Michael Curtiz: He’s No Angel

To those of us who are fascinated by early Hollywood, director Michael Curtiz has always been a puzzlement. He was born Manó Kaminer, began his professional life as Mihály Kertész, and (once he moved from his native Hungary to the U.S.) evolved into a flag-waving American known as Mike. He shrugged off his Jewish heritage as easily as he cast aside his several out-of-wedlock children, yet was consistently loyal both to his brothers and to his second wife’s growing son. (Bess Meredyth, officially married to Curtiz until his death in 1962, was a prolific screenwriter who participated in all her husband's screen projects. Her son John Meredyth Lucas went on to become a director as well as a producer on such hit shows as The Fugitive and Star Trek.)

During a fifty-year career that covered some 170 film projects, he proved himself a total workaholic, taking pride in always being the first one on the set. Yet he also loved retreating to  his expansive San Fernando Valley ranch, and (outside of sex with every sweet young thing who struck his fancy) his favorite form of recreation was polo. One thing about him was consistent: his total inability to stop mangling the English language.

I get my information from a colleague, Alan K. Rode, who’s no stranger to contradiction. A former naval officer, he spent years dividing his time between writing and toiling as an aerospace general manager before committing himself fully to chronicling the history of classic Hollywood. His love for the entertainment industry is deeply rooted: his mother and several other family members were all once involved in film production. Aa a lifelong movie buff, Alan has interviewed and befriended many of the stalwarts of Golden Age Hollywood. His special passion for film noir has led him to be active as both a commentator and a preservationist. He’s one of the leading lights behind the Film Noir Foundation, and helps host the nation’s various Noir City film festivals, as well as his own Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs. He curated UCLA's recent three-month Curtiz retrospective, and this April he'll be appearing on TCM with Ben Mankiewicz, spotlighting Curtiz's Hollywood career.

When I first met Alan, he had one book under his belt: Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy. But he told me then he was laboring over something really big. Big it certainly is—Alan’s Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film is a jumbo-sized volume from the Screen Classics series put out by the University Press of Kentucky. It’s a serious, critically acclaimed survey of the director’s long career. In it I learned about Curtiz’s skill with a camera, his fraught relationship with his home studio, Warner Bros., and his involvement in making everything from Captain Blood to Casablanca (for which he won an Oscar) to Life with Father to the Bing Crosby musical, White Christmas. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Bette Davis became stars on his watch. In addition, James Cagney brilliantly shifted gears in his George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Joan Crawford—making a comeback after being sacked by MGM as “box office poison”—won an Oscar for her title role in Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce. He was the first to make movies starring John Garfield and, much later, Doris Day. (Seeing Day, a popular band singer, as possessing unmistakable star quality, he forbade her to take acting classes.) In 1958 he directed Elvis Presley in the film generally considered his best, King Creole. 

Curtiz’s achievements don’t entirely make up for his shenanigans—like his temper tantrums and the late-career big-budget botch called The Egyptian in which both he and producer Darryl Zanuck cast their mistresses in featured roles. Rode discusses, in fascinating detail, how Curtiz ended up making a movie, Mission to Moscow, that could be considered a Soviet propaganda film, but then emerged from the McCarthy era wholly unscathed. Some in Hollywood loved him; some hated him. But one thing’s for sure—without him, Hollywood would have been a much less interesting place. 

“Here’s Looking at You, Casablanca”

Casablanca lives on, at the intersection of Lincoln Blvd. and Rose Avenue, not far from me in Venice, California. It’s true there’s nothing even faintly Moroccan about this nearly forty-year-old restaurant: its menu features California-Mexican cuisine, complete with margaritas, guacamole, and flour tortillas made on the spot. But Casablanca Restaurant does boast Casbah-style décor, and  houses a prime collection of memorabilia from the 1942 movie. The restaurant’s founders were so enamored of the denizens of Rick’s Café Américain that their parking lot has assigned parking spaces for Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and the rest of the movie’s featured players, should they deign to show up. 

Noah Isenberg, though SoCal born, doesn’t seem to know about Venice’s Casablanca Restaurant. But his new We’ll Always Have Casablanca is a paean to the many ways in which the seventy-five-year-old film – “Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie” – is still with us today. This is the place to find comic allusions to Casablanca on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Life; he also tracks down various literary attempts, some of them bizarre, to update the love story of Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, chronicling what happens after he urges her to get on that plane with her husband because “the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Isenberg even introduces Rick’s Café Casablanca, a picturesque nightspot opened in 2004 by a former U.S. diplomat in Morocco to serve those who hanker for good seafood amid nostalgic reminders of a movie that was filmed in its entirety on the Warner Bros. backlot.

