Everybody—from Everywhere—Comes to Rick’s: What Casablanca Tells Us about Immigration

When Warner Bros. producer Hal Wallis bought the film rights to Joan Alison and Murray Bennett’s unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s in 1942, he had no reason to expect the eventual movie would become a classic that film lovers would still be enjoying 75 years later. After all, this was the period, from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s, when the Hollywood studios flourished using the “factory system.” Movies were products, and the major studios owned or controlled all components of their production: the studio facilities; the back lots; the performers, writers, and directors; the technical crews; and the theaters. A movie’s producer would oversee its assembly-line production, from writing the screenplay to assigning the director, cast, and crew; designing and building sets; filming; and post-production. Movie crews rarely strayed far from the studio; shooting “on location” usually meant a short trip to the hills above Malibu. No one spent more time on a production than necessary, and costs were carefully managed. Unlike today, when directors can spend two to three years nursing their projects from inception through final cut, directors of that time—even major directors like John Ford—would routinely make two to three movies in a year [1]. Also unlike today, the studios didn’t rely on a few enormously profitable movies; for studios in the 1940s to be profitable (and in those years they were extremely profitable), they needed to make a lot of movies efficiently, and to have most of those movies make decent profits. Blockbusters such as 1939’s Gone with the Wind were rare, and no one planned for or expected that kind of success [2].

Which brings us back to Everybody Comes to Rick’s, or rather to the movie that Hal Wallis made from it: Casablanca, possibly the best-loved movie from the ’30s and ’40s [3]. When the American Film Institute in 1998 selected its top 100 American movies, Casablanca was #2, behind 1941’s Citizen Kane (which may be the most-admired movie from that period). But here’s the thing about Casablanca: While it may be an exceptionally well made and enjoyable movie—and in my mind there’s no question about that—it is still very much a product of the factory system. Humphrey Bogart was under contract to Warner Bros., which was casting him in cynical good-guy roles since his 1941 success in The Maltese Falcon. Ingrid Bergman was loaned to the studio by David O. Selznick, to whom she was under contract. Michael Curtiz directed two other Warner Bros. films in addition to Casablanca in 1942. All the scenes except those at the airport were shot on the Warner Bros. lot. Just eleven months elapsed from Wallis’s purchase of the play in January 1942 until the movie’s November premier, a speed of production that was unexceptional for the time, and that only the factory system could consistently achieve. In summary, Casablanca was the ultimate product of a particularly American method of making movies, the very best the factory system could produce, and in that sense maybe the quintessential American movie …

Yes, the quintessential American movie—with a cast made up almost entirely of immigrants. Except for Bogart (as Rick Blaine), Dooley Wilson (as Sam), and Joy Page (as Annina Brandel), everyone in the credited cast was born in another country. Here are the actors, with their roles and birth countries:

• Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund), Sweden
• Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo), Austria-Hungary
• Claude Rains (Captain Louis Renault), United Kingdom
• Conrad Veidt (Major Heinrich Strasser), Germany
• Sydney Greenstreet (Signor Ferrari), United Kingdom
• Peter Lorre (Ugarte), Austria-Hungary
• S.Z. Sakall (Carl), Austria-Hungary
• Madeleine Lebeau (Yvonne), France
• Leonid Kinskey (Sasha), Russia
• John Qualen (Berger), Canada
• Curt Bois (Pickpocket), Germany
• Marcel Dalio (Emil), France
• Helmut Dantine (Jan Brandel), France
• Ilka Gruning (Mrs. Leuchtag), Austria-Hungary
• Ludwig Stossel (Mr. Leuchtag), Austria-Hungary

And it wasn’t just the people in front of the camera. Many of the movie’s leading technical crew were immigrants as well:

• Michael Curtiz (director), Austria-Hungary
• Jack Warner (executive producer), Canada
• Owen Marks (editor), United Kingdom
• Carl Jules Weyl (art director), Germany
• Orry-Kelly (costume designer), Australia
• Perc Westmore (make-up), United Kingdom
• Max Steiner (music), Austria-Hungary

