Life in the sun, as it sets on empire
From Casablanca to Hong Kong, I'm fascinated by melting pots and fading colonial grandeur: what's the attraction, I wonder?
Today I saw Casablanca at the British Film Institute on the South Bank. I’ve seen the film several times before, of course, but I like seeing things on the big screen, I’m a BFI member and it was an appealing way to stay out of the roaring sun for a couple of hours. This isn’t a film review, but it was—predictably—brilliant, all of the performances outstanding (I particularly love Claude Rains as the prefect, Captain Renault) and it’s a much funnier film than I’d remembered.
Something else struck me about Casablanca. It wasn’t filmed in North Africa at all, of course: everything was in Burbank, with the exception of some shots at Van Nuys airport. It was, after all, made in 1942, when North Africa was still very much Axis-controlled. Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of the French territories of the Maghreb, did not begin until November of that year, weeks after Montgomery had finally turned the tide at the Second Alamein.
So there was nothing authentic about the scenes in Casablanca, though most of the action takes place indoors when you think about it: either at Rick’s Café Américain or the prefecture. But there are opening scenes, played behind Lou Marcelle’s sonorous narration, which show the police “rounding up the usual suspects” in the cafés and markets of the city. It is clearly very hot and dusty (“I came to Casablanca for the waters… I was misinformed”). And it is a classic colonial setting: some Europeans, civilian and official, dressed in defiance of the climate, an indigenous population going about its business, and some local police and soldiers wearing the fez with their uniforms, embodiments of the fault-line between coloniser and colonised.
And that I find hugely alluring. I cannot explain why, really, but there is something hugely romantic and attractive to me about these slightly seedy, grubby melting pots, with colonial administrations who know they can never entirely impose their will but will keep the lights on for the time being, and locals who resent the foreign imposition but only in a rather vague and notional way, meanwhile following their paths through life with the conquerors immoveable, accepted but often distant objects. For Bogart and Bergman it was Casablanca, but think of Tangier, Algiers, Cairo, Damascus, Aden, Nairobi, Singapore, Shanghai, Beirut… The list is almost endless.
Some of these have already been great dramatic settings. Paul French has written the excellent City of Demons, a non-fiction novel of Shanghai between the wars which positively reeks of corruption, opium and fear, sweat stains on grubby linen suits. Alan Furst has mined lots of liminal cities for his pre- and Second World War thrillers. Olivia Manning’s sprawling Fortunes of War sextet takes in many dusty, exotic cities across the Balkans and the Levant. For what it’s worth, though no-one has asked me, I think there’s a great novel to be written set in wartime Cairo, possibly revolving around the titanic and irascible figure of Miles Lampson, later Lord Killearn, the British ambassador to Egypt from 1936 to 1946. Handily, he kept a diary. But I digress.
Why do I see these places as such rich veins for fiction (or indeed, in Paul French’s case, fact)? Part of it is the multiculturalism. Many of the places I have mentioned are ports, always cosmopolitan places. Some bustling patchworks were even more varied before horror intervened: Salonika, Odessa and Baghdad had substantial Jewish populations before the Shoah (today the Jewish population of the Iraqi capital is in single figures: less than five). Places like Trieste and Kolosvár had enormous variation and vitality. And with colonial towns and cities already mixed in ethnic terms, the overlaying of a European administration simply added more complexity, more languages, more faiths.
There’s nostalgia, too. Not a red-faced, whisky-and-soda longing for the Empire; as much as anything I’m far too young for that. When I was born, our only significant colonial possession was Hong Kong, though some small, windswept islands in the South Atlantic, a British Crown Colony, were about to become disproportionately important. But linen suits, panama hats, ceiling fans, rattan furniture, whisky against the heat, malaria pills, all of these things speak of a different age which I find aesthetically pleasing and (entirely in my imagination) conducive to my way of life.
Graham Greene, with his foreign correspondent’s experience and unerring eye for pathos, was very good on this: Fowler in French-governed Saigon in The Quiet American, Major Scobie in Freetown in The Heart of the Matter, Wormold and his vacuum cleaners in Batista’s Cuba in Our Man in Havana. There is, among the catholic guilt and the British reserve, a crushing sense of time running out, of a reckoning for those who took up the white man’s burden: Kipling had been describing the Philippines in the 1890s but in the places I’m talking about, 30 or 40 or 50 years later, the burden was taking its toll.
The French in Morocco, for example, who in Casablanca are being shouldered aside by the Germans, may have longed for the return of their status as the great colonial power, and certainly French thinkers and politicians looked forward to a post-War world in which la patrie would reassert its control over its substantial empire. But there was a wider sense that the game was up. French disengagement from the imperial project would be a bloody and painful one, in Indo-China, Algeria and elsewhere. Churchill may have been committed to the Raj, but there was a real expectation that India would gain at least some kind of self-government when the conflict was over.
As for the Middle East, well: Sykes and Picot had shown their limitations but there was still a game to be played. Nevertheless the rules had changed, the Americans had pulled up a seat to the table, and “majority rule” would become the louder and louder imperative, even if “the majority” meant handing power over to local autocrats who would be no more populist than the colonial powers. An obscure but brave RAF pilot in Southern Rhodesia, badly injured in combat, would manage to keep his country ruled by whites until the very end of the 1970s, but Ian Smith was an object lesson in bloodymindedness and persistence.
