Two Unsuccesful Attempts to Recycle Humphrey Bogart's Triumph in "Casablanca" (1942)

From reading Round Up the Usual Suspects, it seems that no one connected with making "Casablanca" anticipated its immortality. Its original success owed something to the US landing at Casablanca days before the movie opened in New York City on 26 November 1942. It went on to win Oscars for best picture, direction, and writing (of 1943) with Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains being nominated for best actor Oscars (dubiously losing, respectively, to Paul Lukas and Charles Coburn).

After playing gangsters in many 1930s Warner Brothers movies (mostly notably recreating his Broadway role in "The Petrified Forest" in 1936 and competing with James Cagney in "The Roaring Twenties" in 1939), Bogart broke through to stardom in 1941 as the escaped convict in "High Sierra" and the cynical detective Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon"). I'd say that he reprised those two triumphs witch success in "The Desperate Hours" and "The Big Sleep." And as the would-be cynic suppressing gallantry and heroism, Bogart played a great variation on his role as Rick in "Casablanca" in "To Have and To Have Not."

After the end of the Second World War, in movies made by his own production company (Santana), Bogart made two less successful attempts to recapture the magic of "Casablanca." In both "Tokyo Joe" (1949) and "Sirocco" (1951) he played American cabaret owners in troubled cities: immediately postwar Tokyo and 1925 Damascus with an Arab revolt at the French "protectorate" imposed by the League of Nations.

Like Rick in Casablanca, Tokyo Joe and Damascus Harry try very hard to make money while staying out of politics. Those vying for power make this very, very difficult. Willing to sell anything to anyone, Harry is involved in profitable gun-running, supplying independence-seeking Arabs (viewed by the French as terrorists) and in an air-freight partnership with a fascist baron (Sessue Hayawaka) in US-occupied Japan in "Tokyo Joe."

With an available frame of "aiding terrorists," "Tokyo Joe" may have more appeal now than it did in 1951, and the existence of those not grateful to American good intentions in occupying their country (Japan, ca. 1949) is not without relevance in the 2010s, either...

As movies (rather than as sites to examine Hollywood representations of Others), "Tokyo Joe" is badly damaged by the lack of screen charisma of the Woman from (Bogart's character's) Past. Florence Marly plays Trina Pechinkov Landis, a White Russian who sang in Joe's cabaret into 1941, when, shortly before Pearl Harbor, he left. She divorced him and married another American, a civilian well-connected in the military occupation government. Bogart (Harry) still loves her and is confident he can win her back. Not only is Marly no Ingrid Bergman (the lost love of "Casablanca") but she also is no match for Dooley Wilson (carrier of The Song of that lost love). And her marriage does not have the geopolitical significance of Ilsa's to Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) in "Casablanca."

Trina has an ace in the hole, but I don't want to be guilty of plot-spoiling.

The exotic (to the setting) love interest in "Sirocco," Märta Torén as Violette, has more screen presence, but no claims to righteousness at all. She is being kept by a French cornel (the very New York Lee J. Cobb) Feroud. Col. Feroud is attempting to persuade Gen. LaSalle (the also very New York Everett Sloane) not to execute hostages. This paragon of humanism is also the head of military intelligence, and zeroing in on the guns Harry is selling the Arab opponents of the French occupation.

In addition to the forceful Cobb, "Sirocco" includes Zero Mostel as the oily merchant Balukjiaan. The role is not really comic, but somewhat foreshadows Mostel's frantic conniving in "The Producers" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum").

There are less credible bases for Bogart's character to get involved in "Sirocco" than in "Casablanca," ("The Maltese Falcon,") "To Have and to Have Not," and "Tokyo Joe." The studio cinematography by Burnett Guffey (who went on to win Oscars for "From Here to Eternity" and "Bonnie and Clyde: and who also had shot Oscar-winner "All the Kings Men") adds nothing to "Sirocco."

George Antheil provided moody music with some local colors to both "Sirocco" and "Tokyo Joe." Antheil also provided the music for Bogart's 1949 "Knock on Any Door" and 1950 "In a Lonely Place," the latter with Gloria Grahame, who could easily blow Marly or Torén off the screen...

Charles Lawton Jr. (The Lady from Shanghai, The Gene Krupa Story, the original movie versions of A Raisin in the Sun and 3:10 to Yuma) provided more striking visuals for "Tokyo Joe." Indeed, I'd say these are superior to those of Arthur Edeson in "Casablanca."

There is no question that "Casablanca" was better written than these two knockoffs and had a formidable cast of supporting players (Conrad Veidt, Dooley Wilson, plus Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre carried over as coconspirators from "The Maltese Falcon."

Though nominally the bastion of freedom and advocate of democracy, the US covertly and hot very covertly supported French colonialism in general and attempts by the French to hold onto Indochinese and Maghreb colonies in particular both during the supposed war against racism (WWII) and after it (financing the French army in Vietnam). There is some ambivalence about the civilizing mission of the French in 1925 Syria and about Arabs fighting for independence in "Sirocco." The Americans administering Japan are shown as pure of heart and savvier than the renegade fascists in "Tokyo Joe" with only hints of resentment by the occupied populace. Hollywood's emotional investment in English colonialism exceeded (indeed, IMO continues even now) any in French (or Dutch or Portuguese and, especially, Spanish) colonial endeavors.

Having recently read Morocco Bound by Brian Edwards, which has considerable discussion of "Casablanca" and American conceptions of North(western) Africa, I was sensitized to the lack of sympathetic Arabs in "Sirocco" (the "natives" are almost entirely invisible in "Casablanca," which concerns an American navigating Nazi and Vichy officials and refugees from the Nazis). An anti-colonialist position is expounded in "Sirocco," though the movie identifies with the "white man's burden" French position.

Definitely, the good guys in "Tokyo Joe" are the occupying US Army officers, but compared to both "Casablanca" and "Sirocco," there are more locals onscreen, and they range in sympatheticness, though Baron Kimura (Hayakawa) is the menacing villain.

Bogart's characters have no Arab friends in "Casablanca" or "Sirocco," but has a pal from before the war who has kept "Tokyo Joe's" running until his return. And there is even a Japanese hero in there (I won't plot-spoil by identifying him).

I might also mention the droll flyboys who work for Joe. I especially enjoyed the job interview (which approaches "Casablanca" jocularity) at the end of which, when Joe sighs that he's sure they're over 18 years of age, one remarks "We were over 18 even when we were 15."

None of these three movies was shot on location (Sam Fuller's 1955 "House of Bamboo" is supposedly the first American movie shot on location in Japan). There are some rear projection scenes from postwar Tokyo in "Tokyo Joe." Though these are quite obvious, I still find it interesting to look at what is now historical documentation of the postwar city, and a plus for the movie.

Also, "Tokyo Joe" provides an opportunity to see Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) between his superstar "forbidden lover" silent movies (Rudolph Valentino was cast in "The Sheik," which rocketed him to stardom, after Hayakawa turned down the part to start his own production company) and his only widely remembered role as the camp commander building "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in 1957 (the movie won an Oscar, but Hayakawa lost to Red Buttons for "Sayonara"). (Hayakawa had fought in the French Resistance against the Nazi occupiers during World War II, btw. He returned to Japan in 1961, becoming a zen master; his autobiography was titled Zen Showed Me the Way: To Peace, Happiness and Tranquility.)

I learned something about Hayakawa's very eventful life and stardom in American movies from Jeff Adachi's 2006 "The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film and Television." There is a 2007 analytical biography by Daisuke Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. And shelves of books on the also unlikely superstardom of the unhandsome Humphrey Bogart and the best-loved of his movies.