Some of these people came to the United States to escape the Nazis, others simply because Hollywood [4] was the place to be if you wanted to make movies. Throughout the 1930s, the Hollywood studios welcomed talented immigrants, and at least partly as a result, American movies were the best crafted and most popular in the world. Did these immigrants in Hollywood displace Americans? Perhaps, but certainly not the more skilled and talented ones. Were American audiences bothered by having immigrants playing such a big role in American movies? Maybe some were, but based on attendance records, most apparently were not; more Americans were attending movies in the 1940s than in any decade since.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that Casablanca or Hollywood in the 1940s [5] was a shining example of diversity. Far from it. Hollywood was filled with glass ceilings, and all of them were low. Even Dooley Wilson’s small but sympathetic role as Sam was unusual for the time. Minorities were always under-represented on screen, and when they did appear, they were almost always in villainous or ridiculous roles [6]. The same was true behind the camera, except here we can also add women, who, other than being costume designers or filling other “women’s jobs,” were absent from film crews. (Ida Lupina’s switching from acting to directing in the 1950s was a highly unusual move.) So although Rick’s Café Américain, and Hollywood in general, may have welcomed immigrants, they were primarily immigrants from Europe and Canada.

Instead, my point is that Casablanca is a specific example of what I believe to be a general truth: When America welcomes immigrants and embraces its melting-pot heritage, the country overall gets better. And when America doesn’t welcome immigrants, the country is tainted by its mean-spiritedness.

It wasn’t just the movie business that benefited from immigration in the 1930s. Nearly every creative field was enhanced by the influx of foreign talent fleeing fascist or totalitarian governments. A few outstanding examples: scientists Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, and Max Born; writers Vladimir Nabakov, Bertolt Brecht, and Thomas Mann; musicians Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Bela Bartok; and artists Piet Mondrian and Marc Chagall. These are just the famous ones, representing the thousands who weren’t famous, but still made contributions to the country. And that’s just the first-generation immigrants. Consider all the thousands—no, millions—of descendants of immigrants, living and working in America. All those Casablanca immigrants? Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are probably still in the United States, except we don’t think of them as descendants of immigrants, just as Americans. It’s hard to imagine an America without them [7].

While we’re at it, let’s try to imagine a Casablanca without its international cast and crew. Would a Casablanca filled with American actors speaking in fake accents have become the #2 American movie of all time? It’s hard to imagine that movie becoming a classic.

Follow the author on Twitter @bill_schmwil.

Footnotes:

[1] Four-time Oscar-winner Ford, who spent the early 1940s making movies for the Navy (including the 1942 classic Sex Hygiene), directed three films—Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk—in 1939, followed by The Grapes of Wrath and The Long Voyage Home in 1940 and Tobacco Road and How Green Was My Valley in 1941. Seven films, four of them nominated for best picture Academy Awards, in just three years. The studios kept him busy.

[2] Except perhaps Gone with the Wind’s producer David O. Selznick, who spent the rest of his life trying and failing to have another such success.

[3] Why the name change? First, because the play was unproduced and had no name recognition (as opposed to, say, Now, Voyager, another 1942 Warner Bros. film, based on a 1941 best-selling novel (and produced by Hal Wallis and starring Paul Henreid and Claude Rains)). And second, the 1938 movie Algiers had been a modest success, so Warner Bros. figured if audiences liked one movie named after a North African city, they’d like another. Little did the studio know that American and British forces would invade North Africa on November 8, 1942, or that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would meet in Casablanca in January 1943 to begin planning the post-war world. The studio took advantage of this by premiering the movie in November 1942 and releasing it wide in January 1943, just as Casablanca (the city) was in the headlines. This certainly boosted its box office performance, and may have helped it win the Academy Award for best picture in 1944.

[4] A common misconception is that the major studios were located in Los Angeles’s Hollywood neighborhood. MGM, RKO, and Columbia were in Culver City; Warner Bros. and Disney in Burbank; 20th Century Fox in west Los Angeles; and Universal in unincorporated San Fernando Valley. Of the majors, only Paramount was, and still is, in Hollywood.

[5] Or even today.

[6] When minorities were portrayed positively, they were often played by white actors. For example, in several dozen movies in the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan was the smartest person on the screen, consistently outwitting the comparatively dim white characters. And who played Chan? Swedish actor Warner Oland for the first 14 Chan movies (including the best ones), and American white guys Sidney Toler and Roland Winters for the next 28. Similarly, Peter Lorre played the Japanese-American detective Mr. Moto in seven movies in the late 1930s.

[7] It's especially hard for me to imagine such an America, since as the grandchild and great-grandchild of immigrants, I wouldn’t even exist there.