Here’s Looking at the Casablanca Sequel, Brazzaville (1944)

Brazzaville-Lobby3Everyone knows that movie sequels are a tricky business, and that for every Godfather, Part II or Aliens there’s a Sting II, Grease 2, Staying Alive, Son of the Mask, or even a Godfather, Part III. It’s also a given that the more iconic and beloved a film is, the bigger the chances for backlash against a follow-up, which is in part why Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain and The Sound of Music, to name a few, are still and (one hopes) always will be stand-alone big-screen entities. What, then, are we to make of Warner Bros.’ 1944 Casablanca sequel, Brazzaville?

What’s that, you say? You didn’t know there was a sequel to Casablanca? Given its stormy production history, poor reception at the ticket window, and decades of abuse by cineastes worshipping at the altar of the original, that’s hardly surprising. In the wake of Cacablanca’s somewhat surprising box office success, however, Warners executives were by the spring of 1943 eager to continue anti-hero Rick Blaine’s (Humphrey Bogart) wartime exploits. What started out as a fairly straightforward project grew into a mess that would take twice as long as its predecessor to bring to life and was, in the words of one studio wag, “harder to coordinate and launch than the actual Allied landings in North Africa.” Perhaps the time has come, though, to make an unbiased appraisal of the WWII thriller that even its stars never mentioned and will never be discussed in any retrospectives of their careers.

CASABLANCA 5Brazzaville opens right where Casablanca left off…on the airport tarmac, where American ex-pat “saloon keeper” Blaine (Bogart) and his new best friend, local police prefect Louis Renault (Claude Rains), are discussing joining the forces at a Free French garrison at Brazzaville, in what was then called French Equatorial Africa. With Nazi and Vichy French officials certain to be interested in “chatting” with them about the murder of German officer Strasser (Conrad Veidt) and the escape of Resistance leader Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) and wife Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), a timely exit from the city is, in Renault’s words, “just what the doctor ordered.” Thus the pair find themselves stationed in central Africa, under the command of an antagonistic Col. LeTour (Henry Daniell) for about a year, until they’re abruptly detained and brought back to Casablanca.

RAINS, CLAUDEExpecting a less than warm reception upon returning to Morocco, Blaine and Renault are pleasantly surprised to discover that Allied forces landed and took over the coastal part of the country the week before (even with radio, news apparently didn’t travel too quickly in the Congo) as part of the campaign to drive the German army out of northern Africa…and Rick learns that his “corrupt” colleague Louis has been part of the French Underground, keeping a watchful eye on him and discerning where his true loyalties lie, all along.

FITZGERALD, GERALDINEThe Allied command, it seems, has a deal to offer Rick: find out who’s behind a sabotage ring preying on U.S. lend-lease ships in the Mediterranean and end its operation, and he will finally be allowed to return to America. With help from his old “ally,” black marketeer Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet in a one-scene cameo at the Café Americain), Rick is put on the trail of the saboteurs and travels to their base in Tangiers. Once there, the undercover Rick works his way into the heart of the coastal city’s underworld as a seller of faked U.S. passports and “letters of transit” (supplied by Allied forces who happily intercept the buyers). It’s also here that he meets nightclub chanteuse Simone (Geraldine Fitzgerald), mistress to the espionage outfit’s ringleader, Count von Doren (George Coulouris), an Austrian-born official and Nazi collaborator who enjoys diplomatic immunity. She also happens to be Col. LeTour’s estranged sister. In spite of themselves, Rick and Simone are drawn to one another, but can he free her from the mysterious hold that von Doren has on her and, with her help, put the kibosh on von Doren’s cabal before his true mission is revealed?

As you can see from my brief synopsis, the key elements that made Casablanca such a favorite with moviegoers–the anti-heroic lead, the memorable supporting players, and particularly the love triangle–were plainly lacking in Brazzaville, the last one due in no small part to the filmmakers’ hesitancy to count out a certain lead’s return (more about this in a minute). With Renault basically being left behind once Rick leaves for Tangiers and not being seen again until the final scenes, the interaction between Rains and Bogart was keenly missed. And what can one say about “More Than a Kiss,” the tin-eared attempt to follow up “As Time Goes By” that Fitzgerald sings (with her voice allegedly dubbed over by a teenage Andy Williams) as part of her nightclub act?

