The 40s: The Story of a Decade (88 page)

DAVID LARDNER

NOVEMBER 28, 1941 (ON
CASABLANCA
)

E
ven though the armed forces might be said to have taken some of the play away from them, Warner Brothers have gone right ahead and released a film called
Casablanca.
They may feel that General Eisenhower has merely served them well as an advance agent. The Casablanca on the screen is the old Casablanca of three or four weeks ago, and much of the heavy intrigue indulged in by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, and Paul Henreid has presumably been cleaned up by the army of occupation by now, but there is probably enough topical truth left in the picture to suit the topical-minded. Not to speak of the eternal truths always to be found in the better screen plays.

The centre of intrigue in old Casablanca, we learn, was Rick’s, a night spot where forged passports flowed like water. Into this dive, operated by Bogart, come Henreid, as the leader of an underground movement in Europe, and Miss Bergman, as Europe’s most beautiful woman. Henreid has escaped from a concentration camp and is trying to get to America. The Germans would like to stop him by fair means or unwholesome. Claude Rains, as the local police chief, sits cheerfully on the fence and won’t do much for anybody. Bogart and Miss Bergman have met before in Paris, it turns out, and they become particularly melancholy whenever the song “As Time Goes By” is played. It’s as good a tune as any to attach sentiment to, and a good one to attach to this picture, which, although not quite up to
Across the Pacific
, Bogart’s last spyfest, is nevertheless pretty tolerable and deserves attractive accessories.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1944 (ON
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
)

A
pretty good murder melodrama has come to town, named
Double Indemnity.
I have an idea that Paramount, which launched it, takes a certain artistic pride in the fact that the two leading characters, played by Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, are heels who behave antisocially throughout and die violent deaths at the finish. This, you understand, is not the kind of thing fan clubs are accustomed to, and a producer who runs such a chance with the public’s sweet tooth is no doubt entitled to bask at his desk in a glow of prestige while assistants wring his hand in shifts and say “Chief, you are game as a pebble.”

Be that as it may, there is another point about
Double Indemnity
which strikes me as even more unusual. That is the nature of its treatment of the insurance industry and those predatory types among us who buy insurance. Taking up the message of the James Cain novel on which it was based, the picture, without so much as blinking, shows insurance as a deadly war between beneficiaries, felonious to a man, and the company, which fights tooth and nail in defense of its capital holdings. The true giant of the battle, and therefore of the film, is Edward G. Robinson, the
company’s claims inspector, a gentleman tortured by the thought that a client may get away with something but practically infallible in forestalling such a calamity. When Mr. Robinson, told that the police are giving up their investigation of the death of a policyholder, says scornfully, “Sure, it’s not their money,” he sounds the keynote of the struggle. He is very entertaining, I should add, and not a little convincing.

It appears that sentinels as keen as this can be duped only by someone on the inside, who knows all the angles—by choice, an insurance salesman. Personally, I have done business with three or four salesmen who were, like Mr. MacMurray in the picture, genial and fair-spoken and absolute mother lodes of human knowledge and special information. It now occurs to me that if I had wanted to commit a perfect crime, and I won’t say I didn’t, I should have consulted one of them on the spot. That is what Miss Stanwyck does with Mr. MacMurray. She is anxious to dispose of her husband, at a profit, and Mr. MacMurray puts his unique resources at her service with a readiness which weakens the picture somewhat, for, though Miss Stanwyck’s beauty is great and the temptation to outwit one’s employer may be equally so, the salesman’s character, as written and acted, does not make his crime wholly credible. Apart from this fault,
Double Indemnity
is a smooth account of sordid minds at work, and compromises with sweetness and light only at well-spaced intervals. There are one or two especially good moments, as when Mr. Robinson, sharing Mr. Cain’s relish for this sort of detail, intones as he would a hymn the statutory variations of suicide.

JOHN McCARTEN