Rick: “Inside both of us, we both know you belong with Victor…. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it—oh, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

Ilsa: “What about us?”

Rick: “We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have it; we’d lost it before you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night…. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world … someday you’ll understand that. Here’s looking at you, kid.”

—RICK (Humphrey Bogart) TO ILSA (Ingrid Bergman
Casablanca

Late one afternoon, after the first season of Hollywood and the Stars was winding down, I received a call to attend a special production meeting in David Wolper’s office. When we had all assembled, David informed us that Hollywood and the Stars had been renewed for another season and that the new shows would focus more on the great stars: Cagney, Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Brando, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart—the list went on and on. We were told to look for concepts and ideas that would best capture the screen images of these great movie icons.

In our first season, Hollywood and the Stars had been dealing, more or less, with conceptual shows, like The Great Musicals, The Gangster Movies, The Great Westerns, The Great Lovers or The Great Directors. Now we were moving in a new direction, emphasizing the individual stars, their roles, their careers, their private lives and their impact upon the public consciousness.

We celebrated by having a giant water fight throughout the downstairs production office that left the entire area soaking wet; luckily, none of the shows currently in production were affected. It was a real mess, but we all had a great time.

As one of the associate producers on the series, I was responsible for text and film research, but with the new season I would be given more latitude in terms of influencing the thematic direction of the shows. My assignment for the new season was to select clips from the films of John Wayne, John Garfield and Humphrey Bogart. My only instructions were that the clips I chose should reflect the stars’ attraction and their “public image.”

At first, I was a little overwhelmed with the task, but as I started exploring the actors’ careers, watching their films and researching their public image, I saw I had a creative choice. On the one hand, I could simply view their films, then select some great scenes that reflected their public persona. I felt I could choose any scenes from Bogart’s or Wayne’s films and I would satisfy the requirements of the show. On the other hand, I had always been inspired by the heroic stature of Wayne, Bogart and Garfield, so I felt that if I went a little deeper, exploring their attraction and larger-than-life images, I could possibly find a larger thematic context that had made these actors superstars.

I began by asking myself some questions. The term “star quality” had been discussed, defined and argued about for years, and I didn’t want to get into that kind of show. But it started me thinking about the nature of a star’s appeal. What makes a great star? Is it looks, personality, the roles he or she plays? I knew the answer as soon as I formed the questions: all of the above.

Since movies are a form of entertainment that is “larger than life” (on screen, the actor’s image is at least twelve feet high), I wanted to explore the specific characteristics that made these actors the great stars they were. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed there were two basic elements that went into the making of a star like John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart. One was the actors’ personality: their looks, camera charisma, mannerisms. The other was the roles they played.

Does the role affect the actor? Definitely. When I saw Humphrey Bogart in a western, for example, the image and part did not fit. Bogart “worked” when he played a tough guy with a heart of gold, as in Casablanca (Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, Howard Koch), Key Largo, To Have and Have Not or as the tough private eye in The Maltese Falcon. The same with John Wayne, or John Garfield. I couldn’t imagine Wayne in a suit and tie or tuxedo doing romantic comedy, for example, or Garfield in anything but a film noir, but early in their careers they played these kinds of parts. Sometimes an actor has a natural “affinity” for a part, and sometimes not.

What qualities go into making a great character on screen? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed “star status” was almost mythological in nature. Myth and the movies. I remembered a visit to New York several years before with an artist friend of mine, a man who was a close friend of the noted poet, author and essayist Robert Graves. Graves happened to be in town at the time, so the three of us met for dinner in Chinatown. I knew some of Graves’s work from Berkeley, especially The Greek Myths, his novel I, Claudius and some of his poetry.

During dinner we were talking about film and I mentioned I had worked with Jean Renoir. Graves had long been an admirer of Renoir’s, and thought Rules of the Game was an absolute masterpiece. During the course of our conversation, we started talking about the source of creativity, and I was very curious how Graves sparked his creative imagination. Graves became quiet, put down his chopsticks, looked at me for a long moment and mentioned that Stephen Spender, the English poet, used to sit at his desk with a rotten apple in front of him. Somehow, Graves said, the smell of that rotten apple invigorated his creative faculties.

At first, I thought he was putting me on, but he was completely serious. In his own case, he said, he looked outside himself for inspiration. What worked best for him, at least at that time, he said, was to fall madly in love with a woman and go through the intense permutations of the relationship. When the bonds of love began to splinter, he would sit down and in that great, tumultuous passion of pain and despair compose his poetry. “The White Goddess” and “The Black Goddess,” two of his most powerful poems, had been written that way.

