Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film | Alan K. Rode

[Alan K. Rode] Thank you very much and thank you. This is nice to see this turnout here. I want to talk a little bit about Curtiz and a little bit about uh... "Casablanca" obviously but first I'd like to thank Paul and UCLA for allowing me to curate this series and for putting it on. Also KJ Relth who went out and got all of these movies. Todd Wiener... in addition. And uh...programming this festival was kind of like a microcosm of writing this book because originally I had intended to spend three years and write about a 350 page book and that turned into seven years and 700 pages. And uh...more than once during the process I recalled that line that John Huston spoke to Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown" where he says, "You may think you know what you're dealing with but, believe me, you don't." [Rode chuckles] It was really tough and it was really tough to program this festival. There were a lot of hard choices to make. Uhm... you know 21 films out of a resume of, of... I stopped counting at like a 181 and that includes some of the films that he didn't finish, that he left unfinished in Europe and that he did partially at Warner Brothers and so forth. I'd also like to thank the good people of Warner Brothers who provided many of the films here and that's Christy Nakamura, Ned Price and one of my heroes, George Feltenstein, who...his work with the Warner Archive a lot of these films really wouldn't exist. So kudos to George. Uhm... [Audience clapping]. And by the way I'll be doing something at the Burbank Library, I think, on January 17th. They have this big display of the 75th anniversary of "Casablanca." If you can't get enough of it and George and I are going to be there together talking about "Casablanca" and I'll be signing books... as well. So...uhm... yeah, Curtiz-181 films, 94 of them for Warner Brothers. Peter Lorre said about Curtiz, "Curtiz eats movies and...and excretes movies." I put in the book, "It was an incandescent mania for filmmaking." What Curtiz said about his technique for making films is, "You should be a tiger on the camera fighting for the success of the movie." And no other director is really more firmly identified with the branded success of a single American movie studio than Michael Curtiz- "Casablanca," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Mildred Pierce," "Robin Hood," "The Sea Wolf," "Angels With Dirty Faces," "Life With Father," "A White Christmas," "The Breaking Point"- really the richest of cinematic legacies. And what I found about Curtiz, one of the many things I discovered about him, he was largely ignored and has been largely ignored by historians... uh... because he was an exception to the "auteur theory." He really was a man for all movies. Really, I have to say, that when you take... for those slavish adherence to the "auteur theory" don't be offended, don't take it personally but when you take the "auteur theory" and you try to apply it unilaterally to films made in Hollywood during the 1930s and the 1940s, it...it...it really doesn't work. Also Curtiz died in 1962 and this was before the wave of retrospective appreciation for Golden Age directors and the work done by Richard Schickel and Peter Bogdanovich and so on and so forth and all of those documentaries, so Curtiz died before that. So he was really kind of considered a vocational mechanic of the studio system, a guy that, "Hey, give me the script and I'll shoot the script." And as I found out doing the research for this book nothing could be further than the truth- he rewrote scenes, he changed scripts. He was in a constant state of acrimony with people like Jack Warner and Hal Wallis and early on Zanuck because he insisted on making movies in his own way and most of the time improving them. Very interesting. Of course, during his career he was very well known, not only for his hit films but his English malapropisms that, that got literally had his name applied as a descriptive noun, called "Curtizism's"- "You know, next time I need a dumb son-of-a-bitch, I'll send for myself," "Of all the Hungarians I speak the best goddamn English." He had an explosive temper. He was not a sadist in the true sense of that word but he had a short fuse and he vented pressure. He did pick on people like the sound, the sound guy. He hated sound people because when they came in, he made his first film in 1912, and when sound came in he came to Warner Brothers in '26 and the sound people from Western Electric basically took authority of the set with their technology and newfangled things. So he always used the sound people, the sound guy as kind of a verbal pinata. He was a paradoxical man. Of the many people that didn't like him, there were those that did liked him...very much. Ann Blyth, who I interviewed extensively, adored him and was a close friend. Doris Day, John Garfield... and I think the best way to sum up Curtiz's personality was a quote from Hal Mohr to Leonard Maltin and Hal Mohr was the pioneer cinematographer that shot many of Curtiz's early films, also shot "The Jazz Singer" and he said, "I enjoyed Mike very much. He was a brutal son-of-a bitch. He had no consideration for anybody's feelings but he was really a very kindly man." [Rode chuckles]. So go figure. Curtiz's talent was prodigious. He had a instinct for film. William Dieterle who became...was an actor who became a directorial colleague said, "You know, if...if people were late at Warner Brothers and directors were not on time, not on schedule they usually replaced him with Curtiz and he could do anything." And Dieterle said, "If I didn't have my script and it was being rewritten or something, I was helpless." He said, "But Curtiz had such an...like this Jungian instinct for film he could function without a script and move ahead and get things done. Robert Buckner, the producer, who produced "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Life With Father" and many of Curtiz's films, he said, "Curtiz could make a film and he didn't even really know what it was about while he was making it." When he made "Mission to