Round up the usual suspects : the making of Casablanca : Bogart, Bergman, and World War II by Harmetz Aljean

Author:Harmetz, Aljean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Movie/Tv Tie-Ins, Pop Arts / Pop Culture, Film - General, Film - History & Criticism, Films, cinema, Television, Casablanca (Motion picture), Casablanca (Film cinématographique), Casablanca (Film), tournage (cinéma), Dreharbeit, Geschichte
Publisher: New York : Hyperion
Published: 1992-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

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provided diversion for Bogart on Casablanca for barely a week. He started work in Rick's Cafe on Stage 8 on May 28 and finished his last scene on June 2.

Since Bogart didn't use his dressing room for the usual male-star sexual acrobatics—Errol Flynn sometimes managed four starlets a day and Fredric March's reputation was such that Jean Burt says she had to be accompanied by a makeup man before she was allowed to go into March's dressing room to fit his wig for The Adventures of Mark Twain —he concentrated on liquor and chess. The solitary chess game Rick is playing when the camera first focuses on him in Casablanca was a real game Bogart was playing by mail with Irving Kovner of Brooklyn. Bogart would play chess with anyone at any time, and, when he was making Casablanca, he was also doing his patriotic duty by playing a number of mail games with sailors in the U.S. Navy. How good a player Bogart was is debatable. His friend Nathaniel Benchley said that, as a young actor in New York, Bogart used to make money by beating the experts who sat in the park and took on all comers at a dollar a game. But the owner of Romanoffs, Mike Romanoff, one of Hollywood's best players, belittled Bogart's game. "He wouldn't have a chance against a third- or fourth-class player," Romanoff said. "I usually win when I play with him, but it is no distinction for me." Once, when Romanoff was home sick and Bogart and Richard Brooks were having dinner at his restaurant, they jointly played a telephone game with him. After the fifth or sixth move, said Brooks, "We knew we were in trouble. So Bogie calls the chess expert from the Los Angeles Times and asks what our next move should be. Then he calls Mike and gives him the move. In less than a minute, Mike called back and said, 'Who's there with you?

Whatever the quality of his game, Bogart loved chess. In a business full of gamblers, he hated gambling. "I enjoy chess because there's no luck to it," he told Ezra Goodman. He would undoubtedly be amused by the fact that the postcard on which he sent his fourteenth move to Kovner—14-P-Q5—recently sold for $1,750.

Bogart and Rains admired each other, and that admiration comes through in their scenes together. What seems to be a genuine friendship between Rick and Renault takes the sting out of the ending of Casablanca. "My father loved Humphrey Bogart," says Jessica Rains. "He told me so." The cockney who turned himself into a gentleman was unexpectedly compatible with the gentle-born

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