Round Up the Usual Suspects - Aljean Harmetz

As you might guess, Round Up The Usual Suspects is about the making of the film Casablanca, published on its 50^th anniversary. The film was not thought to be anything special when it was being made. Hal Wallis, the producer, was more focused on some of his other concurrent films, like A Watch on the Rhine, and the actors mostly thought it was silly. They were still trying to figure out the ending while they were shooting – Ilsa couldn’t abandon her husband to stay with Rick, that wouldn’t have been allowed, so how to make her leave with Lazlo and make it believable – which put Ingrid Bergman in a spot because she didn’t know which guy she was supposed to be in love with in these scenes.

There’s a lot about the major players involved, not just Bogart, Bergman, Paul Henreid, but also director Michael Curtiz, producer Hal Wallis, studio head Jack Warner, Max Steiner, who put together the music for the film, and a lot of other people. Harmitz also looks at the film in relation to the political climate at the time, with the U.S. just recently entering the war. Casablanca was fortunate in that, later in the war, the Office of War Information was much more heavy-handed in trying to get the messages it wanted spread into movies, often resulting in extremely boring, preachy speeches that ground the films to a halt. As it was, the film was not shown to the armed forces overseas, because it was believed to be too critical of Vichy France. Awww, it might offend the Nazi collaborators, how awful. Many of the bit players, people with just a line or two, were major actors in Europe who came to America to get away from Hitler, and mostly got shoehorned in as background foreign characters, if they could even manage that.

There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff in there about things the OWI and similar government branches tried to get put into films, largely in the way they wanted a depiction of America and its armed forces that was not at all realistic. So officers are always competent, gruff sergeants really just want the men serving under them to survive (as opposed to being mean for the hell of it), the armed forces are fully integrated, people on the home front are fully accepting of the sacrifices they’re making, and everyone’s prepared for loved ones not to return. They encouraged movie studios to stop placing black actors in the stereotypical servant roles (not a bad idea), but the end result was the studios just cut a lot of those roles out, and then there were no African-American characters at all. *sad trombone noise* There’s the necessity to portray allies in a positive light – the OWI criticized a Sherlock Holmes film because it made a Nazi saboteur in London look too effective, making the British appear unable to protect themselves. Don’t show people being wasteful of scarce resources, which eventually extended to no car chases (because audiences responded badly to the screeching tires symbolizing wasted rubber, supposedly), and no pie fights, because that’s wasting food. Then there’s a bit about how films people were encouraged to make in the early 1940s – say, Mission to Moscow, which the Warners were encouraged to produce by FDR supposedly – were then used against them as evidence of un-American – read: Communist – leanings in the late 1940s. So Bogart’s in Action in the North Atlantic, and it shows Soviet fighter planes protecting a convoy of ships as it nears Murmansk, that’s a mark against him (and so is that fact the film was written by a Communist). I think history is sometimes the study of reading about people you’d like to go back in time and punch in the face just as hard as you could.

Along that line, there is an irritating recurring theme of nostalgia of Harmitz’ part. Yes, it’s a book about a movie that was 50 years old then, but it’s more this romanticizing of the studio system. Oh, there are no character actors like Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet any longer. Oh, movies today would not be as subtle and suggestive of romantic tension as Rick and Ilsa were. On and on. Harmitz has this letter Bogart sent the studio heads asking if he could please have just a couple of weeks of vacation before starting shooting on this Casablanca film, if you don’t mind. She showed it to a couple of current producers, and you could practically hear them jerking off musing on how great it would be to have that control over their big stars. And Harmitz argues Casablanca wouldn’t have been as good as it was without Hal Wallis being able to bring in other writers to help work on the script (Phil and Julie Epstein provided much of the comedy, Howard Koch much of the political and social commentary, and Casey Robinson helped a lot with the love story), or assigning Curtiz a lighting technician Curtiz didn’t like, but who was available and happened to be good. It’s kind of a “These directors need someone to rein them in” attitude, and that might be true in certain cases, but I kept thinking what Wallis or Jack Warner would have done to Segio Leone, imagining their response to the final standoff in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. “Why is there no dialogue? Why are you doing a 7-minute scene of close-ups on faces and hands? This is excessive and wasteful of film. The music is too loud, and needs more singing. Clint Eastwood is the main star, give him more lines.” Yeesh. Not every movie needs studio suits sticking their noses in.

I’m always leery of these people who romanticize the eras where management had even more power than it does today. Like sportswriters who still bemoan free agency, because how awful teams can no longer just lowball players with crappy one-year contracts forever, and the player’s only option would be to not play. That’s essentially the studio system. You make the movies the studio wants you to make. If you don’t, you don’t get to make movies, period. Even the bigger stars got stuck with that. Bogart didn’t want to do Conflict, and asked Warner to let him out of it, but Warner told him no Passage to Marseille if he didn’t, so Bogart gave in (having seen Passage to Marseille, he’d have been better off refusing). Yeah, there were plenty of good movies made under that system, but there have been plenty of good movies produced without it, too. The studio holding the whip hand is not the essential ingredient to a good film.

‘As the casts and crews of Wallis’s five movies came together in late winter and early spring, the war was beginning to cause changes in the way movies were conceived and made. Equally important, the war rubbed away Hollywood’s veneer of arrogance and left the industry confused and tentative. On the crudest psychological level, the United States government was now in the censorship business and looking over the studios’ shoulders. On the crudest physical level, the simplest staples of production were no longer available. Aluminum, copper, and rubber were forbidden materials. Shellac, which came from India, was diverted to coat bombs. Rubber cement – which created the spiderwebs in dozens of horror movies each year – had to be replaced by glue, which was brittle and made lopsided, sticky webs. That first spring only sugar was rationed and meat was still plentiful, but eventually actors would sit down on screen to meals of hand-painted plaster roast beef.’