We are pleased to announce the next Movie Matinee at Beit Knesset Hanassi. On Tuesday, November 17, we will present one of the greatest movies, if not THE greatest movie ever made. It is rare to find any ranking of the best films of all time that does not include Casablanca at or near the top.
The movie was filmed in the summer of 1942. World War II began in 1939. The United States entered the fighting in December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. So it was one of the very first American movies of the 1,500 to 2,000 American films made about World War II.
Casablanca was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three—Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenwriting.
Many people have already seen the film. But in our post-screening talk and the essay that will be provided to each attendee, we will explain how this movie is truly a Jewish movie. The producer, the director, the writer of the play on which the movie is based and the two most important screenwriters were all Jewish. Moreover—and this is not widely known—many of the actors and actresses were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe.
Most significantly, Harry and Jack Warner, the heads of Warner Bros.—the production company that made the film—were the most anti-Nazi movie studio owners. Warner Bros. made many films that opposed the Nazi regime. They “fought” Hitler before the United States even entered the war. In 1939, there was considerable opposition—from the public, especially the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh and the rest of the America First crowd, and from elected officials—to the United States entering the war or even helping Great Britain in its solitary fight against Nazi Germany. Warner Bros. had the courage and the commitment to release the first American movie about World War II. Before the United States Armed Services fired their first shots in World War II, Warner Bros. fought the Nazis with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. A movie critic at the time wrote: “The movie is potent anti-Nazi propaganda that presents a powerful and impassioned plea for the defense of the principles that have made America ‘the land of the free’.”
When Casablanca was winding up its filming in August 1942, Warner Bros. was shooting six other movies. Of these seven films, four were about the underground resistance to the Nazis. Altogether in 1942, more than half of the Warner Bros. movies dealt in one way or another with World War II.
Michael Curtiz, the director, was raised in an Orthodox home in Hungary. In 1919 at the age of 33, he fled the anti-Semitic regime of Miklós Horthy. He spent seven years in Austria and Germany making silent movies. In 1926, Warner Bros. brought him to Hollywood. He made 102 films in the United States, winning the Academy Award for Best Director for Casablanca and being nominated or written-in four other times for Best Director.
Curtiz was able to get his mother and two brothers out of Hitler’s Europe. But he was unsuccessful in getting his sister and her family out. His sister survived Auschwitz but her husband, her daughter and two of her sons perished there.
We will explain which of the film’s character actors/members of the supporting cast were Jewish and will describe their war and Holocaust experiences.
Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, a cynical American café owner in French Morocco at the beginning of the Second World War. Ilsa, his former lover played by the magnificent Ingrid Bergman, shows up unexpectedly in his establishment with her husband, Victor. Victor is Czechoslovakian. He is passionately anti-Nazi and he has been an effective resistance fighter. The character is based on a real-life hero. The Germans are hunting him. He needs and wants to escape Morocco—to avoid capture and to return to Europe to continue his underground fight against the Nazi war machine. But one cannot leave Morocco without an exit visa which are next-to-impossible to obtain. Morocco was a French protectorate controlled by Vichy France—the collaborationist French regime that governed the country.
By pure chance, Rick, who also wants to quit Morocco, has obtained possession of two letters of transit (fictional travel documents that allow whoever holds them to travel freely through German-occupied Europe to neutral Portugal and out to freedom). What does he do with them? The answer to that question results in a cinematic masterpiece.
The film has a superb ensemble cast with each of the supporting actors imbuing the movie with authenticity. No doubt that is because, as stated above, many of them DID suffer the experiences of their character.
Casablanca is a movie with unique rewatchability that reveals new details and acting gems with each viewing. The film’s enduring legacy is a result of the brilliant performances of Bogart, Bergman and the supporting cast led by Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, the Jewish Peter Lorre and each of the minor characters. Casablanca is famous for its sharp, snappy, memorable dialogue, its powerful romantic elements and its demonstration of patriotism and courage in the face of daunting oppression and danger.
As Aljean Harmetz, author Round Up the Usual Suspects, the definitive account of the making of Casablanca, wrote: “...no other movie better demonstrates America’s mythological vision of itself—tough on the outside and moral within, capable of sacrifice and romance without sacrificing the individualism that conquered a continent, sticking its neck out for everybody when circumstances demand heroism.”
Kind of sounds like she’s describing a sabra, no?
In 1989, 47 years after the release of Casablanca, a woman called Howard Koch, one of the three primary screenwriters of the movie. She told Koch: “I tracked you down because I had to tell you that I’ve just seen Casablanca for the forty-sixth time. It means more to me than anything in my life.”
Koch said, “It’s just a movie. But it’s more than that. It has become something that people can’t find in values today. They go back to Casablanca as they go back to church...to find something that is gone from our values today.”
What Koch said 37 years ago is even more true today.
It is perfectly understandable why Casablanca is considered by critics and movie-lovers as a treasure. Indeed, it is a gift that keeps on giving even more than 80 years after its release.
COME SEE CASABLANCA AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME. And realize the additional benefit of learning just how Jewish this movie is.
The movie is in English and has English subtitles. The Movie Matinee is at 2:00. The film is 1¾ hours in length.
There will be a brief introduction of the film and a talk and discussion after the screening. There will be a hand-out about the movie for each attendee.
There will be refreshments. No reservations are required.
Beit Knesset Hanassi is located at 24 Ussishkin Street. The admission is 20 shekels for members of the shul and 30 shekels for non-members.
If you can please bring the exact change, we would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
For more information, please contact Mark at 0548 01 1957 or [email protected].