I know it makes me sound more morose than I actually am, but this gloominess appeals to me, this pervading and heavy-hanging sense of catastrophe, because it is sometimes accompanied by an extraordinary burst of life, a bulb burning brightest before it gives out completely. The tinkle of cocktail glasses and the rut of adultery in Happy Valley, high society in 1950s Ras Beirut, negotiating grand building schemes with young King Faisal in Baghdad: where do I sign?
I am less well-travelled than I would like, and many of these places remain—in reality—mysteries to me. But I have been to Jerusalem, to Baghdad, to Nicosia, to Gibraltar, so I have some faint whiff of the former colonial and post-colonial life. My linen suits just about survived everything an Iraqi summer could throw at them (the worst damage was done by a leaky fountain pen), and a gin and tonic certainly tasted more piquant in the baking heat.
Images, images. I don’t know that I have an especially visual mind—I’m a writer, not a director—but I’ve read enough to have seen the stalwarts of fading European grandeur going about their business: Harold Macmillan in Algiers in the Second World War, Anthony Eden ‘enjoying’ a cocktail with Colonel Nasser (actually Eden detested the Egyptian leader, whose name, peculiarly, he pronounced “Nah-ser”, and genuinely thought he was another Hitler), Malcolm MacDonald running from one creaking corner of the British Empire to another (he was our man in South East Asia then governor of Kenya, having been colonial secretary and dominions secretary in the War).
I’ve often wondered—I was about to say ‘Who hasn’t?’, then I realised the answer is ‘Almost everyone’—if I would have been a good colonial administrator. After all, I was a public servant for more than a decade, and had I been born 60 or 70 years earlier, a career in our overseas possessions would have been entirely possible: by 1947 there were 11,000 posts in HM Colonial Service. I could have been in Evelyn Baring’s private office in Nairobi, or a bureaucrat at the University of Hong Kong, or shuffling papers for Nyasaland’s legislative council in Zomba.
Such a profession, a servant of Empire, a tiny cog in the machine, served some well, some less so. Orwell was a superintendent of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, John Buchan looked after the sanitation of prison camps for Lord Milner in South Africa, Lionel Curtis was secretary to Milner himself before busying himself with the idea of a world government.
One can paint an agreeable picture. Working under a swishing ceiling fan, game for lunch, a drink after hours at the club, sundowners on the veranda. Or pastis in the square and a wander through the souk, depending where the service took you. But it’s the agglomeration of supporting roles that fascinates me. And here we come back to where we began, Casablanca.
The cast of Michael Curtiz’s enduring classic was dizzyingly international. Only three credited parts—Bogart as Rick, Dooley Wilson as Sam and Jack Warner’s stepdaughter Joy Page as a Bulgarian refugee—were US-born. Rains and Sydney Greenstreet were British, Bergman was Swedish, Paul Henreid and Peter Lorre were Austro-Hungarian by birth, and Conrad Veidt was (authentically) German. And it is a magnificent swirl of high-low. Lorre is superb as the slimy, wheedling Ugarte (a Basque name, as it happens), Leonid Kinskey is the outstanding light relief as Sascha, the lovelorn Russian barman, and Curt Bois, an actor born to a Jewish family in Berlin, shines brightly but briefly as the courtly pickpocket preying on naïf tourists (he would end up having a career which spanned 80 years).
It is a triumphant portfolio, despite the luminosity of Bogart and Bergman (Roger Ebert said of their on-screen chemistry that “she paints his face with her eyes”). Such is the brilliance of the film that some characters only need a few minutes in front of the camera to portray great depth of character, like John Qualen as the nervous Resistance agent, his nerves shredded by constant fear, or S.Z. Sakall as Carl, the plump waiter who keeps his cool under all kinds of pressure and reassures Rick that all is well, all is well, all manner of things shall be well.
That kaleidoscope, overlaid with the imagined heat and smell of a Moroccan port, even in winter, dazzles. Yes, the pervading air is of desperation. After all, most of the people in the film are in Casablanca because they have run out of other options.
“Might as well be frank, monsieur”, Signor Ferrari tells Victor Laszlo. “It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca, and the Germans have outlawed miracles.”
Perhaps this became a film review after all. Or something more meta. At any rate, I can sit at café tables this summer—especially when we are liberated almost fully on 19 July—and pretend that I hear the wail of the muezzin, or the chatter of street hawkers, or the beat of an ocean. I can order a cool drink, or a strong coffee. And I can pretend that I am in some deeply strange place, superficially familiar but under the surface quite other, no-one really knowing their business, but pressing on anyhow.
After all, I live in London.
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A splendid article. Thank you. We remember the tail end of International Morocco. In 1964 we spent a month there. They have been lucky in having a wise king and it is heartening to see the improvements made when we were there have born fruit..literally, the vines The King had planted on rocky hillsides are now producing export income. The people were delightful and they accepted us with kindness and hospitality .We were able to visit remote places where the children rushed out to see us and even the cats were curious about people they had not seen except when Mr Churchill went there to paint during the war. My family lived during The Raj and I remember gloomy houses filled with (not only the smell of curry) but all sorts of amazing souvenirs. Stories of alligator hunting on the rivers in Africa and grand dinners in India where even the British ladies wore saris ( before the Woke sensitivity about cultural crossovers.. (remind me to give up drinking Cha.). I loved those days when we could enjoy others cultures, other people, other traditions. The Woke Brigade have robbed us of so much, even if Blue Spode Willow Pattern china is still acceptable, for now.