(Filmframe)

By Stuart Mitchner

When Bogart tells Bergman “We’ll always have Paris” as they say their farewells in Casablanca, he’s responding to her plaintive question “What about us?” For Rick and Ilsa, Paris is another word for love. “We lost it until you came to Casablanca,” he tells her. “We got it back last night.”

While the city of the title is a Moorish fantasy fabricated on a back lot at Warners with stock footage of an overview, Paris is the absolute that will always be the City of Light as Humphrey Bogart will always be the epitome of cool, Ingrid Bergman the epitome of beauty, and “As Time Goes By” the theme song of their romance.

When the two lovers were reunited in Rick’s night club, they talked of the last time they were together, in a Montmartre cafe called the Belle Aurore on the day the Germans marched into Paris. “Not an easy day to forget,” said Rick. “I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”

One wonders how many takes were needed before Bogart could deliver that last sentence with a straight face, but Casablanca is brimming with quotable lines. “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” Bogart’s own unscripted contribution is used almost to excess, until he says it gently, tenderly, movingly during the film’s emotional moment of truth, Bergman’s face aglow in one of cinema’s most hallowed close-ups, all love and longing, tears in her eyes, as they say goodbye. This is what Bergman is all about, making you forget the virtually audible tapping of the typewriter cranking out the requisite dialogue for Bogart (“I’m not good at being noble but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”), while charming you to the point where you could care less that Rick pairs the blue Ilsa wore at the Belle Aurore in Paris with the uniforms of the German army.

“An Imaginable Human Being”

Graham Greene ends a mixed review of Bergman’s first American film, Intermezzo (1940), by asking “What star before has made her first appearance on the international stage with a highlight gleaming on her nose-tip? That gleam is typical of a performance that doesn’t give the effect of acting at all, but of living — without make up.” Greene goes on to note that Bergman’s co-star Leslie Howard, “with his studied inflexions, can’t help seeming a little false beside the awkward truth of this young actress.” Greene fears that “this first picture” will be “regretfully” remembered “after the grooming and training” does to her what they have done to other actresses.

Three years later, the quality that impressed Greene is still very much in evidence according to James Agee in The Nation. After ridiculing Hollywood’s travesty of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), “which has no more organic connection” to the political reality of the Spanish Civil War “than a Gideon Bible has with a hotel bedroom,” Agee writes, “There is, on the other hand, Ingrid Bergman,” who “not only bears a startling resemblance to an imaginable human being” but “really knows how to act in a blend of poetic grace with quiet realism which almost never appears in American pictures.” In his long profile of Bergman for Time, Agee tries to define “her particular kind of beauty …. What makes it hard to compete with is that, coming from within, it is the beauty of an individual …. Miss Bergman comes of a tradition in which an interest in realism, in the huge and various wealth of actual life, is as natural to a good actress as to a good novelist.” Agee ends the piece in Timespeak: “For when all the political whoopdedoodle about the film is over,” the fact is that “whatever Hollywood’s Bell tolled for, Ingrid Bergman rang it.”

Hemingway’s Bergman

Ernest Hemingway once said that “the best way for a writer to deal with the movie business was to arrange a quick meeting at the California state line. You throw them your book, they throw you the money. Then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.” Even so, Hemingway had a hand in casting the lead roles in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Besides being determined from the start that his friend Gary Cooper play the part of Robert Jordan, he sent Bergman a copy of the novel inscribed “You are the Maria in this book.” When Bergman informed David O. Selznick, to whom she was under contract, he set up a lunch for her with Hemingway in San Francisco and invited a Life magazine photographer to cover it. In the subsequent article, Hemingway was quoted saying, “If you don’t act in the picture, Ingrid, I won’t work on it,” after warning her that she’d need to crop her hair to play the part, and asking to see her ears, “which would of course be exposed. Like everything else about her, they struck him as remarkably photogenic.”

As it happened, Maria’s haircut became the most requested style in beauty salons all over America, presumably the only time the fiction of Ernest Hemingway influenced women’s fashion.

