PROBABLY just as much hokum is turned out for circulating libraries, record albums and art galleries as for double bills, but movie hokum is easier to take. One reason for this is that Hollywood often uses its best players, writers and directors for its epic phonies; and phony or not, something at least vivid results from so much talent. Each studio has its preference: Metro’s is a James Hilton romance with its sprinkling of good works and roses round the door, starring Greer Garson and a suitable male; Columbia’s is the Riskin-Capra comedy with its moral catch—but more important, Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur; Paramount’s is a comedy of wacky millionaires written by Sturges, Wilder or Binyon; Warner’s is “Casablanca.” Before Allied troops made it more famous, Casablanca served as a jumping-off spot to America for many of Europe’s refugees—therefore a timely place to carry on Warner’s favorite cops and robbers.
Besides having to be timely, “Casablanca” had to have a prominent place in it for all of Warner’s famous stars. That meant a Grand Hotel picture, a human crossroads. Humphrey Bogart will own one saloon (Rick’s), Sydney Greenstreet another (The Green Parrot). Bogart will get hold of two precious passports, whereupon the leader of the vast European underground movement, Victor Laszlo, and his wife, Ingrid Bergman, who once ran out of a love affair with Bogart, will appear looking for passports. The saloon locale will take in all of Warner’s character gems—the Mischa Auer character, the pickpocket, the fat waiter with the funny accent, the corrupt chief of police, the cabaret girl, and seven or eight song interludes.
The “Casablanca” kind of hokum was good in its original context in other movies, but, lifted into “Casablanca” for the sake of its glitter and not incorporated into it, loses its meaning. Thus, Sydney Greenstreet’s velvet gesturing and suave cruelty were vitally necessary to “The Maltese Falcon,” even potentially in “Across the Pacific,” whereas in this picture he’s not even needed. He’s there merely for Sydney Greenstreet. So that whenever he finishes a superfluous conversation by sadistically swatting a fly it can be chalked up as hokum. Peter Lorre played his birdlike whimpering to Bogart’s tough manhood effectively in “The Maltese Falcon.” He repeats it here, wrinkling and unwrinkling his forehead faster than ever, but without effect, since there were so many other things there was no time to develop his character with sharpness and credibility. The Mischa Auer (Leonid Kinskey) skit has often been funny, mainly in “My Man Godfrey,” but it misses here. Bogart’s humanitarian killer, who was disillusioned apparently at his mother’s breast, has to say some silly things and to play God too often to be as believably tough as he was in his last eight pictures.
Actually the picture has more acts than it knows what to do with for truth and beauty—and gives too much time to less important ones, such as the Bulgarian couple whom Bogart allowed to win from his roulette table so that they would have money to pay their fares to America. The emphasis on everything, big or little, makes for a kaleidoscopic effect. Neither the story nor characters are firmly set in their environment save for a glance or two at a native market and one at a painting of the town.
Yet the people in Hollywood don’t project their hokum without reason. They know very well the pleasure one gets from seeing Ingrid Bergman, so noble and utterly clear, Mr. Bogart’s mouth, which seems to be holding back a mouthful of blood, the contrast in villains of Veidt, Greenstreet and Lorre. If, as this is, it is from Warner’s, it is full of political intelligence. In addition there is an album of jazz classics, with a Negro (Dooley Wilson) singing them. Finally, there is one good sequence where intuitive feelings prevailed over script writers’ unconcern and Director Curtiz’ incapable scissors—the scene in which the fighting Frenchmen drown out the Germans’ “Horst Wessel” by singing their “Marseillaise.” “Casablanca” is as ineffectual as a Collier’s short story, but with one thing and another—like Bergman, Veidt, and Humphrey Bogart—it is a pleasure of sorts.
December 14, 1942