LIFE Casablanca by The Editors of LIFE

Author:The Editors of LIFE
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Liberty Street
Published: 2018-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

© WARNER BROS., COURTESY PHOTOFEST

In a scene with Conrad Veidt, Casablanca’s Major Strasser.

Sydney Greenstreet

Signor Ferrari

RALPH CRANE/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY

NICE PAYDAY To entice Greenstreet into accepting the small role of Signor Ferrari, Warners offered him $3,750 a week, more than double his usual salary.

If Sydney Greenstreet had a single defining characteristic, it was his girth, and he used it to discomforting effect in Casablanca as club owner Signor Ferrari. On-screen for less than five minutes, the nearly 300-pound Greenstreet is effete and insinuating from his first big scene, where he looms near the piano player, Sam, and seeks to lure him away from Rick.

Ferrari: What do you want for Sam?

Rick: I don’t buy or sell human beings.

Ferrari: Too bad. That’s Casablanca’s leading commodity.

Even if Ferrari is not strictly evil, he becomes an oversize stand-in for corruption and greed, brought home clearly by his declaration that “as leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca, I am an influential and respected man.” It was a familiar role for Greenstreet, who was often cast as a partner (or rival) in crime with the tiny Peter Lorre, who plays the black-marketeer Ugarte in Casablanca. The two did not share any scenes in the film, but their personas were so linked for the public, its almost as if they did.

Greenstreet’s success in film was a late-in-life phenomenon. Born in Britain in 1879, he spent decades on the stage, often in Shakespeare and musical comedies, but his original ambition had been to make his fortune as a tea planter. He was just a teenager when he moved to Sri Lanka and discovered a volume of Shakespeare’s works that his mother had packed in his suitcase. With nothing else to do in the evenings, he memorized the plays, and when a drought forced him to leave Sri Lanka he returned to England and began studying acting. Greenstreet arrived in the U.S. in 1904 and worked for years in the theater, rebuffing overtures from Hollywood. A chance meeting with The Maltese Falcon director John Huston led to his being cast, at 62, in that film as the malevolent Kasper Gutman, who is desperate to track down the jewel-encrusted statuette. Peter Lorre was his foil, playing Joel Cairo, and Humphrey Bogart was the hero, as gumshoe Sam Spade. The trio would make three films together.

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