I had never really thought of creative inspiration that way, and I mentioned that Renoir had told me that great art comes from the distillation of personal experience. “It’s the same thing,” Graves said. Art springs from experience.

At that point in the conversation, we started talking about the influence of myth in our culture and its effect on literature. Graves pointed out how the context of a journey, as a form, worked on the shaping and molding of a hero. He mentioned The Odyssey and several other classics, then referred to a book called The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I had read the book a few years before, while I was at Berkeley, but had forgotten it.

Recalling my conversation with Graves, I wondered whether Campbell’s book might help clarify my thinking about myths and the movies. I went to my aunt’s house and dug through the several boxes of books I had stored there until I found my copy of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, then started reading.

Campbell had reached back through time, memory and culture to collect a series of myths from the ancient, primitive and contemporary traditions, culling them into a basic form which he termed “the hero’s journey.” Campbell found that in almost all myths and cultures, from ancient times to the modern, the hero travels along the same path and reaches the same destination: enlightenment and realization. As the hero follows this path, he encounters various obstacles that test the nature of his resolve and which serve to elevate him to a higher level of consciousness, a new level of being.

When I related Campbell’s concepts to the movies, I understood that the hero of the story, the main character, is placed in a situation where he or she confronts a series of obstacles in order to achieve that higher state of consciousness. I saw it was not only a physical journey but a spiritual one, because it takes place inside as well as outside. On this journey the hero experiences a symbolic transformation of death and resurrection as he casts off the old parts of his life in order to be reborn and emerge into the “birth” of his new self. In mythological terms, Campbell says, the hero’s journey is one of acceptance; he must accept his fate, his destiny, no matter whether it is life or death.

I wondered whether I might be able to use some of Campbell’s ideas about the mythological hero as a sort of guide, or model, for the qualities which make a movie star “larger than life.”

The John Wayne episode was the first of the three shows I had been assigned, and though I had never been a big fan of his, I admired his attributes and screen persona. Two of my favorite John Wayne movies, I realized, dealt with a journey: The Searchers (Frank Nugent) and Red River (Borden Chase, Charles Schnee). I’d always thought of Wayne as playing a kind of mythic, heroic figure who determinedly follows his path to achieve what is right, noble and just while remaining true to his beliefs.

I chose The Searchers as the first film I viewed within this mythic context because it dealt with a journey over the course of several years. I had seen the John Ford film several years before and liked it very much; I thought it akin to a Western Odyssey. Wayne plays a former officer in the Confederacy who searches for his niece, who had been kidnapped by a renegade band of Comanches. Wayne was the classic western figure—strong, rugged, silent, still engaged in the struggle between North and South. It is the search for his niece that gives his life meaning and keeps him going, just the way the beliefs and ideals of the Southern cause kept him fighting.

Watching The Searchers, I became aware that John Wayne’s character doesn’t change. There is no transformation in his character; he’s exactly the same at the end of the movie as he was at the beginning. Wayne’s image as a man of action, I saw, is heroic precisely because he does not change; he refuses to give up, bend or alter his ways until he accomplishes his mission: to find and rescue the kidnapped girl. At the end of the movie, when the family enters the house to celebrate the return of his niece, Wayne remains outside the doorway, a desolate, homeless drifter doomed to wander “between the winds.”

I thought that blew my whole theory. In Campbell’s analysis, the hero weathers every obstacle but returns home a wiser and better person, sharing his newfound awareness with his fellow man. That certainly didn’t happen here. It took me a while to understand that Ford made The Searchers in 1956, when the Hollywood blacklist was still in effect. This horrific witch-hunt took its toll on the lives and careers of professional film people, who were forced to test their honor and integrity. Principles, self-respect, artistic freedom—those were the rallying cries of the screenwriters suffering the outrage and indignities of this period.

Wayne’s film persona, I saw, was established by his code of honor. Life is simple; there is right and wrong, good and bad. And, if you’re ever in doubt, let your heart guide you. It’s easy to see that the screen image of John Wayne stands for everything good, everything right. The path he follows is akin to the path of dharma—the path of righteous action, according to ancient Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. I think this was one of the main qualities that made his star burn so bright in the Hollywood firmament. At the end of The Searchers, it is his very strength of character that leads to his isolation and loneliness.

The next film I watched was Howard Hawks’s 1948 film Red River, one of my favorite westerns. It, too, revolves around a journey; it is set within the context of a cattle drive from the Red River Ranch in Texas across vast plains and hostile Indian territory to Kansas City, as the Chisholm Trail is forged. Viewing the film with Campbell’s mythic journey in mind, I really began to see how the journey, as a context, establishes the mythic and heroic qualities of the character.

