MAY 28, 1942
BURBANK, CALIFORNIA
MORNING
The Americans are making a movie.
Seven thousand miles from the Libyan Desert, on the closest patch of sand twenty-one miles away on Santa Monica Beach, the third day of filming a brand-new motion picture about the war in North Africa begins on Soundstage Eight here at Warner Bros. Studios. The action is set against the backdrop of Vichy Morocco. There are guns and death but the pistols fire blanks and no one really dies. Between takes, when hunger pangs and thirst prove too great, the actors can at the very least eat from their brown bag lunches and sip from a water cooler.
The film is called Casablanca.
And no one on the set today has knowledge that the Allies are secretly planning a very risky invasion of the real-life version of that African seaport. The plight of France has become a growing international cause célèbre due to the determination of General Charles de Gaulle, but this unlikely blend of romance and fascism will take de Gaulle’s message onto the silver screen for the first time. The world will see the general as the true leader of France, even if President Franklin Roosevelt does not.*
Tall green hills and swaying palm trees border one side of the Warner’s lot. The exterior of Soundstage Eight is beige and nondescript like a warehouse, with roll-up cargo doors and a single bright light flashing red when filming is underway. Trucks are parked alongside the building. Painters and carpenters in workingman’s clothes build sets. A paved road separates the soundstage from a studio office building.
Nothing special.
The glamour lies inside. Today is the first day filming will take place on the set representing Rick’s Café, a mythical nightclub in Casablanca, where real-life refugees now rub shoulders with real-life Nazis and real-life Vichy officials as part of their daily existence—just like in the script.
The massive set is decorated with Moorish arches, small round tables, beaded lamps, padded chairs, and, as its centerpiece, an upright piano on casters. There are women in evening wear laughing gaily while sipping pretend champagne and men costumed to look like Nazi officers smoking real cigarettes. Off-screen, powerful lights hanging from the ceiling by chains cast down bright illumination. Director Michael Curtiz, with his thick Hungarian accent and a résumé that will one day include more than 150 Hollywood films, barks instructions.
Casablanca is based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, written shortly after the war began. The plot is almost prescient in its setting, predicting North Africa as the war’s melting pot. The coauthors, a young teacher named Murray Burnett and writer Joan Allison, unable to find a producer willing to put it on the stage due to undertones of adultery, sold it to Warner Bros. for $20,000.*
Burnett and Allison have not been asked to write the screenplay, which deviates from the play and is not yet complete. Just as with the war itself, the actors do not know how the movie will end. So Curtiz is filming the script sequentially, starting at page one with scenes already written, shooting in the same order they appear in the script. Most of the production will take place right next door on Stage Seven, soon to be known as known as “Lucky Seven” for the string of hit movies filmed there. Casablanca’s romantic lead, prickly Humphrey Bogart, a forty-two-year-old Hollywood veteran best known for playing gangsters and getting shot in the last reel, filmed the drama Dark Victory on Stage Seven. Director Curtiz just finished filming Yankee Doodle Dandy on Stage Seven, a patriotic song-and-dance movie starring James Cagney, another actor more known for portraying gangsters. So there is a comfort level to shooting on Seven.
But the set for Rick’s Café is large enough to require a soundstage all its own. Now the statuesque twenty-six-year-old Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman sits next to the saloon piano in a low-cut white dress, sipping a glass of champagne. Bergman is a beautiful woman, blond, with an open face and kind eyes. She is not thrilled to be making Casablanca, having hoped to get the part of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the book by Ernest Hemingway. Yet here she sits.*
Curtiz is accentuating that beauty by filming Bergman with gauze over the lens to soften her appearance. Special lights catch the sparkle in her eyes. The name of Bergman’s character is Ilsa Lund and she has a past. Ilsa is “bad luck,” as another character describes her.
“Action!” cries Curtiz.
“Playing” the piano is a career musician named Dooley Wilson. A drummer by trade, the fifty-six-year-old Wilson wears a shiny satin tuxedo with thick lapels and a bow tie. He sits with perfect posture on the small piano bench, drapes his fingers over the keyboard just so, and even moves his hands to the right and left as if reaching for a chord—yet Wilson does not actually play a note.*
Wilson’s character is Sam. Ilsa knows him well, from a time before the war in Paris. She wants to hear an old favorite song. Like a siren, Ilsa is hoping her former lover will hear their song and come to her.
“Play it, Sam,” coos Ilsa in words that will become iconic. “Play . . . ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”
“Oh, I can’t remember, Miss Ilsa,” protests Sam. “I’m a little rusty on it.”
“I’ll hum it for you.”
Sam plays, but only the melody. Not satisfied, Ilsa asks him to also sing the words. “As Time Goes By” is a powerful statement that love will exist for all time, whether in war or peace. Sam croons in a voice low and comforting: “It’s still the same old story . . .”
The completed movie will cut to Bogart, playing the namesake owner of the club, looking like he’s on the verge of murder, entering the scene through a tall wooden door, resplendent in a double-breasted white dinner jacket. Walking slowly at first, then picking up speed, Rick makes a beeline for the piano.
Rick speaks through pursed lips, furious. “Sam, I thought I told you never to play—”
He stops short.
With a roll of his eyes and nod of the head, the piano player directs Rick’s attention to Ilsa.
Curtiz yells, “Cut!” The camera is repositioned as the scene moves from the piano to a table in the corner. Other actors enter, among them Austria-Hungary–born Paul Henreid, who fled the Nazis and came to America before the war. As the new scene begins filming, the script contains dialogue about rationing and a curfew.
The new scene tells more about the main characters. Rick and Ilsa share their story in throwaway lines and short vignettes. They were a couple the day Paris fell. But the Nazi occupation marked the end of their love affair. Ilsa’s husband, long thought dead, returned. Forlorn and angry, Rick has taken to drinking alone and refusing to let his saloon’s piano player sing their favorite song.
“I remember every detail,” Rick now tells Ilsa about June 1940. “The Germans wore gray. You wore blue.”
“Yes,” Ilsa replies, “I put that dress away. When the Germans march out I’ll wear it again.”
She wants him back. Someday. But not until Paris is free.
It’s all pretend. A movie taking creative liberties. And yet, in the midst of a real-life war with no end in sight, Hollywood moviemakers with more belief in making money than making right are well aware that a Paris without Nazi occupation is a potent symbol of renewal, hope, and even true love that all the world will understand.
A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die.
That ideal keeps the men of Bir Hakeim fighting.