In "Casablanca": Dooley Noted

I've been looking through my mother's high school yearbook.  In New Jersey, she was in Montclair High School's Class of 1942.  What strikes me about Mom's yearbook is the racial diversity of her class.  Not at all like the depiction of high school classes you saw in MGM, Paramount or other major Hollywood studio movies of the 1940s.  Think of the Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals like Strike Up The Band and Babes in Arms.  Those groups of musical teens eager to put on a show in New York City were all white.  They weren't racially mixed like the Montclair High School boys' soccer and track teams, the girls' basketball and field hockey teams, the Latin club and the glee clubs.  Just imagine if those old Hollywood movie studios had embraced racial diversity.  My mother and her high school classmates in 1942 would've liked that.  One of the things that irked glamorous, sexy black singer Lena Horne the most when she was under contract to MGM, the Tiffany shop for movie musicals, was that she never got to interact with the white fellow musical stars on camera.  She did featured numbers in A-list MGM productions but her songs were separate from the film's action.  Horne had broken through a barrier in how blacks were shown in Hollywood films, especially black women, but she was still within margins in a pre-Civil Rights era.  We see that the Hollywood roles for black actors in the 1930s and 40s were mostly maids or manservants.  This is why I see Casablanca as revolutionary in a classy, subtle way.  Sam, the nightclub headliner played by Dooley Wilson, is an often ignored Hollywood breakthrough character.

Sam is not a servant, a porter or a chauffeur.  He's a top act at a swanky, popular nightclub.  He's also the hero's friend and confidante.  The hero, as famously played by Humphrey Bogart, is Rick Blaine.  He's the tough American who "came to Casablanca for the waters."  It became Hollywood folklore that Lena Horne's elegant MGM musical numbers were shot separate from the movies' main action so that they could be cut out when the movies played down South.  In his fascinating, revealing and under-appreciated Lena Horne biography, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, author James Gavin disputes that with evidence while he does acknowledge Hollywood racial discrimination of the time.  But she absolutely did not get to do scenes and have dialogue with the Caucasian MGM studio co-workers who were the stars of big musicals in which she performed -- Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Kathryn Grayson, Robert Walker, Ann Sothern, Red Skelton, Esther Williams and Van Johnson.  She was woven into the action solely in films with all-black casts such as Vincente Minnelli's 1943 directorial debut with his sophisticated adaptation of the Broadway musical fantasy, Cabin in the Sky.  She starred in the less sophisticated and oddly-titled 20th Century Fox all-black musical comedy, Stormy Weather.  If Dooley Wilson had not been allowed to do scenes with the Caucasian stars of Casablanca, a Best Picture Oscar winner, or if his scenes with them had been excised down South to appeal to bigoted minds, the film would fall apart.  There would be no Oscar for Best Picture.  As Sam, Wilson's musical numbers are not just featured like Horne's in MGM all-star musicals. They're part of the story.  He acts opposite each star in a key scene that advances the story.  He has history with Rick and with his great love, Ilsa, famously played by Ingrid Bergman.  We sense this history when she, with a wistful smile says, "You used to be a much better liar, Sam."  Try to imagine this movie without Bergman saying to Wilson "Play it, Sam.  Play 'As Time Goes By.'"

That sets up the heart of this film.  Not only is it a classic Hollywood movie scene, it's a scene critical to that movie classic.  So is another scene with Sam.  He's alone with the movie's hero, Rick.  The nightclub owner, drunk and bitter, makes Sam play it again as he emotionally reels from having been reunited unexpectedly with the woman who broke his heart: "Of all the gin joints, in all the places, in all the world, she walks into mine."

This take us into the important montage in the Julius and Philip Epstein screenplay.  It shows us Rick and Ilsa's Parisian love story and how it was severely, darkly interrupted by the Nazi regime.  Sam knows the love story, the secrets and the music that goes with it all.  Here was Sam, a best friend and well-paid upscale nightclub pianist and singer.  How many times in an old Hollywood film did you see a black character share a bottle of champagne with -- not just one -- but two Caucasian lead characters?

THAT was major.  Whenever there's a TV channel doing a salute to Black History Month with airings of and looks at classic films, Casablanca is never included.  It should be.  A Broadway actor, Dooley Wilson originated the role of Joe in Cabin in the Sky done in the film version by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.  Ethel Waters recreated her stage role for Vincente Minnelli.  Waters (at far left of photo with Lena Horne) was the second black 

person to be nominated for an Academy Award, thanks to her supporting performance in the 1949 Elia Kazan race drama, Pinky.  The first black person to be an Oscar nominee was Hattie McDaniel.  She was the first nominee and the first winner, awarded Best Supporting Actress for her work as the sturdy, all-knowing, no-nonsense Mammy to iron-willed Scarlett O'Hara in 1939's classic Civil War drama, Gone With The Wind.

After the Oscar victory, McDaniel would spend pretty much the rest of her film career playing maids.  The best role she had after Gone With The Wind was in a John Huston bad sister/good sister drama called In This Our Life.  Starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, it blended in a story of modern day racial oppression.  McDaniel played Minerva, a domestic and a struggling working mother.  She works to give her good son a better life than she's had.  He studies hard to get into law school but is jailed for a crime he didn't commit.  He's jailed basically because he's black.  McDaniel was again teamed with Gone With The Wind co-star, Olivia de Havilland, for her strongest scene.

As with the Dooley Wilson part in Casablanca, the Hattie McDaniel role in Huston's In This Our Life is often overlooked in film salute programming for Black History Month.  Both films had a supporting role that was a giant step ahead at that time for the Hollywood depiction of African Americans.  Both those Warner Brothers film releases, just like my mom at Montclair High School, were part of the Class of '42.