But something else is working in Red River: the relationship between the man and the boy, surrogate father and surrogate son. Wayne plays a loner by the name of Tom Dunson, a man who follows his own path. He and his friend Groot, played by Walter Brennan, are searching for land near the Red River when they find the lone survivor of an Indian attack, a young boy herding a single cow. His name is Matthew Garth, and he tells Dunson he managed to escape only because his cow had wandered away from the wagon train.

Amid the harsh obstacles of the untamed frontier, Dunson lays claim to the rich, fertile land and starts his herd; in a simple but elegant ceremony, he marks his bull and Matthew’s cow with the Red River brand.

Years pass. Matthew, now a young man, played by Montgomery Clift, has returned from fighting in the Civil War, and during the years he was away, Dunson has amassed a huge herd. But times are tough after the war and there are no buyers for his cows. Desperate to sell his beef, he decides to hire a crew and herd the cattle to market. In one of the most stunning sequences ever put on film, the cattle drive of some six thousand animals gets under way and the long journey to Missouri, over a thousand miles, begins.

And this is where the story truly begins. Dunson, driven by his obsessive need to get his livestock to market or face the ruin of his lifelong dream, becomes a righteous tyrant, riding herd on both men and cattle relentlessly. It doesn’t take long for him to alienate his men, including Matthew and Groot. We sense a split between father and adopted son. For here, riding herd on the trail, is the place where relationships are formed and loyalties established.

When I first saw the film, I was struck not only by the cinematic beauty of the images but also by the motivation of the Dunson character. The journey is certainly the type of frame Campbell uses to illustrate the quest of the hero. In Red River, Wayne plays a character obsessively driven to achieve his goal. It is the quest, the hunt for the Holy Grail, that drives him on and motivates him. The journey becomes the source of his character, as in The Searchers.

During my acting days I had learned about character motivation, and had always approached a particular role with the idea that the actor creates his or her own dramatic need within the framework of each scene. But I came to a new awareness of character as I studied this movie. I saw that the key to creating a strong character on the screen starts with establishing a strong dramatic need. To me, John Wayne’s persona was often defined by this intense need, and the journey was often the context in which that need was explored and fulfilled.

That was a major insight for me. I wondered whether the character’s dramatic need might be the engine that fuels the dramatic context of the story line. If it was, how could I describe the dramatic need of the character? And how could I relate this to capturing the “essence” of Wayne’s image? I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and finally arrived at an understanding of dramatic need that seemed to encompass the essence of a strong character. Dramatic need, I determined, is what the main character wants to win, gain, get or achieve during the course of the screenplay. It’s one of the keys that can unlock the dimension of the character.

In Red River, Dunson’s dramatic need—to drive his cattle to Kansas and then sell them—establishes the force and depth of his character. Examining this further, I saw that dramatic need, by its very nature, becomes a source of conflict. As Dunson heads north to Missouri, he confronts obstacle after obstacle: storms, a stampede (a classic sequence), rivers, an attempted mutiny, Indians. During the drive, the men fall victim to his obsession, and most of them, including Matthew and Groot, begin to doubt Dunson’s ability to lead the herd to market.

The real fracture between father and son occurs when the men hear the railroad has reached Abilene, Kansas. If that’s true, Matthew knows, they can cut several hundred miles off the cattle drive. But no one has ever driven six thousand head of cattle across uncharted territory, and more important, Dunson says, nobody has actually seen the railroad there.

Because Dunson refuses to listen to the rumors, he becomes isolated in his obsession, and when his men begin deserting, he starts making errors in judgment. When Dunson wants to hang two of the deserters, Matthew steps in and forcibly takes the herd away from him. It is the ultimate confrontation between father and son. Matthew tells the men they’re heading for Abilene, and when he leaves with the Red River herd, Dunson tells his adopted son to always look behind him, “Because I’ll be there, and I’m going to kill you.”

Everyone knows Dunson means what he says; he will never give up the herd, even if it means tracking Matthew to the ends of the earth. From that moment on, every shadow, every sound, heralds the possible appearance of Dunson.

And so Matthew sets out on the unknown Chisholm Trail. As they move closer to Kansas, they rescue a wagon train of women and gamblers being attacked by Indians. During the battle, a relationship begins between Matthew and a feisty, free-spirited young woman played by Joanne Dru. When Matthew and the herd finally reach Abilene, and the railroad, it’s cause for celebration, except for one fact: Dunson has rounded up a group of men and is hot on their trail. It’s only a matter of time before father and son come to their final confrontation.

