
up doing the BFI Film Classics book on Detour in
the midst of it. And then it was during that
process I think also that in my conversations with my editor,
Mary Francis, who actually is an editor at the University
of Michigan Press now, and she thought, you know what, Noah,

(01:11:37):
maybe you should try to do this what they call
academic trade.

Speaker 8 (01:11:40):
So I was all kind.

Speaker 11 (01:11:41):
Of indicators were pointing towards this new effort on my
part to speak with a popular audience. And so the
Casablanca book, occasioned by the seventy fifth anniversary of the movie,
became that opportunity, and I was very happy with how
it turned out, and it was a lot of fun
to write. Expressed my deep indebtedness to aljin Harmitz and

(01:12:06):
to her pioneering work. Round Up the usual suspects as
it was original. That was a title under which it
was originally released.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
And we met.

Speaker 11 (01:12:13):
We actually in twenty seventeen. We went on this State
Department junket to Morocco to it was fantastic. It was
Algean Harmitz, Monica Henry, Paul Henry's daughter, and Jessica Rains
Claude Raines's daughter. We went and introduced a few screenings

(01:12:33):
of Casablanca in Morocco in Casablanca, and I went onward
to Tangier and then ultimately to Robot and it was
so much fun. But al Jean harmit's without her book
and without the interviews.

Speaker 7 (01:12:48):
That she could have.

Speaker 11 (01:12:49):
So many of those folks were long gone. By the
time I started my book. I had to give it
my own spin, and I had been thanks to the
Ulmer project and some of my other work. I was
still very invested in that emigrat crowd that managed to
make it the whole refugee trail. That's chronicled semi fictitiously,

(01:13:09):
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,

(01:13:30):
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

(01:13:53):
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

(01:14:15):
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

(01:14:36):
DAN last year and now serving as executive director of
these programs.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
It's just fun.

Speaker 11 (01:14:41):
I enjoy it, but it's hard to have that sustained,
uninterrupted time. You know that every scholar a writer year
in sport. It's hard to have it when doing these
other things. So my I guess I shouldn't give so
many apologies. But where I left my own device, I'd
be able to sit down and you know that the
sits flash. I'd be able to just sit and ammer

(01:15:03):
away at the keys and knock out this book project
because after that, I'm to write a short interpretive biography
of Wilder.

Speaker 7 (01:15:13):
Or it's not.

Speaker 11 (01:15:13):
There's no longer the American Icon series at Yale Universe Press,
but there is the Yale Jewish Live Series at Yale
University Press. So I will that's the last in my
trio a certain menage attois of Wilder projects that includes
the last book that I was lucky enough to finish up,
which is Billy Wilder on Assignment Dispatches from y mar

(01:15:36):
Borlin and into War Vienna, which I did with a
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:58):
Will be behind.

Speaker 11 (01:16:00):
But yeah, the Casa Blanca book was a lot of
fun to write, and the apropos early of the earlier
much yearned for, sadly frequently neglected, precious time off. I
was lucky enough to get one of these Any Age
Public Scholar Awards as their first. It was the inaugural
group of Any Age Scholars that is a category of

(01:16:23):
the National Dowber. Who knows whether we have or even
today have a national Undown. Few mandays we'll see shouldn't
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,

(01:16:45):
and it was great. Managed to just really knock that
one out.

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):
With this episode, I'm struggling a little bit, and I'm
curious if you struggled a little bit as well, because
what is there left to say about Casablanca? So how
did you determine? This is what I'm going to do,
This is how I'm going to leave my mark on it.

Speaker 11 (01:17:03):
I have a tendency I haven't really I need to
go to some intense psychoanalysis at some point, but a
tendency to take up subjects that are have trodden paths,
that have covered pretty much. So I wrote my doctoral
dissertation on figures like Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin and

(01:17:25):
these others who so many others had come before me.
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

(01:17:48):
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

(01:18:08):
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

(01:18:32):
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

(01:18:56):
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

(01:19:20):
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.

Speaker 8 (01:19:38):
Refract.

Speaker 11 (01:19:39):
So, if you pardon me, this film through this lens
of the refugees. When the book came out in twenty seventeen,
we were in the first phase of Trump one point zero,
and you remember you had the Muslim band, and we
were in a real state of another sort of refugee crisis,

(01:19:59):
so to speak. Can I guess that there wasn't planned
that way? And I certainly wouldn't wish that upon anyone
to face the sort of threats that various aliens now
in air quotes or foreigners faced at that moment in time.
But the book, I think, in particular that chapter struck

(01:20:19):
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

(01:20:44):
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

(01:21:05):
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

(01:21:28):
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

(01:21:50):
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

(01:22:13):
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

(01:22:34):
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

(01:22:58):
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

(01:23:18):
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

(01:23:41):
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,

(01:24:02):
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

(01:24:25):
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,

(01:24:46):
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

(01:25:10):
I can spot in my work, and I think it's
actually on display in the Casa Blanca book as well.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
That's such much chapter that you're talking about is one
of my favorites of the whole book, especially just because
the way that those characters are treated, they're not just wallpaper.
If you don't have those characters. Yeah, sure you got
the romance, you got Ilsa and and all that, but
it's like they add so much in those little vignettes

(01:25:41):
and like learning more about Sasha and the whole like
come back right away, like I don't trust to you
kind of thing. I love those parts.

Speaker 11 (01:25:49):
That was a really important chapter for me to write.
And what Pauline Kale said about the film that you
otherwise ignore or even held a certain degree of contempt
for and calling it schlocky romanticism, she says an interview
with Algine Harmat, she says that were it not for
those refugees playing refugees on screen, it would just be

(01:26:13):
had American actors in there trying to fake these accents.
It just it wouldn't have the hef the emotional haft
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

(01:26:34):
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

(01:26:55):
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

(01:27:18):
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

(01:27:38):
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

(01:28:02):
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

(01:28:23):
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

(01:28:44):
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

(01:29:04):
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.

