In the outpost of Casablanca, the dress code is white

Photo: Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca”, 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Brothers

Rick never sits with his customers. He never sticks his neck out for everyone. He is intently neutral. He owns a nightclub in Casablanca, the Moroccan seaport that, during the Second World War, becomes part of a treacherous refugee trail, where “the fortunate ones threw money, or influence, or luck, so that they might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World”. Casablanca, a crossroads not just for refuges, but for spies, Nazis and the French Resistance. Seeing Bogart in those opening scenes, cigarette in mouth, striding easily through the club and a corrupt world, acting so well and so long without uttering a word, laconic in conventional breaking Black Tie, is seeing the never-dying attraction of classic cinema. His ivory white dinner jacket is quite possibly the most iconic dinner jacket in the history of cinema and the most famous image associated with Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart’s most romantic character.

Practicing another form of neutrality is Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Rick’s friend, the shamelessly corrupt local chief of police and his most loyal customer. He manages to get by, a day at a time, in this shadowy North African enclave. And then “of all the gin joints of all the towns of all the world”, she walks into his one night. She is Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), Rick’s former lover in Paris, who abandoned him when they were supposed to escape together when the Germans invaded the city. She’s accompanied by her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a hero of the resistance. This time, Rick sits with his new customers and Louis.

Rick and Ilsa’s love reignites, and yet they do not remain together. An unhappy ending after Hollywood standards, for most popular American film made during the war that had begun as just another studio picture, based on a little known play, a love triangle in exotic surroundings with an espionage background. But it is particularly this ending, even more so than the emerging image of Bogart as romantic hero after his tough guy stereotyped roles, even more so than Rick and Ilsa’s love story, that is responsible for the film’s endurance.

Photo: Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains in “Casablanca”, 1942. Warner Brothers

The costumes, especially Rick’s and Ilsa’s, are another reason for why the film stands the test of time. “Miss Bergman was the most un-actressy of all actresses I have dressed,” costume designer Orry Kelly would remember. “Off the screen she wore simple peasant-style skirts and blouses, and always low heels, even with evening dresses. She wore no make-up; her lovely face didn’t need it. The only request she made was to have her hair dressed on the set. She disliked listening to the make-up in the make-up department.” She mainly wears white in the film, the most remembered costume being the white sleeveless jumper and white French sailor sweater in the film’s casbah scene. It was obsessively copied and put out by the New York fashion houses of the time after the film’s release. The simplicity and timelessness of that look conjures up the elegance of the 1940s. But, as Orry Kelly’s words attest to, much credit goes to Ingrid Bergman. She eschewed made-up glamour. She didn’t want to look like everyone else. “I was very fond of Ingrid,” Cary Grant, her Notorious co-star, confessed. “She was an amazing woman… She used no make-up, not even lip rouge. Why don’t more actresses imitate her instead of going the other way? You can tell how secure a woman is by the amount of makeup she uses.” By Truffaut, she was described as “elegant and agonized with Hitchcock, nervous and without makeup with Rossellini, a voluptuous Venus descended to earth with Renoir”. In Casablanca, she has a luminous natural beauty and it’s not because of the spectacular photography. The camera work merely brought it to light.

Photo: Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid in “Casablanca”, 1942. Warner Brothers

“When she wasn’t attending to details concerning the picture, it was Miss Bergman’s home, and mainly her daughter, that seemed to be her chief interest,” Orry Kelly recalled. “I was putting her into a white dinner dress on the sound stage one day, and checking for last-minute changes – the playback machine was playing ‘As Time Goes By’, Bogart’s voice came on, saying, ‘Play it, Sam’. Then the song came on again: “The world will always welcome lovers…’ I can see the lovely alive face of Miss Bergman now, smiling and saying, ‘What a lovely theme.’ The atmosphere on set was not ideal however. One main reason was that the screenplay was being written as they went along and up until the filming of the last scene, they didn’t know who Ilsa would end up with. “I had no idea how I should play the character,” Bergman would remember. “I kept begging them to give me the ending but they’d say, ‘We haven’t made up our minds. We’ll shoot it both ways.’ We did the first ending and they said, ‘That’s good, we won’t bother with the other.’” It played out for the best, making Ilsa’s emotional confusion very believable.

When Ilsa first comes into Rick’s club, she wears white, a long, straight white skirt paired with a structured shirt-sleeved jacket. It beautifully brings out Ingrid Bergman’s statuesque physique and presence, while refraining from being too dressy and trying to keep it realistic for the occasion – Rick’s café, just as Casablanca, is a place of transit, where refugees, regardless of their name and class, stop in their way to another country. The cast was largely from other countries, too, many of its members genuine refugees from the Nazis, with Bogart and his faithful pianist Dooley Wilson almost the only Americans in the film. Even if the filming took place on the backlot of the Warner studios at Burbank, great attention was given to the look, feel, colours, nuances and costumes, and the atmospheric attraction of the exotic storied location.

Orry Kelly observed how “everyone was going to the movies. Everyone saw Hitler’s marching army in the newsreels, but no one did anything about it. Huge, braided and beaded epaulets adorned women’s evening gowns. Was this a histerical display? Both men and women wore the widest and squares of shoulders – a forerunner, a prediction of the squaring of America’s shoulders for the Second World War.” The designer admitted he didn’t approve of the wide shoulder style, and he used it in moderation, as we can see on Ilsa’s looks in the film, and only when requested to do so.

Ilsa’s darkest, most puzzling and elaborated costume is the paisley patterned blouse, worn with a long black skirt. It appears shortly before she pulls a gun on Rick.

The men’s wardrobes were approached differently and Bogart himself had to provide his film costumes, from his white tuxedo, the trench coat and Borsalino hat – the brand has since created a fedora in homage to the actor, lined in elegant satin with one of Bogart’s best-known expressions exclusively engraved on the black leather Moroccan internal band: “Do everything. One thing may turn out right” – for the train station scene in Paris, to the light suit and Panama hat for the bazaar scene. Bogart made personal style into an art form. He was a very smart and well-read man, he struck a chord with men and women alike and he hated the whole “movie star” thing. He thought he was no better than anyone else and that’s how he lived his life. “A man with a tough shell hiding a fine core. […] By showily neglecting the outward forms of grace, he kept inferior men at a distance,” Alistair Cooke is quoted in the book Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart, by Richard Schickel and George Perry.

By now well into his forties and fresh from The Maltese Falcon (1941) fame, “replete with Bogart’s entire panoply: hat, revolver, cigarette, telephone”, as Truffaut described him, and which has just established Bogart’s iconic image and the quintessence of the film noir private eye, hard boiled, cynical, ruthless, courageous, driven by an ethical code that he alone understands and respects, he emerges as a far from perfect and yet incredibly believable, albeit still timelessly cynical, romantic hero of WWII.

Bergman and Bogart teamed well together on screen, although the Bergman’s imposing silhouette presented problems for the camera department, and they had to make sure she didn’t tower over Bogart. Bogie had to wear lifts on his shoes on camera and Ingrid Bergman wore low-heeled sandals (which she personally preferred anyway both on and off screen) and by his wearing white in the opening of the film and further on when she enters the scene, his look doesn’t look slight at all. In appearance, he was the modern hero alright. But “his morality was classic,” in Truffaut’s words. So is Rick’s.

In the outpost of Casablanca, the dress code is white