Aljean Harmetz > Quotes

“Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then - love lost for the good of the world - and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. No movie can last if it cannot find new things to say to new generations. Captain Renault, the one gray character in a black and white time, would’ve been amused.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“Typicallu, government agencies made a decision, then reversed or refined it.”
― Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“RENAULT
I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me.

RICK
It was a combination of all three.

RENAULT
And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK
My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT
Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.

RICK
I was misinformed.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“Movies today are bigger, brighter, technically dazzling, awesome in their computer generated special effects. But they are also thinner; they lack the thick layers of character actors who brought depth to the background and refracted the stars’ light, so that it formed a different and more complicated image.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“It is possible that one of the seven other major studios might have bought and made a movie from Everybody comes to Rick's, an unproduced play about a cynical American who owns a bar in Casablanca. (One producer at M-G-M, Sam Marx, did want to buy the play for $5.000, but his boss didn't think it was worth the money.) It wouldn't have been the same movie, not only because it would have starred Gary Cooper at Paramount, Clark Gable at M-G-M, or Tyrone Power at Fox but because another studio's style would have been more languid, less sardonic, or opulently Technicolored.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“It is a mistake to confuse old with golden, a word within which those letters are often trapped. But the old Hollywood studios did have a golden era, when art, and commerce, and hard work fitted comfortably together.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“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.
Whatever the quality of his game, Bogart loved chess. "I enjoy chess because there's no luck to it," he told Ezra Goodman.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“Fleming could not keep a tight rein on most of his actors because the queerness of their characters defied a realistic approach. He could, and did, keep a tight rein on Judy Garland. And it is Garland’s obvious belief in what is happening to her that keeps the film credible. “You believed that she really wanted to get back to Kansas,” says Jack Haley. “She carried the picture with her sincerity.” The first confrontation between Fleming and Judy Garland came late in November when she first met the Cowardly Lion on the Yellow Brick Road. John Lee Mahin was on the set that day, and the moment stuck fast in his memory. “She slapped the Lion and he broke into tears. And she was to continue bawling him out. But Lahr was so funny that she burst into screams of laughter instead. Vic was patient at first. She went behind a tree. I could hear her saying, ‘I will not laugh. I will not laugh.’ Then she’d come out and start laughing again. They must have done the scene ten times, and eventually she was giggling so much she got hysterical. She couldn’t stop laughing. And Vic finally slapped her on the face. ‘All right now,’ he said, ‘go back to your dressing room.’ She went. And when she came back, she said, ‘O.K.’ And they did the scene.”
― Aljean Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz

“By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie.

She wrote despairing letters to Ruth Roberts from Rochester, New York where her husband Petter Lindstrom, who had been a dentist in Sweden, was preparing to become a neurosurgeon. "I am so fed up with Rochester and Main Street I am ready to cry," she wrote.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“Today, any movie that didn’t show Rick and Ilsa sweatily grappling with each other’s naked bodies in Rick’s apartment above the café would be considered old-fashioned. But graphic sex wipes out ambiguity, and the ambiguity in Casablanca, the uncertainty about events and motives, is one of the things that still entices us.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II