Cast away as typecast

Welcome back to the fight,'' Nazi resistance leader Victor Laszlo says to Rick Blaine at the end of Casablanca, as the famous plane to Lisbon sputters and roars. “This time I know our side will win.''

It is one of the finest Hollywood scenes — apotheosised by Humphrey Bogart (Rick) and Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund) face to face in the night fog, saying goodbye at the airport so Laszlo could escape.

Of this trio, the elegant character of Laszlo, played by the refugee Austrian actor Paul Henreid, is nearly forgotten — in film and in real life. He went on to play roles as European types, Nazi heavies and freedom fighters.

But he got blacklisted in the McCarthy era for not divulging the political views of fellow actors and ended up directing TV fare for 25 years. Bogart got an Oscar nomination for Casablanca. Henreid got typecast. He never broke free, becoming one of the countless Tinseltown footnotes who lived outside the Oscar glare.

Today, Henreid's daughter Monika, raised in Brentwood, Los Angeles, shuttles from the US to Vienna to reconstruct her father's life on film.

“He played heroic screen characters but often got slapped around in life, so he constantly tried to reinvent himself,'' says Monika, whose father died in 1992. “People think he is French.

"No one can pronounce his name. He is known as Victor Laszlo, but he spent much of his life in Los Angeles, working and directing. He gave Richard Dreyfuss his first film; he discovered Burt Reynolds. But [being typecast] took a toll.''

Deportable alien

Henreid came from an aristocratic Viennese family. He was twice blacklisted in Europe. And in 1934, he refused to sign the Nazi loyalty oath, part of a lucrative Berlin film contract.

He escaped to London, worked on stage, but became a deportable alien after the Anchluss in 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria. Desperate to flee to America, he despaired when authorities told him the Austrian émigré list was full.

Henreid created a European home in Los Angeles, a “Viennese island''. It was a refuge for artistes such as Arthur Rubenstein, who practised piano there, and for a never-ending troupe of scholars and intellectuals from the Old World.

Henreid existed half in and half out of Hollywood. “We didn't have Hollywood parties; it wasn't a celebrity centre,'' his daughter says.

They had a nanny, a housekeeper, a cook, a French teacher, a gardener. “You played tennis and rode horses every day. My mother taught the cook how to prepare Viennese food. It was very Old Europe,'' Monika says.

Casablanca, shot in 1942 just after Pearl Harbor, was based on a play by school teacher Murray Burnett (Everybody Comes to Rick's) after a visit to Nazi-occupied Vienna. It continues to rank No 1 or 2, along with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, as the best film of all time. Romance, moral tension, spies, Nazis, thieves, heroes, intrigue — all collide in Rick's Café Americain.

Google Casablanca today and the film comes up before the Moroccan city. But when it was made, Casablanca was an afterthought for Warner Brothers; Hungarian director Michael Curtiz said he never realised it would be a classic.
Instead, emblematic music such as As Time Goes By emerged.

So did countless one-liners now echoed in pop culture: “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship'', “Round up the usual suspects'', “Here's looking at you, kid''.

Film critic Pauline Kael attributed much of Casablanca's authenticity and spark to its many European actors — refugees playing refugees. Of 14 main roles, only three are US-born actors.

Henreid himself criticised Laszlo's authenticity. He doubted a resistance leader who had escaped Nazi camps could waltz into the swankiest café in town wearing a white suit with his wife on his arm.

Nor would Laszlo be able to negotiate with the Vichy police and Nazi officers. But nothing came of the protestations. It was Hollywood of 1942.

Henreid, along with European actors such as Peter Lorre and Marlene Dietrich, gets credit for helping build a genre later known as “film noir'', edgy black-and-white psychological thrillers such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

Henreid received critical acclaim for Now, Voyager, with Bette Davis. But he got few leading roles after Casablanca.
Monika Henreid now lives in Montana. After a recent screening of Casablanca in Vienna, where she has come to do her documentary work on her father, she laments that the man who played Laszlo and whose life was forever altered by not signing a Nazi oath, spent so many creative years in a McCarthy-era limbo.

Lost world

After the war, the Henreids sometimes summered in Austria. But he never returned to live there. “The Vienna my father grew up in was gone, physically and culturally,'' his daughter says. “He wasn't famous when he left, anyway. We couldn't come back for so many reasons. Sometimes, life just interferes with your plans.''

Like getting an iconic part and then getting pigeonholed for it. On the other hand, if Henreid hadn't done the film, he probably would have regretted it.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon — and for the rest of his life.