NOVEMBER 26, 1942
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
11:30 A.M.
Casablanca is released early.
New Yorkers can’t wait to see this tale of wartime intrigue, even on Thanksgiving. Opening day. First show. Sidewalk line snaking outside the Hollywood Theatre. Broadway and Fifty-First. Doors open at 11:30. Inside, the Hollywood is lavish: floor-to-ceiling columns, plush carpeting, hand-painted murals, glass chandeliers, fifteen hundred seats spread out between lower level and balcony, plus standing room. No better place for a holiday escape to tropical Morocco.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade would normally be passing by right about now, but that eighteen-year-old tradition has been canceled due to the war. Rubber and helium used to form and float the giant character balloons have been donated to the cause. Instead, soldiers and sailors march down Broadway in a patriotic parade, eager to break formation when it comes to an end on Thirty-Fourth Street and revel in this day of feasting and drinking. Restaurants throughout the city are answering an appeal by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia that every man in uniform receive a hot turkey dinner. No one wants to miss out.*
The same holds true for Casablanca. America is finally in the European war. The coincidental timing of the film and the American landings could not have been better planned. The movie was supposed to be released seven months from now, in June, but studio bosses Jack and Harry Warner rushed Casablanca into theaters to take advantage of Operation Torch—a marketing ploy they freely admit. “As exciting as the landing at Casablanca!” cries one ad.
“Remember that it was completed and ready weeks before our forces invaded North Africa and that, almost on the heels of the first invasion barge to touch African soil with our soldiers, it was on the screen, helping in its definite way to interpret the action for you, to explain Vichy France to you,” Harry Warner explains to Variety magazine.
New Yorkers have followed the exploits of General George S. Patton in the Times for the past nineteen days. They now fill every seat in the Hollywood, a movie palace specially built by Warner Bros. to showcase their top films. Thirty-one thousand tickets will be sold in the first week, an amazing figure in light of the fact that superstars Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, and Errol Flynn all have films screening within blocks of the Hollywood.
The difference is that none of them possesses the timely novelty of Casablanca. This new war against Hitler is taking place in far-off countries foreign to Americans in every way. Most citizens have never traveled outside the United States, let alone to Africa. Names like Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia are mysterious, alluring, and a little bit dangerous.
Casablanca explains it all. The audience hears the name de Gaulle. They see for themselves the Cross of Lorraine. They witness the desperation of refugees willing to steal, to cheat, to lie—anything to flee. And for moviegoers who didn’t understand the difference between Free French and Vichy French before settling into their plush maroon movie seats this morning, the full-throated singing of “La Marseillaise” to drown out Nazi officers bellowing “Die Wacht am Rhein” in Rick’s Café makes that gulf very clear.*
The camera cuts to actress Madeleine Lebeau shedding tears of rage as she belts out the words. Her look of anguish is real, for Lebeau is French. The nineteen-year-old fled Paris with her Jewish husband in June 1940. Every member of his family will die in a concentration camp. “Vive la France!” she cries when the on-screen Germans give up the competition. “Vive la démocratie!”*
Americans get it.
“Against the electric background of a sleek café in a North African port, through which swirls a backwash of connivers, crooks and fleeing European refugees, the Warner Brothers are telling a rich, suave, exciting, and moving tale in their new film Casablanca,” lauds the New York Times in a lengthy review. “[T]he Warners here have a picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.”
The first screening ends midafternoon. Casablanca is deeply quotable. As with most such movies, the best lines are repeated by members of the audience as they file out of the Hollywood and head home to give thanks. In the film’s final scene Humphrey Bogart is off to join the Free French in Brazzaville. Speaking to Claude Rains, portraying a Vichy administrator, Captain Louis Renault, who has decided to change sides and join him, Bogart as Rick closes the movie with the iconic line: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”*
Oh, that Charles de Gaulle could say the same about Franklin Delano Roosevelt.