A good deal of the film’s problems can be traced to the script travails. Twin brother screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, who crafted Casablanca out of an unproduced Broadway play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, were offered first crack at drafting the follow-up story treatment. After the chaotic environment that accompanied the first film, though, the siblings decided that one trip to Morocco was sufficient, thank you very much. For some reason Warners bypassed writer Howard Koch, who worked on the Casablanca screenplay, and any other number of in-house scribes in favor of a filmmaker best known as director and co-writer of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial, Frederick Stephani. His treatment–which, interestingly, did not feature so much as a single scene set in Brazzaville–started out promisingly but soon jumped the rails when it revealed that, not only was Renault an undercover Allied operative the whole time, but so was “completely neutral” Rick himself. In the words of a studio reader, “the moment Rick becomes…an agent of the secret police, the interest in his position and character largely evaporates.”

Using Stephani’s story as a jumping-off point, the project was handed off to a number of writers before it eventually came around to Casey Robinson, who worked sans credit on Casablanca, and author Jack Moffitt. The pair toiled for two months before handing in their updated treatment and first-draft script, with later contributions by an uncredited William Faulkner. The search for a director was similarly bogged down once Casablanca helmer Michael Curtiz turned it down. Fresh off playing Rommel in Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo, Erich von Stroheim offered his services to Warners as director/co-star and was eager to play Count von Doren. The studio, however, had set its sights on Raoul Walsh, who had assisted Lloyd Bacon on Bogart’s most recent effort, Action in the North Atlantic. Ultimately, the unenvied task of shooting the film fell to Howard Hawks, who Warner Bros. signed in July of 1943.

CASABLANCAAs far as the casting, both Bogart and Rains were game for a second go-round on the studio’s North Africa sets, but it was pretty much a given–despite the early Stephani story that killed off Victor Lazlo en route to America and returned Isla Lund to Rick’s world–that Ingrid Bergman wasn’t going to reprise her role as the saloon keeper’s great love. Robinson toyed with the idea of keeping Ilsa in the script and letting the studio recast her, but found it hard for himself to imagine anyone but Bergman in the part and knew moviegoers would feel the same way. Enter new love interest Geraldine Fitzgerald, whose character started out as a pro-Franco Spaniard named Maria before changing nationalities. No matter her homeland, Maria/Simone was an ill-defined follower in Ilsa’s footsteps (and at one point was set to take a bullet meant for Rick in order to free him up to reunite with Ilsa). Similarly, Coulouris’ Austrian nobleman seems more the shady businessman (like Citizen Kane’s Mr. Thatcher, perhaps?) than the sinister villain of Veidt in the first film. And while it was nice to see Sydney Greenstreet (and Leonid Kinskey’s Sacha the bartender, who greets the returning Rick with a Russian kiss on both cheeks) in the café sequence, it would have been nice to see Carl (S.Z. Sakall), Abdul (Dan Seytmour), and especially Sam the piano player (Dooley Wilson) once again, too.

In the wake of its Oscar-winning parent picture, Brazzaville certainly does not measure up. On its own merits, though, it stands as an average Bogart WWII programmer, along the lines of Action in the North Atlantic and Sahara. Why it has yet to come out on home video (it was never even released on VHS back in the days) is a question that may never be answered. At least one good thing did come out of Brazzaville, however. Director Hawks used a model his wife had seen on a Harper’s Bazaar cover as an extra in the above-mentioned nightclub scene. He–and Bogie–were so impressed by her presence that she was given the female lead in their next project together, Warners’ 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. And that was how Humphrey Bogart met future wife Lauren Bacall.

Author’s Note: If you made it this far down in my review, thank you. If you made it this far down and are still wondering why you never heard of Brazzaville, please take another look at this article’s publication date.