(01:29:24):
But I didn't manage to interview Ondre Ausimon.

Speaker 8 (01:29:26):
He said.

Speaker 11 (01:29:28):
He called it a certain structure, not to be overly academic,
but his structural absence in the film, you have Jews.
They're all over the screen, but nowhere in the picture.
And there's that. And by the way, they weren't all doish.
There were also those like al Mucdantine and Conrad Veidt
who were principled anti Nazis. And look, for that matter,

(01:29:50):
Paul Henry, I don't want to forget him. Oh God,
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,

(01:30:15):
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

(01:30:39):
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

(01:31:01):
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

(01:31:23):
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

(01:31:44):
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,

(01:32:07):
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.

(01:32:30):
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.

Speaker 7 (01:32:44):
Is funny.

Speaker 11 (01:32:44):
I was in the Austin Texas and the whole country
in Texas to especially in nineteenth century, had a large migration.
Only you have the Pennsylvania Dutch, but that's actually just
a misnomer. It's a Pensylvania Deutsch. They just call it Dutch.
They are right, but they're German speakers as well throughout.
And then of course you have the Amish. You're not
just in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio and elsewhere. I think that,

(01:33:06):
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

(01:33:26):
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.

(01:33:47):
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

(01:34:10):
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,

(01:34:32):
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

(01:34:53):
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,

(01:35:17):
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,

(01:35:40):
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

(01:36:02):
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

(01:36:23):
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

(01:36:43):
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

(01:37:05):
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

(01:37:26):
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

(01:37:48):
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

(01:38:10):
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

(01:38:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
When you start writing about the post Casablanca and just
mentioned the Simpsons and David Thompson's book, that feels to
me like you must have spent an inordinate amount of
time working on all of those references that came in that.
To now, it's almost eighty years or eighty some years.

Speaker 11 (01:39:15):
So there's a new film out Austin favorite Richard link Later,
Rick link Later. He's got a new film that just
premiered at the Berly Nale a week ago called Blue Moon,
and Ethan Hawk plays. I think it's barman is his
main He's a barman, but I think he also is
he writes music. He's a musician. I haven't seen you.

Speaker 8 (01:39:36):
I'm just heard about it.

Speaker 11 (01:39:37):
But apparently there's a lot of Casa Blanca banter in
that film as well. And it just it's one of
those movies because it's so deeply ingrained in the in
our consciousness, right in our kind of popular imagination, and
because we know these lines, even if we've never even
seen the movie. We know these lines. We know that

(01:39:59):
whatever we all like, always have Paris or my case,
will always have Casklanka. But we know the shocked, shocked.
We know here's looking at you. We know these lines.

Speaker 15 (01:40:12):
It's a an easy way, I think, to reference something
that has really broad appeal and that it's in our
collective register, people will recognize it.

Speaker 11 (01:40:27):
And whether it's in a satirical vein or a more
serious vein, it just it's you see it over and
over again. I looked at book came out in twenty seventeen,
and I referenced Blue Moon as it's called the new
link later movie, which haven't yet seen. But there are
so many films that have come since Sentence. I found myself.

(01:40:48):
Spielberg was a huge fan of Casablanca. He's a huge
fan of just classical Hollywood in general. I think was
one of those people who's weaned on the movies and
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

(01:41:09):
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

(01:41:31):
certain instances even more explicit allusions to Casablanca, and I
think that you just it's.

Speaker 7 (01:41:38):
There are that.

Speaker 11 (01:41:39):
Look, I'm not doing the best job of articulating this,
but I think that people like whether it's Spielberger in
the meantime, many filmmakers of the next succeeding generations. It's
one of those movies that people have seen, they've talked about,
and so it has a way of kind of cropping
up and it does so as well win these sort

(01:41:59):
of satirical cartoons it does. So it's Matt Sulman who's
one of the writers on the Simpson he told me,
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,

(01:42:20):
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

(01:42:42):
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

(01:43:04):
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

(01:43:25):
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

(01:43:47):
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

(01:44:08):
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

(01:44:29):
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

(01:44:52):
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

(01:45:14):
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

(01:45:38):
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,

(01:45:58):
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

(01:46:20):
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,

(01:46:43):
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.

Speaker 8 (01:47:00):
I'm messaid.

Speaker 11 (01:47:00):
Look, there's so many other fabulous movies, no doubt, but
especially when talking about classical Hollywood and the sort of
the holy grails of classical Hollywood. I think that's often
whether it's an ambidious comparison or not, doesn't make it.
Don't care about that bullshit, But I do think there's
some credence to it in the sense, and I teach
Kane it's hard not to. But it is a more

(01:47:22):
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

(01:47:43):
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,

(01:48:08):
I'm not meaning in any way to disc Kaine. But
Caine is much more about virtuosity, right than it is
about story.

Speaker 8 (01:48:17):
The story.

Speaker 11 (01:48:18):
It's certainly well told, there's no question about that. But
I think in the case of Gasablanca, it's really from
beginning to end, all about that great story, that great
old story.

Speaker 7 (01:48:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:48:30):
This time goes by, when you're some like a hot
book comes out, will you come back and talk to
me about it?

Speaker 11 (01:48:38):
Oh God, that's an easy one. Yes, all right, great
with enormous pleasure, fantastic some fact the new as the
Germans might say, Yes, with enormous coucha a lot of pleasure. Absolutely.
I'm due to finish it up by the end of
this calendar year. Let's see if I can hustle. I'm
doing all that. I've got to get to that finish line.

(01:49:00):
I got to get there.