The showdown happens at sunrise, on the streets of Abilene. John Wayne catches up with his adopted son, and in one of my favorite fight scenes, Dunson strides through the herd of cattle milling around the streets of Abilene and confronts Matthew. Dunson pulls his gun and fires at Matthew, narrowly missing, but his son never flinches. Dunson remembers a time when Matthew told him never to take his gun away from him, and when Dunson does just this, the two men explode into a ferocious fight. Matthew goes after his adoptive father with a frenzy. Before they can kill each other, Tess, the Joanne Dru character, stops the senseless mayhem by firing her gun angrily, telling them they’re fools; anyone can see they’d never kill each other—they love each other too much to do that. The two men, lying amid the shambles of broken debris, look at each other, and Dunson sardonically says, “You better marry that girl, Matt.” A little hokey, to be sure, but a wonderful scene.

Red River is one of the few westerns that Howard Hawks made, and as I thought about the characters and the forces that drove them toward their final showdown, I saw how Campbell’s ideas could be applied to the modern “hero.” Red River is a story in which the main character embarks on an unknown journey, leaving one way of life and replacing it with another. Both characters, Dunson and Matthew, undergo their own personal change, their own rites of initiation. By the time they reach their destination they have gone through a transformation of character based on their dramatic needs, a journey that is both inner and outer.

More than once I thought back to my dinner with Robert Graves and silently thanked him for pointing me in the direction of my own journey of understanding. The scenes I pulled for the John Wayne episode were all placed within the context of the hero’s journey.

But while it worked with Wayne, I was not so sure it was going to work with John Garfield.

I’ve always liked Garfield’s films. Something about his manner, the tough guy with a strong moral center, strongly appealed to me. The first Garfield film I ever saw was The Postman Always Rings Twice. Released right after the war in 1946, the film was adapted by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch from a James M. Cain novel. I was struck with the energy and intensity of Garfield’s performance. In the film, he plays a drifter who accepts a menial job in a gas station because of his attraction to the owner’s wife, played by Lana Turner. Together, they decide to murder her husband, but after the crime has been committed, the forces of doubt and fear begin to seep into their relationship, and they get caught. It is a steamy, intense film noir, energized by the chemistry between Garfield and Turner.

As in many of Garfield’s movies, he plays a character who is caught in circumstances beyond his control. The more I studied his films, the more I began to see it wasn’t the outward journey that formed his dramatic need, but an internal journey fueled by his own passion. And often it’s this very passion that leads him to become his own victim.

I became fully aware of this fact when I screened one of his early films, Dust Be My Destiny (Robert Rossen). In it, Garfield plays a character who tries to run away from his destiny, but the seeds of his fate have been planted early on. When we first meet him, he’s just been released from prison, convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, and enters the story knowing he can never escape from this mark on his character. It turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I could see that while his character was tough, energetic and forceful on the outside, on the inside he was a rebel who stands up and defies the “system,” a rebel with a cause, who is ultimately crushed and subdued by the forces of society.

Other roles revealed this same quality of character: Four Daughters; Body and Soul, written by Abraham Polonsky and directed by the great Robert Rossen; Humoresque (Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold) and especially Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky and Ira Wolfert).

Finally, I identified a common thread in Garfield’s roles—his point of view, the way he looked at the world. In his strongest roles he played a character born on “the wrong side of the tracks,” desperately reaching out for fame or fortune, but in the process discovering that in order to achieve his goal he has to sacrifice his moral center. In Humoresque, for example, he plays the youngest son of a poor family with a unique gift to play the violin. Tired of financially draining his family, and against his mother’s wishes, he joins a professional orchestra, but learns he cannot overcome his basic nature as an outspoken soloist. When a wealthy woman, played by Joan Crawford, offers to become his “sponsor,” he accepts, but the emotional price he has to pay as her lover to reach his artistic potential is too high. In the end, he has corrupted his moral and ethical standards, and he wants out. The ending, in which Crawford wades into the deep ocean at sunset, is right out of A Star Is Born—melodramatic to be sure, but effective nevertheless.

In Force of Evil, one of my all-time favorite Garfield films, he plays a sharp corporate attorney driven by greed who accepts corruption as a necessary part of life. Once again, the Garfield character is born on “the wrong side of the tracks,” and we learn that his older brother, played by Thomas Gomez, has sacrificed his own dreams to put his younger brother through law school. When the story opens, Garfield is the attorney for a New York racketeer who runs the numbers racket. Garfield sets up a brilliant scam and tries to convince his brother to close his small private bank to protect him from bankruptcy. But his older brother refuses to double-cross his clientele, and when the preselected number hits the next day, he’s wiped out.

