Screenshot for the Week of 03 August 2020: "CASABLANCA " (1942)

Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca (1942).

Look at those two pairs of eyes.  In Rick Blaine's eyes there is a mixture of sadness and trepidation.  Something has just been set in motion, and in Blaine's mind and spirit the ramifications have sunk in quickly.  In Victor Laszlo's eyes there is absolute defiance.  And in the next scene he will risk his life, openly defying the personifications of evil.

In two of my favorite movies there is a moment that never fails to bring a lump to my throat.  One is when Atticus Finch walks out of the courtroom following Tom Robinson's trial in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).  The other is in the scene immediately following the one depicted in the screenshot above.  Both moments are extraordinarily powerful, though each strikes a different chord.

Or do they?  Both involve the rare individuals who put their lives on the line, looking evil in the eye with defiance and honor.  Lazslo says, "If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die."  And Atticus Finch says—referring to why he volunteered to defend a Black man, accused of raping a white woman, at a trial conducted by and for white racists: "If I didn't, I couldn't hold my head up in this town."

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If you want to discern what style dominates a director's ouevre, find out what he or she did before becoming a director.  Hitchcock, for instance, was a graphic artist working for film set designers and art directors.  That makes sense, doesn't it?  Billy Wilder had been a screenwriter.  His movies are plot-, character-, and dialogue-driven.

What about cinematographers?  Does the same formula hold true?  Many of the best ones started as movie camera operators or their assistants.  But it shouldn't surprise anyone that many others began as still photographers.

Arthur Edeson was one of these.  He was the cinematographer on Casablanca.  I believe that experienced still photographers look through motion picture camera viewfinders in a different way from those who only train on movie cameras.  Just a hunch.

Edeson was one of the founders in 1919 of the American Society of Cinematographers.  (Watch for "A.S.C." in cinematographers' credits.)  At William Fox studios he filmed the first widescreen movie ever made, The Big Trail (1930), starring a very young John Wayne.  The widescreen process was a technology that had to be scrapped shortly afterward: the Great Depression made the construction of new theaters with wider screens (or even retrofitting old theaters) impossible to accomplish.  Edeson worked for many of the great directors of the Golden Age.  And many of his movies are classics:

• All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
• Waterloo Bridge (1931)
• Frankenstein (1931)
• The Invisible Man (1933)
• Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
• Each Dawn I Die (1939)
• They Drive by Night (1940)
• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Across the Pacific (1942)
• Casablanca (1942)

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Of the fourteen credited roles in Casablanca, only three were played by people born in the U.S.—Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine; Dooley Wilson as Sam; and Joy Page as Annina Brandel, the Bulgarian newlywed held hostage by Captain Renault's sexual appetite.  European-born actors, especially those from eastern Europe, desperately wanted to participate in this film.  And dozens did.

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Casablanca might be the most patriotic movie I've ever seen.  It's also my all-time favorite movie.  (You can find my 25 Favorite Movies at the Internet Movie Database, listed in ranked order, along with my 101 Favorite Movies, listed alphabetically.)

Casablanca is my all-time favorite movie despite its containing more than a whiff of hypocrisy.  Though the characters repeatedly assail Germany for trying to take over the world, the narrator of the opening sequence matter-of-factly says the city of Casablanca is located in "French Morocco" while a map showing the African continent in the background contains the words "French West Africa," "French Equatorial Africa," and "Belgian Congo."  The Belgians, by the way, committed the most savage and cruel atrocities imaginable against the native peoples they used for slave labor in Congo, atrocities detailed in Adam Hochschild's history of the Belgian rapaciousness, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

The signature exchange in this movie might be the following:

RICK

"How can you close me up?  On what grounds?"

RENAULT

"I'm shocked!  SHOCKED! to find that gambling is going on in here!"

CROUPIER

(to RENAULT in a soft voice): "Your winnings, sir." (Hands RENAULT a wad of French Francs)

RENAULT

(to CROUPIER in a soft voice) "Thank you very much.  (Shouting) Everybody out at once!"

C: Arthur Edeson.  D: Michael Curtiz.