Speaker 2 (01:49:02):
Noah, thank you so much for your time. This is
a was such a pleasure talking with you.

Speaker 7 (01:49:05):
Thank you.

Speaker 11 (01:49:05):
I appreciate, I salute you. I love what you do,
so thank you. I feel it was a great honor
and a pleasure. And now I'm like a repeat offender.
I'm like, I'm one of the usual suspects.

Speaker 16 (01:49:22):
Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman, Let's go make a picture on
the island of strongly, Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman, You're so purty.
He'd make any email quiver, You'd make five fly from

(01:49:47):
the creator, Ingrid Bergman.

Speaker 2 (01:49:52):
Mister Rody, what brought you to write about Michael Curtiz?

Speaker 7 (01:49:56):
I had written a biography of Charles McGraw with Looking
Back was a long time ago, and that was an
exercise in serhen diipity, and I was thinking about what
should I do next. One of my friends was Dick
erd Me, who came up through Warner Brothers, was one

(01:50:17):
of the last people standing on that, and he recommended
I was casting around and saying, I'm trying to think
of something to write about, and he said, you need
to write about Mike Curtiz. He was my champion. And
then right around the same time, McGilligan reached out to me,

(01:50:38):
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

(01:50:59):
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

(01:51:20):
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

(01:51:42):
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

(01:52:05):
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,

(01:52:26):
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,

(01:52:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:53:08):
Now, I thought, you're trying to avoid traveled with the
Dassin book, but here you are going to Budapest and
all this for Curtiz.

Speaker 7 (01:53:15):
That kind of dovetail, that wasn't originally planned, but then
I ended up going to the Portanoni Film Festival to
speak at what they call the Presidium about Crites before Crtz,
along with another author who had written a biography of
Curtiz in Spanish. And so what I did was I

(01:53:36):
dovetailed and went to Budapest first. And the trip from
a time travel point of view turned out to be
a nightmare, with canceled flights and coming back an engine
caught on fire and we had to land in Paris
and all of this relative melodrama of plane flights. But
I was glad that it was able to be worked

(01:53:56):
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

(01:54:18):
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

(01:54:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:54:51):
Can you tell me a little bit about his emigration,
because he leaves Europe a lot earlier than a lot
of other people who had to leave because of the
is coming to power.

Speaker 7 (01:55:02):
He came to America originally in nineteen twenty six. He
was directing a film for this Austrian count Colorat, who
he made a lot of pictures for. He left Budapest.
In Hungary after the nineteen nineteen revolution, you had a
very short term communist regime that he was the motion

(01:55:24):
picture pillar of that regime, although Curtiz was notoriously apolitical.
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

(01:55:48):
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

(01:56:11):
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

(01:56:32):
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

(01:56:55):
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

(01:57:17):
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,

(01:57:39):
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

(01:58:01):
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

(01:58:24):
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.

(01:58:46):
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

(01:59:07):
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.

(01:59:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:59:47):
As we all know well, he was cranking out these films,
three four films a year. I can't even imagine you
having to go through and find all of these movies,
much less find the time to watch all of them.
I under took his six years to do that.

Speaker 7 (02:00:02):
Yeah. I had to also write a complete filmography, which
is in the back of the book, which was a
very laborious exercise, but I felt I needed to do this,
and he directed whole or in part, one hundred and
eighty one movies. It's just absolutely incredible. And at the
last minute it was brought to my attention by one

(02:00:22):
of my friends at the Hungarian Film Archive. When the
Emperor of France, Joseph died and they had a temporary
emperor before World War One blew up the Austrian Hungarian Empire.
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

(02:00:44):
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

(02:01:07):
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

(02:01:27):
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

(02:01:50):
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,

(02:02:11):
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

(02:02:35):
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

(02:02:57):
invaluable and really shaped his career.

Speaker 2 (02:03:00):
You've mentioned where you're at, and I'm over here in Detroit.
And with Detroit we had The Black Legion. And I
think I've read that Tea's directed part of The Black Legion.
What does the story with that if.

Speaker 7 (02:03:12):
You remember, Yeah, he directed the courtroom scenes and boat
art in jail at the end of that movie. And
the director of that, yeah, Archie mails that Black Legion
was such a controversial film that I found a memo
from the executive producer Hal Wallace to Archie Mail saying, Hey,
this is very controversial. If you don't want your name

(02:03:34):
on the film, let me know. And so what would
happen is Curtis was really the Swiss Army Knife of
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.

(02:03:57):
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

(02:04:18):
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

(02:04:42):
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

(02:05:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:05:20):
Nineteen forty two. It seems like it was a huge
year for Curtiz, just with obviously Casablanca, which I would
like to talk a little bit more about, but of
course Yankee Doodle Dandy. I freaking love Yankee Doodle Dandy,
and what a different You couldn't get two more different
films from Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Speaker 7 (02:05:38):
Yeah, and don't forget Captains of the Clouds exactly. Those
were the three pictures those years. But I think Yankee
Doodle Dandy, starting with that was the happiest time he
ever had a Warner Brothers for a variety of reasons.
Number one, Curtiz was a very patriotic American, and one
should be aware that this was somebody who was Jewish

(02:06:03):
that grew up under being governed by an emperor. I'll
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

(02:06:24):
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.

(02:06:45):
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.

(02:07:07):
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

(02:07:30):
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

(02:07:51):
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

(02:08:15):
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,

(02:08:36):
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,

(02:08:58):
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

(02:09:19):
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

(02:09:41):
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.

(02:10:06):
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,

(02:10:28):
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.

(02:10:50):
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

(02:11:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:11:29):
Yeah, I'm curious what his experience was on there, because
I think a lot of people give a lot of
credit to Hal Wallace. A lot of people then try
to spread out the credit to the whole ensemble that
comes together. And I'm curious what your take is as
far as what Purtiz's role was in the success of Casablanca.