Moscow", he said, "I had to constantly remind him of the events that were going on with the War and what we, what we were doing." Jimmy Lydon, who was in "Life With Father" and had a long, long career both in front of and mostly behind the camera said, he told me, "Mike was really an artistic man and he arranged every set-up he ever shot." He said, "The...the cinematographer, the cameraman did not arrange the set-ups. Mike arranged the set-ups and it was never just a two-shot. It was very, very artistic and how I used the camera." His arrival at Warner Brothers in 1926 after directing upwards of 70 films in Europe was really serendipitous because I think Warner Brothers was the right studio at the right time. They were the survivors, they were coming out of... basically making their mark. Sound was coming in and then shortly thereafter "The Jazz Singer" and then Warner Brothers acquired First National and that was how they got from Sunset Boulevard up to Burbank. So the founders of Warner Brothers and the pictures that they produced over the next two decades had a decidedly sharp, edgy quality that really dovetailed with Curtiz's vitality and the super-human work ethic he had. In writing this book it was impossible not to write a lot about Warner Brothers and not to write a lot about the Warner's themselves. This was a studio that reflected the personality of the brothers, particularly, Harry. Sam, who died in 1927, but was really the glue that held the brothers together in the formative years and of course the one and only Jack L. Warner. It was really the only major Hollywood studio that was run by a family, like a family business. And that kind of brings me to "Casablanca" which... Paul had said it's the most beloved film ever. I think it's the most beloved and the most chronicled. How does one write something new or say something new about "Casablanca" that hasn't been uttered or... written. There are several great books- Aljean Harmetz's book, I think, "Round Up The Usual Suspects" and it's been reissued, may be one of the great books ever written about a single movie. Noah...my colleague Noah Eisenberg has a new book out on "Casablanca" and and there's a multitude of memoirs by the people who wrote it and interviews and what I concluded and what I wrote in my book was that... long afterward everyone wanted to be the first one to claim that, "I went to Rick's" [Rode chuckles]. and, and had something to do with the making of "Casablanca." I tried to write about "Casablanca" from Curtiz's perspective. As in what did he do because "Casablanca" and all of these movies from that era and still today obviously are a collaborative exercise. So what did Curtiz do for "Casablanca." By the way? I just have to ask this question... is there anyone here who has not seen "Casablanca"? Is there anyone here? One. I envy you young lady and I, you sir, so there's two. Okay. This is going to be a seminal experience for you. You'll remember it the rest of your life. But what did, what did Curtiz do that help make "Casablanca" such a great picture? He cast all the European bit players and when you see... particularly the opening shot where there's a dolly shot through Rick's and the bustle of everyone moving around and then they go to each table and everyone's trying to make a deal to get a black market passport and get out of Casablanca, many of those actors... were Jewish refugees from Europe and Curtiz cast all of them. And in fact the one major scene where the French national anthem is sung, those tears were not phony. They were...they were authentic. The dolly shots, the flashbacks...Curtiz also insisted that the love story between Elsa and Rick be built up so all the things that happened in the present made sense. Uhm... he basically forced Hal Wallis to cast Dooley Wilson as Sam. Wallis wanted to use Clarence Muse. Curtiz didn't like him. He thought Dooley Wilson was better and he was right. He also took his old Hungarian... friend S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall and cast him as Carl and they had a big set too with Wallis over, "Well, he wants four weeks and $1500. You have to get him three weeks and $1200." And Curtiz basically went...acted as the middleman between Hal Wallis, the producer, and he, got he got Carl or rather Sakall cast in the film and then built up his part because he perceived that Sakall's humor was important to even out the story and so forth. The other thing about "Casablanca" I think that, that... I should mention is it's kind of like Curtiz coming to Warner Brothers in 1926- it's a matter of timing. So the first day of production in "Casablanca" May 25th, 1942... The first major studio in Hollywood that recognized the threat of Nazism was Warner Brothers, and particularly Harry Warner, was a very, very serious American patriot who coined the studio's motto- "Combining good citizenship, with good picture making"- and Warner's produced anti-Nazi pictures such as "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" and "Underground" well before December, 1941 and Pearl Harbor that brought America into the War. And so there were many war themed films that were produced that year uhm... "Desperate Journey", "Across the Pacific", "Watch on the Rhine", "Air Force", etc. in 1942 in 1943 and all of these films were produced by Hal Wallis for Warner Brothers and highly successful, but they also rallied audiences to the to the cause Of course, Wallis had purchased a play called "Everybody Comes to Rick's" in 1941 and contrary to a lot of things that had been written, the play that was written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, really forms the spine of the movie. There's a lot of the play in the movie. Uhm... and of all the folklore that surrounds the making of "Casablanca" the question of which writer or writers deserve the lion's share of the credit- that's like throwing a huge jigsaw puzzle up in the air and then you're picking up the pieces- but really it was primarily the product of Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers- Julius and Phil Epstein. And the Epstein's were very interesting. They were identical twins