silver nitrate notes

Casablanca and the Problem of the Finished Film

7 oct 2024

Casablanca (1942) is the film people use as an example of the Hollywood studio system working properly. The script was a mess going in; the cast was a compromise; the director Michael Curtiz (1886-1962) was a studio workhorse rather than an auteur; the production was rushed to capitalise on the Allied invasion of Morocco in November 1942. None of that prevented the film from being one of the best-constructed Hollywood pictures of the decade. The lesson that usually gets drawn is that the studio system, when it worked, protected everyone from their own weaknesses. I think this is about half true.

The cinematographer was Arthur Edeson (1891-1970), whom we have met before on The Maltese Falcon. Casablanca was his last major credit at Warner Bros. He was sixty when he shot it. His lighting of Ingrid Bergman is the specific technical achievement in the film that everyone notices, because it is hard not to: Bergman is lit, in almost every scene, with a key light close to the lens axis and slightly above, which flatters her features and which produces in her eyes the bright twin catchlights that became the reference for 1940s Hollywood glamour lighting.

What is less noticed is what Edeson does with Bogart. Bogart is sometimes underlit to the point of partial silhouette. Bogart's face in the Paris flashback is significantly less lit than Bogart's face in the present-day Casablanca scenes, which makes no naturalistic sense (the Paris scenes are in spring daylight) but makes complete psychological sense: the past, for Rick, is a more secret place than the present. Edeson has lit Bogart to match the film's emotional temperature, not the weather in the scene.

The famous dialogue lines ("Here's looking at you, kid"; "We'll always have Paris"; "Of all the gin joints") were the work of the Epstein twins and Howard Koch, who wrote the script during shooting. The actors did not know what was going to happen at the end of the film because the writers did not know what was going to happen at the end of the film. The ending was still being debated the week it was shot. What we now experience as a perfectly constructed piece of storytelling was improvised in real time and assembled in the editing room.

The other half is that Casablanca is, in the end, a film about the competence of its craftsmen. Curtiz gets the blocking right. Edeson gets the light right. The Epsteins and Koch get the dialogue right. Max Steiner gets the score right. Bogart and Bergman get the performances right. What the studio system gave them was not genius; it was the infrastructure to work at a level where their competence, compounded over seven weeks of shooting, produced something better than any single one of them would have produced alone. That is a lesson worth taking seriously. It is not the same lesson as "the system worked".

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sources
[1] Harmetz, Aljean. Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca. Hyperion, 1992.
[2] Eco, Umberto. "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage," in Travels in Hyperreality, Harcourt, 1986.
[3] Koch, Howard. Casablanca: Script and Legend. Overlook, 1973.
[4] Rosenzweig, Sidney. Casablanca and Other Major Films of Michael Curtiz. UMI Research Press, 1982.