Speaker 7 (02:11:46):
There's a couple of things that he did that were significant.
One of the things he did was insist that there
was a basis for rit blame Humphrey Bogart's going off
the rails when Ingrid bergmanship, because there was no basis
in the original script for the love story. And he

(02:12:06):
was the one that insisted that the love story include
the flashback and when they were in Paris and the
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

(02:12:29):
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,

(02:12:49):
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

(02:13:10):
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,

(02:13:34):
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,

(02:13:57):
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

(02:14:18):
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,

(02:14:41):
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

(02:15:05):
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

(02:15:27):
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

(02:15:49):
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,

(02:16:11):
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

(02:16:32):
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

(02:16:55):
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,

(02:17:19):
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

(02:17:41):
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

(02:18:01):
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

(02:18:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:18:30):
Apparently they managed to patch it up or whatever, because
I know they worked again pretty soon thereafter with pastors
to Marseille.

Speaker 7 (02:18:38):
Bogart was not loved, but he was definitely respected. And
when Bogart signed his last contract with Warner Brothers in
forty six, his contract specified these are the directors who
can direct me, and I believe that list was John Houston,
of course, Delmer Daves, John Cromwell and Michael Curtise and

(02:19:01):
John Promo went back to directing Bogart on Broadway back
in his early days, and they were friends, and John
Cromwell was a good director, was Warner Brothers top director.
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

(02:19:24):
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?

(02:19:45):
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.

(02:20:08):
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

(02:20:32):
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

(02:20:52):
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,

(02:21:14):
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

(02:21:37):
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

(02:21:57):
were the yin and yang of Warner Bay.

Speaker 2 (02:22:00):
You watched all of these movies, and we talked a
little bit about the autur theory at the beginning. What
were those patterns and those shots and things you already mentioned,
like the waterwheel on the foreground. I did notice a
lot of foreground background things, even just in Casablanca, the
moving camera. What are those things that you saw that
he would like to employ during his films.

Speaker 7 (02:22:21):
He loved subtlety, and he liked to move the camera,
but he didn't do it for the camera's sake. He
did it for the story's sake. If you watch Purtiz's movie,
the use of mirror, so many movies there's always one
shot where someone that moves and you see something take
place in a mirror and then it switches. But he
was not a meat and potatoes guy. In fact, Curtiz

(02:22:44):
was in his part where he was an artistic man.
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.

(02:23:06):
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

(02:23:29):
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

(02:23:53):
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

(02:24:14):
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

(02:24:35):
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.

(02:24:56):
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,

(02:25:18):
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

(02:25:41):
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

(02:26:05):
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.

(02:26:29):
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

(02:26:49):
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

(02:27:12):
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

(02:27:35):
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

(02:27:58):
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

(02:28:21):
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

(02:28:41):
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.

(02:29:03):
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

(02:29:24):
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

(02:29:44):
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

(02:30:07):
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

(02:30:27):
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

(02:30:49):
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,

(02:31:14):
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.

(02:31:37):
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

(02:32:00):
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,

(02:32:21):
but he did not at a piece of that movie.
He would have been in good shape.

Speaker 2 (02:32:26):
So I know you mentioned Noir City, and I know
that's going on right now, and there's different noir events
throughout the rest of the year as we'll go into
next year, which is fantastic. What else are you working on?

Speaker 7 (02:32:38):
I have an appearance. I'm going up to the I
think it's the Vista Rio Theater in Sonoma County to
host a weekend of film noir, I think April tenth
through the fourteenth. And then there's the TCM Classic Film
Festival here in Hollywood, I think the third weekend of April,
and then I have my festival that I program and

(02:33:01):
host at the Palm Springs Cultural Center in Palm Springs,
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

(02:33:22):
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

(02:33:42):
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

(02:34:03):
I have to deliver before the end of the year,
and then after that we'll.

Speaker 2 (02:34:07):
See mister ROADI thank you so much.

Speaker 7 (02:34:10):
For your time.

Speaker 2 (02:34:10):
It was such a pleasure finally getting to speak with you.
I've been a fan of your work for years.

Speaker 7 (02:34:14):
Well, thank you, Mike. And it's allan jettison that turn
when I got out of the Navy long ago. You
don't have to mister roade in me. But no, Mike,
it's been a great talking to you, and I appreciate
your podcast, and I hope one of these days we
can meet up at the movies.

Speaker 9 (02:34:31):
The time is now, the beat is Hollywood, the heat
is a discount thirty two.

Speaker 7 (02:34:38):
The skirts are.

Speaker 9 (02:34:39):
Blonde, brunettes and redhead I'm not there, but the prize
is sapphire blue. In a world of illusion where the
danger is real, it takes a cool headed private eye
to solve a red hot mister XP, it's a case
for an expert, and there's only one man who has

(02:35:01):
what it takes to crack it in. The man with
the Bogart's face.

Speaker 12 (02:35:08):
Did I see sometime on television and.

Speaker 2 (02:35:10):
All the movies?

Speaker 7 (02:35:11):
Now that's somebody else.

Speaker 2 (02:35:13):
You sure look like you?

Speaker 7 (02:35:14):
Now I look like him.

Speaker 9 (02:35:18):
A claw from a stranger, sham Marlow There, I need
your help.

Speaker 1 (02:35:24):
I get two hundred dollars a day plush, expensive, desperate
days on the doorstep.

Speaker 2 (02:35:29):
How much day want? And when tends today?

Speaker 9 (02:35:33):
A clunk in the attic?

Speaker 11 (02:35:34):
Okay, you've got a twitch.

Speaker 1 (02:35:35):
This is your risky visions.