An Amazing Entrance

Bergman’s last picture prior to her fateful move to Italy to work with Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini was Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, a period drama set in Australia that is worth seeing if only for Bergman’s performance, one of several beautiful embattled victims she played, including her Oscar winner as the wife Charles Boyer tries to drive mad in Gaslight (1944) and as the spy Cary Grant rescues from the Nazis in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).

In Under Capricorn Bergman is Lady Henrietta Flusky whose husband Sam Flusky made his fortune in New South Wales after serving time for a murder he didn’t commit. They live in a gothic mansion where she is being tormented by a jealous housekeeper (Margaret Leighton), who is slowly destroying her with clandestine infusions of alcohol while using a hideous shrunken head at strategic moments to make her mistress think she’s going mad. It’s important that the audience knows nothing of the situation when Bergman makes her entrance, one of the most memorable of her career.

Eight men are seated at the long elegantly set, candelabra-lit dinner table, with the host, Sam Flusky, at the head. Grace has been said and the men have just begun talking when conversation comes to a sudden stop as everyone turns toward Flusky. In the tense silence, all that can be heard is the rustling of a woman’s dress. This being Hitchcock, there’s an eerie quality to the sound and its unseen source, as if it were the prelude to a sinister visitation. As Flusky turns in his chair, the camera moves past him to show, close-up, a woman’s bare feet walking toward the table, then her hands slowly descending to rest on her husband’s shoulders, her voice heard above the sound of chairs being confusedly pushed back, “Please be seated, gentlemen. I hope I’m not too late to take a glass of wine with you.” Her manner of speaking is tenuous, odd, unnatural, as if she were under duress, fearful that any minute the facade of language will give way and she’ll become incoherent. As the camera finally reveals her face, which seems to be floating in a lovely stupor, Flusky says, “My wife, gentlemen, Lady Henrietta Flusky.”

The dazed, dreamily gorgeous woman with flowers entwined in her ringleted hair like a floral tiara seems to have walked out of a poet’s fantasy, like Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot or Ophelia saved from drowning, as she makes her way carefully to the other end of the table, gown rustling, holding her head up but barely, again as if she might at any minute lose her bearings and give way to hysteria. Thus the audience discovers why no wives would deign to join their husbands at Flusky’s table. Hitchcock’s motive in directing the scene must have been to make the audience’s heart go out to her, she’s all at once mysterious, haunted, damaged, not of the real world, and scarily beautiful. The nature of her presence, the fragile balance between her manner and the way she speaks, as if every sentence were a small victory, recalls James Agee’s description of a younger Bergman who knows “how to act in a blend of poetic grace,” one who awakens in the audience “an appetite for the sudden lights, edged shades and flexibilities of reality.”

A Case of Do or Die

In the song shared by the two lovers at the Belle Aurore in Paris, “a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh and the fundamental things apply.” But we never hear the introduction, a standard feature of vintage songs that is often either forgotten or overlooked. In fact, there’s a Princeton connection to Casablanca’s song of songs.

Written in 1931 by that household name, Herman Hupfeld, and voted second place after “Over the Rainbow” in the American Film Institute List of Top 100 Movie Songs, “As Time Goes By” actually begins with reference to how “this day and age we’re living in” gives “cause for apprehension,” what with “speed and new invention” and “things like third dimension,” so “we get a trifle weary with Mr. Einstein’s theory” and “must get down to earth at times,” for “no matter what the progress” or “what may yet be proved, “the simple facts of life … cannot be removed.” These are the “fundamental things” referred to in the body of the song. But the transition from the unfamiliar prelude to the familiar melody is actually quite moving as the lyric we know by heart emerges — “moonlight and love songs … never out of date … the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die” — glowing like an Ingrid Bergman close-up. In a similar way, Casablanca emerges again and again for generations of moviegoers, whether during the darkest days of World War II or at this particular moment in time, shining with the reflected glory of a city the world knows “by heart” in the aftermath of Friday 13, 2015.