Casablanca was on TCM last night. It's hard to believe it started off as a standard, wartime B pic with mid-level studio players.
A new bio sums up the miraculous alchemy that can be film:
By one account, his first 45 movies had him getting hanged or electrocuted eight times, sentenced to life imprisonment nine times, and cut down by bullets a dozen times.
Bogart’s big break came when George Raft turned down starring roles in “High Sierra,” and then “The Maltese Falcon,” and from there, it was on to the movies with which he has become synonymous, including “Casablanca,” “To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
Of “Casablanca,” Mr. Kanfer writes: “It was, and would remain, a Humphrey Bogart movie because he was the one who furnished the work with a moral center. There was no other player who could have so credibly inhabited the role of Rick Blaine, expatriate, misanthrope, habitual drinker, and, ultimately, the most self-sacrificing, most romantic Hollywood hero of the war years. To watch him in this extraordinary feature was not only to see a character rise to the occasion. It was to see a performer mature, to become the kind of man American males yearned to be. When Humphrey Bogart started filming ‘Casablanca’ on May 25, 1942, he was a star without stature; when he finished, on August 1, he was the most important American film actor of his time and place.”
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