Speaker 7 (02:35:37):
For it's a long shore wet hot.

Speaker 9 (02:35:41):
Robert Saki will astound you in the Man with Bogart's face.

Speaker 2 (02:35:48):
All Right, we're back and we're talking about Casablanca, and yeah,
there's a lot of other things that we can talk
about when it comes to this, including I was so
glad that they had most of, if not the entire
episode of the fifties version of Casablanca the TV show.
It was interesting to watch, but it's so weird. The

(02:36:09):
thing that really caught me while I was watching that
was whenever they were on the phone, did you guys
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

(02:36:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:36:41):
Yeah, I look, I'm busy for Ari.

Speaker 5 (02:36:45):
All right, So you got a deal that you can't handle.

Speaker 17 (02:36:47):
Call me tomorrow.

Speaker 5 (02:36:53):
I'll fill me in, all right, send him here?

Speaker 7 (02:37:01):
Never mind? Why just send him here?

Speaker 8 (02:37:03):
That sounds atrocious. That sounds like the parents in Peanuts.
W h Yeah, it's hey, it's crazy because that's television.
And Warners was like right first in the gate we
can talk about. Oh, Warners is great for being against
the Nazis first, but they were also the first ones
to sell all their catalog to television. And that show
from fifty five is such a ridiculous concept where you

(02:37:24):
have like, what was it. It was like three Warner
properties and they would switch every week.

Speaker 2 (02:37:29):
I was like the TV wheel. It was like Colombo, Bancheck,
McMillan and wife McCloud a cloud. Yeah exactly. I was
gonna say hack Ramsey, but you got me. Every week
we come to you with a different Warner property. This
week it's Casa Blanca. All right.

Speaker 7 (02:37:46):
Great.

Speaker 6 (02:37:47):
With all of the television versions of this, it just
tells you how much it's just about the right casting
and the right atmosphere. And that's so hard to manufacture
on command, even if you have a game plan from
how it successfully could work in this film, it just
seems to be you can have really talented people in
front of the camera and writing the scripts and try
to capture that pattern, but it's hard to recapture that

(02:38:09):
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.

Speaker 8 (02:38:24):
I think I just don't understand why you would pull
something from forty two. You want to talk about like
the timeliness of Blanca. It literally opens November twenty six
Thanksgiving in New York, eighteen days after they land in
North Africa in Casablanca where it's in the news, and
then they open wide in the rest of the country
a couple days after FDR and Churchill are in Casablanca.

(02:38:48):
So there's like that tendency on the executives is, look
in the slush pile, what do we have, what's the
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

(02:39:08):
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.

Speaker 6 (02:39:18):
It's like a Cold War thing versus the World War
Two think. So it's a different kind of atmosphere that
they're trying to tap into and it doesn't fit. But
that's the thing that struck me with the fifties version especially.
It's like them trying to deal with the Soviet Union.
It's the wrong enemy, it's the wrong match of international tension,
and that location the.

Speaker 2 (02:39:38):
Eighty three version. There was a video on YouTube that
was supposed to be just about the eighty three version,
and I'm not complaining because I thought the video was
very well done, but the person that put it together
really gave us more information about things around it than
the actual show itself. I would love to know how
that came about, because it feels almost like Raiders of

(02:39:59):
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

(02:40:20):
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

(02:40:40):
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

(02:41:02):
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.

Speaker 6 (02:41:13):
Yeah, my biggest takeaway watch is you know you're terrible
when you have Anita Ekberg in the pilot and you
literally cannot stay awake. But shot on thirty five millimeter
at least that's what IMDb tells me. But it looks
like the sixteen millimeter like Fosspender TV productions. As far
as the look of it, which that was my biggest
hay with it feels like a European made for television

(02:41:34):
movie rather than a TV show. Yeah, esthetically, that was
the thing I was thinking of, like the World War
two setting. I was thinking for Hovid and Fosspender as
I'm watching it, although obviously not as.

Speaker 2 (02:41:43):
It was rough. I also tried to watch play it
again Sam for this one, and I turned it off
after about half an hour because I was just like, Oh,
this is one of those I can't get laid Woody
Allen films, and I was like, yeah, I don't really
need this in my life. I'm sure some people enjoyed it,
but it was not a highlight for me for Whatdye Allen.

Speaker 6 (02:42:05):
It was the first time I'd gone back to play
it against Sam since my early twenties, and so it
was very odd seeing it again. And I guess it
plays differently when you're more young and naive about things.
Looking at it now, I was thinking about, like how
he does that whole idea of the spectator and the
film character a relationship better in Purple was of Cairo

(02:42:27):
as far as like commenting on that kind of the
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

(02:42:47):
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

(02:43:10):
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

(02:43:31):
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.

(02:43:53):
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

(02:44:14):
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,

(02:44:37):
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.

Speaker 8 (02:44:43):
I was going to bring that up, that he didn't
direct it and that it was it's actually one of
the few that's set in San Francisco, and it sarns
that way. Putting the same spade. The character that he's
also blending with Rick from Casablanca is more like a
West Coast thing. It reminded me of and Maltese Falcon
is set. Where is it actually set in New York too?

Speaker 2 (02:45:03):
I think it's San Francisco because I think, you know,
there's the boat that comes in. I think from the Orient,
but I could be wrong.

Speaker 8 (02:45:10):
I feel like Maltie, like all that the hord boiled
stuff that's West Coast and then like East Coast, is
a kind of different sensibility. But as the youngest person
here and possibly the most naive person, I actually have
to say that I really like to play it against
Sam this time around. I do have to admit that
I watched it again on VHS not long after watching Casablanca,

(02:45:33):
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

(02:45:55):
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

(02:46:16):
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.