Later, Garfield finds his older brother dead, lying on the rocks underneath a bridge. And there, the film ends; greed and corruption, he learns, lead only to death and betrayal. In many ways, this is a personal statement for Abe Polonsky, as he was one of the screenwriters whose life and career had been adversely affected by the Hollywood blacklist.

In relating Garfield’s films to the mythic structure described by Joseph Campbell, I came to understand that the internal and external journey of a character are really the same. While the outer journey provides the shell, or the structure, for the inner journey to unfold, as in Red River or The Searchers, in Garfield films like Body and Soul, Force of Evil and Humoresque it was the context of the inner journey that made the transformation of his character so visceral. It was his point of view, the way his characters viewed the world, that led to the transformations that occurred.

I once again saw the importance of the internal journey when I began my preparation on the Humphrey Bogart episode for Hollywood and the Stars. Making a film list of Bogart’s career, I flashed back to the first time I had seen him, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston). I was about fifteen, and a couple of friends and I went in to see it in a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was just the kind of story I loved, with action, humor, high drama and the most wonderful irony at the end. To this day, I think about the ending of that film and experience a little smile inside that totally validates what going to the movies is all about.

While I was pulling several scenes from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre for the Bogart episode, I saw Casablanca again and found the key to what I was looking for: what makes great character, and what the qualities are that make an actor larger than life and lift him into a mythological stature.

I had not seen Casablanca in its entirety for many years. While I was searching for scenes in The Great Lovers show, Jack Haley Jr., the producer, told me to pull the scene from Casablanca where Rick waits for Ilsa at the train station.

I remember watching the scene totally out of context. As Rick waits for Ilsa at the station, his face reflects everything he is feeling: happiness, anxiety, fear, concern. Just before the train leaves, Sam arrives, telling him Ilsa is nowhere to be found, but that she has left him a note. Rick opens it and starts reading as drops of rain splatter onto the paper, smearing the ink. I can still see Bogart standing in the rain, his face raw with the emotions of pain, love, hurt and betrayal; I think it’s one of the great movie moments. As I prepared to select the scenes for the Bogart episode, I thought Casablanca would be the perfect vehicle to embody everything that made him not just a great lover but a character who was larger than life, a modern-day hero—in short, a movie star.

So, late one night after work, I sat down and ran Casablanca in the screening room. I didn’t know what to expect, so I let the movie wash over me, soaking up the characters, the dialogue, the story and situation. It was wonderful. I left work that night totally blissed out; my mind was quiet, yet I was filled with an energetic excitement which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. All night long, I was filled with images from Casablanca, searching for some aspect of the movie I could build into the TV show’s episode.

It wasn’t until lunch the next day that I found what I’d been looking for. As a few of us were sitting in the restaurant, we started talking about Bogart, and it suddenly dawned on me that in Casablanca Bogart sacrifices his love for Ilsa to serve a higher good, to serve a cause larger than himself.

I suddenly “got” the relationship between the movies, myths and heroes. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell says the hero has “to die in order to be reborn.” When Casablanca begins, Rick has been living in the past, harboring the pain and joy of a lost love affair. When Ilsa reenters his life, Rick laments, “Of all the lousy gin joints, in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” and we know it’s time for him to embrace the past.

What makes Bogie so great in this film? I think it’s the combination of the basic nature of the character he plays, his screen persona and the part itself which give Bogart mythological stature here. In their screenplay, Julius and Philip Epstein fashioned a character who is tough and fearless, with a strong moral center and the proverbial heart of gold. He’s one of the “good guys,” and his action at the end of the film, helping Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and his wife Ilsa escape to Lisbon to continue their fight against the Germans, serves a much higher purpose than his and Ilsa’s love affair. “I’m no good at being noble,” he tells Ilsa, “but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world….”

It’s by his action, of course, that Rick is transformed; he has sacrificed his love and desire for Ilsa for the good of the Allies in defeating the Nazis. Victor Laszlo is a leader, a man of great spirit and integrity who serves the call of freedom. Through Rick I learned that action is character; what a person does is who he is. Film is behavior.

After lunch, I reread Campbell’s book and found the passage about the nature of the hero—A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” When I reflected on the template of the classical hero in myth and literature, I saw that Rick’s action elevates him to the level of a contemporary hero. “Life consists in action,” Aristotle said, “and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” No matter what’s in Rick’s heart, it’s his quality of character, his action, that drives the story line forward.

It is dharma, righteous action, as the ancient scriptures say, and it’s this action that makes Bogart, Wayne and Garfield heroic figures. They—and the nobility of the human spirit they represent— stand as beacons that cross all barriers of time and culture.