who were terrific wits and their fingerprints are all over the great dialogue that you'll hear in "Casablanca." They also loved poking fun at Jack Warner and Warner believed writers should punch a time clock and work an eight hour day and come in the studio. And he said, because as Warner put it..."You guys are like railroad executives or bank presidents. You have to work in eight hour day." So the Epstein's sent Warner and unfinished script one time with a note on it that said, "Dear Jack, please have the bank president finish this for us." Uhm... of course, you had Humphrey Bogart who had really paid a lot of dues for years playing "heavies" and became a contracted player at Warner's in 1935. And he finally crested the summit with "High Sierra" and "The Maltese Falcon." Those pictures made Bogart a star but "Casablanca" really made Humphrey Bogart immortal He was matched by Ingrid Bergman as Elsa and Bergman became the logical choice for the role after Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lamarr, Michelle Morgan were ruled out and she had to be borrowed by David O. Selznick and interestingly Bergman always downplayed "Casablanca." She's...all this stuff. She never thought she was good-looking. She, she watched the rushes and she said, "I look like a milkmaid." Which is hard to believe and she was always dismissive when people in the years would come back and rave about "Casablanca" and she would say, "Well, you know, I made other pictures too." But along with Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Dooley Wilson, Sakall, I think, "Casablanca" may be the most well cast movie ever made. There's a case to be made because everyone in it is perfect. Uhm... and, of course, there is the music "As Time Goes By". And it was repurposed by the great Max Steiner... legendary Warner Brothers house composer who hated it because it was a song written in...for a Broadway play in 1931 by someone named Herman Hupfeld and Steiner felt that, "Well, you know, I'm the composer. I should write my own music" and he and Wallis went back and forth on this and Wallis uhm... got his way and it's, it made for a memorable, memorable movie. "Casablanca" was finished ten days over schedule because the writers kept churning out pages. It was a movie that everyone involved in tried to make better to the last possible instance and to a degree the script was being changed as they went along. Now, there's some claim it's like Bergman, I think, in her book said, "Well, I didn't know if I was gonna go away with Laszlo or Bogart or whatever." Yeah, that's...that, that may be her memory but that's not exactly true. But no one really knew how the ending was going to be stitched together and what they finally came up with... was magic When they previewed it uh... the crowd went absolutely crazy. And Hal Wallis wanted to do some changes to the ending and Jack Warner sent him a memo and said, "Don't touch it. It's great." And Warner, for all the criticism that gets rightly heaped on- some of his...some of the things he did with actors and his behavior and so forth- Jack Warner had an a very good instinct on what would work in a film and what wouldn't work in a film. And uh... reinforcing that he rushed the premiere in Hollywood in November of '42 and that was just as American troops were prevailing in North Africa and then he put it in general release in January of '43 right after the Casablanca Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill. So Jack did know how to promote a movie. There was no doubt about that. The picture was nominated for eight Academy Awards. It one three- best writing for the Epstein's and Koch, Best Director for Mike Curtiz and the big one for Best Picture. One footnote on this...the, the marriage for Hal, between Hal Wallis and Jack Warner that spawned so many movies, really ended with "Casablanca" because he got an independant production deal at Warner Brothers and his successes and his ego grew with that and Jack Warner had a kind of fine line over the perception of who ran the studio, which it was his studio. He would take people and go, "Whose name is on the water tower." So when they announced the Oscar and Wallis got up to get the Oscar, Warner ran up ahead of him and grabbed the Oscar from Jack Benny [Rode chuckles]. and wouldn't give it to Hal Wallis and his time was marked. I think he left the studio about two months later. That was, that was about it.. and that straw broke the camel's back and Wallis set up independent production company at Paramount. But... "Casablanca" really represents the apex of the Hollywood studio system of Warner Brothers. Coming together at precisely the right time with the optimum acting talent, the directorial acumen of Curtiz, the production decisions, the perfectly matched writing, the music... it was kind of a confluence of almost predestined serendipity. And the great Andrew Sarris uh... called it, "A happy accident," and I would prefer to term "Casablanca" as a movie that occurred accidentally on purpose. There's a timeless appeal to it uh... personified by Humphrey Bogart as Rick. Uh... I think for the movies watching a story where you have someone doing the right thing with class never goes out of style. The ethical heft really elevates the movie from an acclaimed film to something very rare in our culture, a cultural pillar. I think "Casablanca" represented what was good during an era when the differences between good and evil were readily apparent. And I think it's a movie that still resonates particularly during the present day- patriotism based on personal standards instead of jingoistic flag-waving, honor without phoniness, toughness without cruelty and vulnerability rather than weakness... and yes, love, and who doesn't think about love while watching "Casablanca"? It's a signpost I think of our history and our culture because in the end "Casablanca" is about... the best of us. So with that, please enjoy the movie. Thanks for coming. I'll be back to intro "Kid Galahad" but after this, I think, this is going to be a fantastic series I thank you all for coming and with that... "Casablanca." Thank you. [Audience clapping]