(02:46:38):
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

(02:47:01):
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

(02:47:23):
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.

Speaker 6 (02:47:32):
And Robert Sacchi is that is how you pronounced it.
The actrom the man with Bogart's face. Boy was Boguard
in productions that played against Sam Connection and he's an
actor I know from this Giallo film called The French
Sex Murders, which you know, it's just like incongruously, like
that guy looks like Bogart for no reason. But that
was the interesting ride. I was that the first time

(02:47:52):
you had seen this or did you had you seen
it before?

Speaker 2 (02:47:54):
That was my first time I thought that there was
a and I might be inflating things. I thought there
was an Italian film about a man who looked like
Humphrey Bogart. But maybe it's the whole that he was
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

(02:48:18):
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

(02:48:39):
doctor to talk about I could make a man look
like a booda. You know that line from Dark Passage.

Speaker 17 (02:48:45):
Ever see any botched plastic job. If a man like
me didn't like a photo, you could surely fix him
up for life, make him look like a bulldog or
a monkey.

Speaker 7 (02:49:01):
I'll make you look older, but gooder.

Speaker 2 (02:49:05):
That was so straightened, Like when Mike Mazerski shows up
and stuff. I'm like, this is really bizarre. But I
was glad that it owns itself down, as it actually
gets more into the mystery of the film. But man,
oh man, where there are some real groaners, especially that
secretary character. Oh my gosh, hello dudes.

Speaker 5 (02:49:24):
Oh see, they're in a trillion calls.

Speaker 2 (02:49:28):
I told her you'd call her back.

Speaker 7 (02:49:30):
Oh, and an underwear company called.

Speaker 11 (02:49:32):
They want to know if you'll endorse their staff.

Speaker 7 (02:49:34):
I don't wear underware.

Speaker 11 (02:49:35):
I told them there.

Speaker 2 (02:49:37):
They wanted to know how I knew.

Speaker 7 (02:49:39):
Would you Shay?

Speaker 2 (02:49:40):
I can't remember maybe it'll come to you.

Speaker 11 (02:49:42):
Maybe, but I don't think so, Needa.

Speaker 7 (02:49:44):
Do I get else? You're on the phone? Who never mind,
I'll get her.

Speaker 6 (02:49:50):
Her character reminded me of the Producers, and I was
thinking about mel Brooks. I was, you know, it feels
more like a TV movie to me versus like something
like the Bogdanovitch films from that period. And I guess
that did a lot of made for television movies, so
I guess like that aesthetic makes sense. I do have
to give a shout out to the Great Shark Attack,
and that was something I did not see coming. But
there's so much dialogue that's calling attention to how characters

(02:50:14):
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

(02:50:35):
like peculiar in a way that I thought was interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:50:38):
The whole thing how he's obsessed with the painting of
Laura and that he thinks that the main character looks
like Jane Tierney. And I'm like, are you confusing Bulgart
with Dena andrews uh, because that wasn't the same niyh,
you know, because there's lots of references to Bargart's stuff
through here. But then at the same time you're like, whoa, no,
not not all this, and yeah, just the I assure

(02:51:00):
you don't know Gene Tierney. I'm like, Okay, enough with
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,

(02:51:21):
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.

Speaker 6 (02:51:35):
It felt also like oddly European because of Franco Niro
and simple Danning I and I only have this association
with a Yallow film for Robert Sacci, so it feels like,
even though it feels like a very Hollywood American film,
it's like all this weird European film kind of energy
flowing throughout it, which I thought was another odd thing
to note with it. Yeah, I was glad to finally

(02:51:55):
have seen it. It's bizarre movies, It's very bizarre. And
I thought that Victor Bono did a fantastic Sydney Green
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

(02:52:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:52:28):
Who's the main love interest. I'm just like Okay, just
pick one. Would you like have somebody torn between two loves?
But it was a weird, weird movie.

Speaker 8 (02:52:39):
Sounds like a classic European production that just falls apart.
The script is not there, which is funny considering Casablanca itself.
Like the script was not there, but the sensibilities are
just totally different.

Speaker 2 (02:52:50):
Well, the guy who wrote it, it was based on
his book, Andrew J. Fenneddy. He had written some really
good things, like a lot of people swear by Black Noon,
the TV movie that's kind of a horror TV film.
Actually he wrote the movie that I just did a
commentary for a few months ago, Arnold, which was really bad.
So yeah, I guess he's kind of all over the

(02:53:12):
At least he's consistent. Yeah, And I know that there
were like book sequels that were proposed for I don't
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

(02:53:34):
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.

Speaker 8 (02:53:50):
You want to talk about skirting the production code line like, oh, man,
that Renault is characterized in the film gets really close
to the edge in many ways, it's becoming.

Speaker 6 (02:54:00):
More open minded that line of that day. Oh yes,
that's taking both the book wife and husband with them.

Speaker 2 (02:54:08):
When I watched for this was across the Pacific, which
I hadn't seen before, was it?

Speaker 7 (02:54:14):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (02:54:14):
Journey to Jeremy to Marse is the one that's a
flashback within a flashback, and then there's another flashback within it,
which is just amazing, like a series of flashbacks and
flashbacks that characters who are telling the story should have
no business knowing. I love that that it is so
bizarrely structured, And what a fucking ending of that movie.

Speaker 8 (02:54:36):
Holy shit, it's incredible, like the nesting doll structure of it.
And I read a lot of people like criticizing it,
and I have problems with it too, because it's incredible
to me because I actually loathe frame stories. I despise
them to it. But I watched that movie and I
had a great time. Even though it's like three stories
all segmented into each other. I really really enjoyed Passes

(02:55:00):
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

(02:55:21):
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

(02:55:42):
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

(02:56:04):
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

(02:56:25):
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.