Though Casablanca is best remembered as a love story, it owes its impact partly to the fact that it was released just as Hitler and his Nazis were overrunning Europe. Isenberg is at his best in focusing on a cast filled with actual refugees, actors who’d fled to Hollywood from such places as Austria, Germany, and France to escape Nazi persecution. (Some of them ended up playing Nazi on screen to make ends meet.) The actors’ own personal sense of loss helps explain why the scene containing the singing of the Marseillaise in support of the Free French packs such a wallop. He also makes the excellent point that Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, the detached cynic who finally chooses political involvement, nicely represents the attitude of many Americans before (and even after) Pearl Harbor. The American public in the 1940s, notes Isenberg, tended to prefer isolationism, but films like Casablanca helped sell the appeal of  a principled commitment to solving the world’s larger problems. Jack and Harry Warner, themselves from a Jewish immigrant background, boldly used their films in this period to address the specter of Nazism in Europe. One irony: though Casablanca highlights the desperation of the refugees, the specific threat to Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe is never mentioned. 

 Isenberg also traces the popularity of Casablanca into the Sixties, when scores of young campus activists identified with Humphrey Bogart’s iconic blend of idealism and cynical cool. That’s why Bogart-as-Rick posters were so visible in college dorm rooms in my day, and why theatres like the Brattle near Harvard University played Casablanca as part of an end-of-term ritual for many years. Now, as the Syrian refugee crisis makes headlines, the public’s appreciation for Casablanca seems to have waned not at all.  It turns out that Senator Elizabeth Warren, of all people, watches the film each New Year’s Eve, seeing in it much relevance to our nation of immigrants. “Each time I watch it,” she writes, “Casablanca gives me hope.”

Aftermath of a Bloody Friday Evening in Paris

Given the sad, sad news coming out of Paris, it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever return to thinking of France’s capital as a place of music, laughter, and romance. But I wouldn’t want jihadi terrorists to deprive me of the image of the City of Light, an enchanted place where joy reigns supreme. That’s why I suspect I’ll turn to my movie memories for consolation.

Hollywood has loved Paris in all four seasons: in the summer when it sizzles, in the winter when it drizzles, and so on. I’ve drawn up a quick list of my very favorites. Among musicals, there’s of course 1951’s An American in Paris, in which Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and George Gershwin combine for a valentine to Paris as a city of love and art. Director Vincente Minelli actually stages the big final dream ballet as an homage to Parisian painters like Dufy and Toulouse-Lautrec. Caron also starred in 1958’s Gigi, a tuneful ode to the Belle Époque Paris of Colette, with its ambiguous morality and wonderful clothes.

Then there’s the irresistible combination of Paris and Audrey Hepburn. In the 1950s and 1960s the charming and beautifully dressed Mlle. Hepburn always seemed to be falling in love in Paris (and with Paris). Take Love in the Afternoon, where the object of her affection was William Holden. And Funny Face, made in the same year, in which Hepburn as a black-clad New York bohemian-type metamorphoses into a Paris fashion model, thanks to the skills of photographer (and love interest) Fred Astaire. In 1963, Hepburn starred with Cary Grant in Stanley Donen’s dazzling Charade, which manages to combine romance with a suspense thriller full of chases and bad guys. Three years later, she played opposite Peter O’Toole in a lighter romantic comedy, How to Steal a Million, set in the world of art forgery.  

And let’s not forget the notion of Paris as a culinary capital. In 1954’s Sabrina, a chauffeur’s daughter (Audrey Hepburn again!) transforms her life when she goes off to a Parisian cooking school. When she returns, she’s so chic, and so accomplished in the kitchen, that she wins the heart of both a millionaire playboy (Holden) and his more sensible brother (Humphrey Bogart). It’s amazing what French cooking can do. Which brings me to the Pixar flick Ratatouille, which charmed us back in 2007. Its star, of course, is a rat named Remy, whose mad culinary skills enable a scrawny kitchen underling to rise into the ranks of chefdom, at the same time that he finds romance and the opportunity to launch a bistro. None other than Peter O’Toole voices the role of a stuffy restaurant critic, Anton Ego, who finally re-discovers the joy of eating, thanks to Remy’s skill and dedication. (I get hungry just thinking about the savory pleasures of this film.)

Woody Allen loves Paris, of course. His 2011 Midnight in Paris starts with the story of a romantically-inclined nebbish (Owen Wilson in the Woody Allen-clone role) on a trip to La Ville Lumière with his materialistic fiancée and her folks. Their relationship does not go well, especially after he falls under the spell of true Parisian magic, involving mysterious trips back in time to the era of his expatriate literary heroes, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them.

I’ve saved the best for last. There’s not much of Paris in Casablanca, but Rick and Ilsa’s memories of a happier and more peaceful time propel the World War II-era action forward. I feel that Humphrey Bogart says it best, “We’ll always have Paris.”