(02:56:48):
Everything about it is just glorious. Yeah, it's like.

Speaker 6 (02:56:52):
A Saragosa manuscript kind of nesting dulls. Yeah, I mean
that that whole act sequence that he is kind of
a knockout. But again, it's like taking the hard world
Warner Brothers x Khan kind of thing and putting them
against the Nazis. They're the least French soldiers I think
I can think of in a movie. But I thought
of another one I watched for this was All Through

(02:57:14):
the Night, the Vincent Sherman movie, with which is 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

(02:57:34):
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

(02:57:54):
you know, motivated to stick up for America in this
kind of circumstance. But yeah, I thought that was a great.

Speaker 7 (02:58:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:58:00):
I think I watched like five or six things for this.
This fart was like Man from Cairo and sing a
wild ride, getting to all the way down to the
man with Bogart's face.

Speaker 2 (02:58:08):
I'll do you one better. I rewatched barb Weier for
this one as well, which is as I mentioned that
to my wife, She's like, why are you watching barb
Weier for your Casablanca show? I'm like, don't you remember Hunt?
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,

(02:58:30):
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

(02:58:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:59:03):
Did you wash your hands?

Speaker 7 (02:59:05):
No? I was bad.

Speaker 8 (02:59:09):
I'm so glad to hear that. How about Udo Kir.
I had no idea about barb Weier before this, Like,
you put this on the viewing notes and I was
basically your wife. I was just like, what are you
talking about? This is like, like, this is crazy. You're
gonna make me watch a movie with the what's the
name of the main actress, Pamela Anderson?

Speaker 2 (02:59:28):
She was sorry, Pamela, Yes.

Speaker 8 (02:59:32):
Yeah, because she was married And and I watched it
and I was like, oh my god. Udo Kir is
Peter Lori. He's just like reincarnated, like he's he's German,
he's weird. Wow, he's you know, bald, all that kind
of stuff. But the sad part is he plays Sam
and barbed wire. He doesn't have any musical like I
would love to watch Udo Kir Singh. I mean, just
imagine the novelty. I mean, I'm sure it's terrible, but

(02:59:54):
it would be amazing. And and he doesn't have like
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.

Speaker 2 (03:00:11):
Sat in the distant year of twenty seventeen, I think
it was, And she says something like, twenty seventeen was
the worst year of my life. I was like, yeah, yeah,
I hear you. You could seem to remember who came
to power that year. Yeah, yeah, I would say that
the Peter Lorie diuties that was actually split between Udo
Kir and Clint Howard, because I think he's the one
that ends up selling her the stuff or has you know,

(03:00:34):
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.

Speaker 6 (03:00:54):
I had never seen this one before either. I remember
when when I was in Ithaca, like the film teacher
that was showing it to students, even back in like
the I guess in the when it was a new
film because it was a Casablanca riff. But watching The Guy,
I was reminded also of Barbarella. For some reason, it
felt like John It felt like John Wu's Barberrella is
what they were trying to go for. But that director

(03:01:15):
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

(03:01:36):
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.

Speaker 8 (03:01:54):
It's nicely lit in photographed too. Like going back to it,
it felt like so nostout because this is not like
the greatest script. It's not the greatest locale all this
kind of stuff, but it's like shot on film. It
shot at the docks, and they have like real fights,
like they were up on a giant crane and you
could tell that there was stuntmen actually up in the air.
I mean they probably had pads and all that kind

(03:02:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:02:31):
Just ridiculous we're talking about like, oh, yeah, Cassive Blanc
was just another production. You know, it was just lightning
in a bottle, And then you see what the film
could have been if it was remade in just a
little bit of a different way. Yes, to see how
it turns out, And yeah, it's so reminded me of

(03:02:53):
those mid nineties sci fi films. I was picking up
a little Johnny mammonic in this one as well. You
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,

(03:03:14):
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.

Speaker 6 (03:03:31):
I bought the Arrow edition of Demolition Men, but I
haven't watched it with your commentary yet, But I was
thinking as I was watching it, like, is this something
that you revisited for research, like getting in touch with
like that nineties sci fi action slightly camp well not
even slightly, but like that kind of like that kind
of like Joel Schumacher or a crazy spectacle kind of
action of the nineties, Like was this something that you

(03:03:53):
saw like within that tradition.

Speaker 2 (03:03:56):
Oh, I would definitely say so. And I didn't have
to revisit it for that commentary because barb Weare lives
in my heart with me every day.

Speaker 8 (03:04:03):
You pray at the altar of Barbed Wire.

Speaker 2 (03:04:05):
Any movie that has timu Lister, Timil Morris and Jack
Knows were they, Steve rails Back, Udo kir I mean,
Clinton Howard, just so many amazing people in this film.
You can't go wrong with these character actors, this ninety
set of character actors. And the only thing that I
really disliked was just how small verl Timeylister had because

(03:04:26):
I was pounting on him to really show us his
stuff in this.

Speaker 6 (03:04:32):
We need to get you a theater like the Brattle,
and we need to get barb Weier week. You know
you programming that you can start the cult in Detroit.

Speaker 7 (03:04:40):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (03:04:41):
And by the way, the actor whose name I couldn't
remember was Nicholas Worth also not just little Bruno but
also fantastic in Dark Man as well.

Speaker 6 (03:04:50):
He's the killer from Don't Answer the Phone.

Speaker 8 (03:04:52):
I don't want to like do like a total downer
because barb Weire is like so much fun. But Mike,
I think you and I watched the same movie in
Prepper for this, which was a night in Castle Blank
of the Marx Brothers movie from forty six.

Speaker 2 (03:05:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, and I forgot that and maybe I
meant to forget it, but I couldn't make my way
through that one either. Holy oh oh.

Speaker 11 (03:05:14):
Yeah, okay, I it's just I uh.

Speaker 2 (03:05:17):
Philly Marx Brothers movies, you know, like the guy that
plays Sasha was and Duck Soup one of my favorites.
You know he's in there.

Speaker 1 (03:05:24):
He's like, I have failed investadors. I know it, I
know it, you idiot. I'm sorry, you have muddled everything.
If you started the revolution as I planned during the turmoil,
I could have stepped in and placed Fredonia under the
Sylvanian flag.

Speaker 7 (03:05:36):
Our flag?

Speaker 1 (03:05:37):
What's five flag? Bla, your excellency, you have no idea?

Speaker 7 (03:05:40):
How fuck look he's in Fredonia.

Speaker 1 (03:05:42):
Oh yes, I've known of that too. That's why I
have two spies shadowing him.

Speaker 2 (03:05:47):
Duck Soup feels like, oh, we performed this in front
of audiences. We really owned these bits. We had all
this stuff going, and then he come to a movie
that's so much later, like Night in Casablanca, and you're
like and these jokes just kind of I don't ring
like they ran them in front of anybody before. What
were your impressions on Night in Casablanca.

Speaker 8 (03:06:07):
I can say that I watched it, but I like
sort of half watched it. I was like peeling orangese
to make ors just and I was like watching it
at the same time. It's insane to me because I'm
with you, like cig Rumin is good in it. He
just all he says is fine, over and over and
over again. He is basically like a one note character,
but he's still good because you know, he's that classic,

(03:06:29):
you know, Vaudeville. I'm here to set up the jokes,
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

(03:06:50):
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

(03:07:13):
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

(03:07:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:07:48):
I just feels bad because the Marx brothers themselves just
look very old. Especially Harpo just looks like he's really
gone round the ben in this one. My favorite parts
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

(03:08:08):
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

(03:08:30):
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

(03:08:52):
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.

Speaker 8 (03:09:03):
In this one, absolutely. I will say for the last
thing is at the ending they have a DC three
They have stunned men on an actual runway with the
engines running and this going down the tarmac, and is
incredible to see it because you can tell that it's
actually really done and it's like forty six so they
have all of the surplus war material, so they're basically
just destroying whatever they can get. That ending was was

(03:09:24):
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

(03:09:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:10:07):
All right, we're going to take another break and play
a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.

Speaker 3 (03:10:13):
Dumb a person lacking mental.

Speaker 7 (03:10:15):
Power when you're the most annoying down in the world.

Speaker 3 (03:10:22):
Stupid a person below normal intelligence. Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels,
Dumb and Dumber Luck.

Speaker 7 (03:10:39):
Yes, from Uline Home Video.

Speaker 4 (03:10:40):
It's the smash it that's redefining comedy and has critics
and audiences across the country. Ratings Yeah, obnoxiously triumph. Dumb
and Dumber makes you laugh out loud for almost its
entire running time. Spectacularly dumb. Jim Carrey gives his funniest
performance by far, the hippiest and most hilarious of Jim

(03:11:03):
Carrey's films, Dumb and Dumber from You Line Home Video.

Speaker 7 (03:11:09):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (03:11:10):
We'll be back next week with another cinematic classic, The
Fairly Brothers Dumb and Dummer. Until then, I want to
thank my co host Bill and Federico. So, Bill, what
is keeping you busy lately?

Speaker 6 (03:11:20):
Doing a bunch of commentaries for Blu Ray. I think
the ones I can talk about Baby It's You is
coming out soon. The John Sales movie. I did a
solo commentary profunciate editions, and also did one for Racing
with the Moon, speaking of nineteen forty two and World
War two era, the Richard Benjamin film that Maria Gates
and I did a commentary for that film, and I

(03:11:41):
also did one for four forty four Last Down Earth,
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.

Speaker 2 (03:11:53):
And Frederica, what's new in your world?

Speaker 8 (03:11:55):
Sir? Can I just say I love how next week
you're going to Dumb and Dumber and they're like, it's
like high art low art, but they're both masterpieces in
their own domain. It's like it's a perfect distillation of
what I love about this show. I was just gonna say,
I do film editing, and when I can, I do
a little bit of programming along with watching far too

(03:12:17):
many films. I'm always looking forward to Nitrate, as you
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

(03:12:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:12:57):
Thank you again guys for being out of the show,
and thanks everybody for listening. If you want to hear
more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
of the other shows that I work on. They are
all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit
patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get
helps the Projection Booth take over the world.

Speaker 7 (03:13:17):
You must remember this.

Speaker 12 (03:13:20):
A kiss is just a keys aside, just a side.
The fundamental things.

Speaker 18 (03:13:31):
Applat as time goes by, and when two lovers woo,
they still say I love you.

Speaker 12 (03:13:46):
All that you can rely, no matter of the future,
praise as.

Speaker 14 (03:13:57):
Time goes by, moonlight and all songs never out of day.

Speaker 2 (03:14:10):
Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hey.

Speaker 19 (03:14:15):
Woman needs man, and man must have his maid that
no one can den.

Speaker 18 (03:14:25):
It's still the same old story. A fight for love
and glory, a case of do a die. The world
will always well olcome love us as time goes to ball.

Speaker 12 (03:15:14):
Light and love songs never out.

Speaker 19 (03:15:17):
Of day, arts full of passion, jealousy and hate. Woman
needs man, and man must have his maid that.

Speaker 7 (03:15:29):
No one can dinner.

Speaker 18 (03:15:34):
It's still the same old story, a fight for love
and glory, a case.

Speaker 8 (03:15:41):
Of do a die.

Speaker 12 (03:15:45):
The world will always welcome Love us as time goods
and ball

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Episode 736: Casablanca (1942)

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang