In Film Scholar Noah Isenberg C'89's
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Everybody Comes to In film scholar Noah Isenberg C’89’s engaging investigation of The film’s focus on people caught up in “Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie,” the lives of the émigré actors war trying desperately to make their way to a better life is also freshly relevant who made up most of the cast share the spotlight with the famous given our own era’s controversies over love triangle and wartime call to arms. Their stories also echo the treatment of refugees and immigra- forward to our own era’s debates over the treatment of refugees tion issues generally. “Nearly all of the some seventy-five actors and actresses and immigration policy. By John Prendergast cast in Casablanca were immigrants,” Isenberg writes, noting that the movie’s set was known as “International House.” pleasing but somewhat unnerving feature of The many refugees cast in parts large and small helped give the the talks Noah Isenberg C’89 has been giving film its distinctive, authentic atmosphere, undergirding the iconic to promote his book, We’ll Always Have romance of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman’s Casablanca, is the sensation that the audi- Ilsa Lund and the timely wartime message contained in Rick’s shift Aence’s warm regard for the film has rubbed off on him. “They from disillusioned isolationism (“I stick my neck out for nobody”) shower the same sort of affection on me,” he says, “as if I some- to a renewed commitment to the fight against fascism. how had a hand in making the movie.” This makes him feel a Isenberg opens the book with the story of one minor player— little bit guilty; but also, “I love it.” French-born actress Madeleine Lebeau, who died in 2016, the Subtitled The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most last known survivor among the cast. She played Yvonne, “the Beloved Movie, Isenberg’s book doesn’t lay to rest the question young woman who gets snubbed by Humphrey Bogart in the of why this Hollywood product—among the hundreds released film’s first act,” returns on the arm of a German soldier, and by Warner Brothers and its fellow studios during World War ends by joining passionately in the singing of “La Marseillaise,” II—has meant so much to so many for so long. But it does offer tears streaming down her face as she cries, “Vive la France!” a lively, thorough, and often surprising narrative of how that Lebeau had fled Paris in 1940 and made her way to Hollywood emotional response has played out both here in the United in a months-long journey that recalled the “tortuous, roundabout States and around the world in the 75 years since its debut in refugee trail” described in Casablanca’s opening voiceover. Isenberg November 1942 (just weeks after Allied troops in North Africa quotes an American-born actor, seeing her and others in the scene liberated the real Casablanca). also weeping, as suddenly realizing “they were all real refugees.” 42 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Nov|Dec 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY CANDACE DICARLO The number of times Isenberg has seen Casablanca is “deep in the triple digits,” he says. “I enjoy it every time.” Nov|Dec 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 43 The “Marseillaise” scene—one of the moved to the New School in New York, films (The Man From Planet X, Beyond the film’s most famous and emotionally where he currently directs the screen Time Barrier, The Amazing Transparent affecting—has not lost its resonance. studies program and is professor of cul- Man). And more. Isenberg builds his talks around different ture and media. Much of Ulmer’s work was done for clips from the film. On one occasion last Isenberg is married to Melanie Rehak PRC and similar “poverty row” studios May, the event was running long and he C’93, a writer whose books include Eat- that churned out B-movies “made for was planning to skip that scene—but the ing for Beginners [“A Shelf Full of Reso- next to nothing and very, very quickly” audience wouldn’t let him. It was the day lutions,” Jan|Feb 2011]. They met after to fill the bottom half of double features. after the French presidential election in college when he was writing freelance (The acronym PRC stood for Producers which Emanuel Macron defeated the reviews for The New Republic and she Releasing Corporation but was “some- National Front’s Marine le Pen, and “they was his editor. While Penn didn’t bring times thought to stand for ‘pretty rotten all insisted, you’ve got to play it, you’ve them together, they share an attachment crap,’” says Isenberg.) Ulmer’s extraordi- got to play it!” Isenberg recalls. to the University and Philadelphia now, nary ability to “make stylish pictures” he says, traveling from their home in under these constraints became his “call- Brooklyn for weekend trips and bring- ing card,” but it was also a trap. “He had hough he was born in Los ing their two young sons to Homecom- a lot of work, but he couldn’t break into Angeles, Isenberg doesn’t ing. And Isenberg was a visiting profes- the [major] studios.” come from a film industry sor in Penn’s cinema studies program The director’s more ardent champions family—his mother taught last spring, teaching a course on the have cast him as a “renegade who turned Thigh school English and his father was a “screwball comedy” genre. his nose up at Hollywood,” but Isenberg’s gastroenterologist and professor at UCLA. He’s written about and edited a volume research showed otherwise. He points to The family lived in Santa Monica and La of essays on Weimar cinema, and has letters Ulmer wrote to his wife in the Jolla, and he chose Penn for college after published articles on American and Ger- early 1940s predicting that he would accompanying his father East for a lecture man film subjects in The New Republic, soon be “the big man on the lot—and at the medical school. “I got a chance to The Nation, The New York Review of obviously that didn’t happen,” says tour the campus and just kind of fell in Books, Paris Review, BookForum, LA Isenberg. “So, it was a somewhat tragic love with the place,” he says. Review of Books, and elsewhere. His pre- career trajectory but also a really fasci- A swimmer in high school, he dropped vious book—Edgar G. Ulmer: A Film- nating life story.” out of Penn’s team as a freshman because maker at the Margins, published by the One challenge in telling that story was the double workouts were “just too gruel- University of California Press in 2014— Ulmer’s “penchant for mendacity,” Isenberg ing.” He claims he wasn’t much more was about a figure nearly as obscure as says. “It was very, very hard to try to cor- dedicated academically—at least at first. “I Casablanca is familiar. roborate claims that he made, especially enjoyed everything about [Penn], including Ulmer emigrated from Germany in the late in life.” To ferret out the truest ver- the social life,” he says with a laugh. early 1930s, and was one of several future sion required “two European research That began to change during his junior Hollywood filmmakers who had had a stints, spread out over several years,” and year abroad in Munich. “It was a kind of hand in the influential silent film Men- ultimately stretched the process of fateful experience for me,” he says. “I schen am Sonntag/People on Sunday. His research and writing over the better part came back and was a pretty solid student signature work as a director is 1945’s of a decade. “That was a very twisted in my senior year—I guess better late bleak film noir, Detour (about which Isen- path and one that took a lot of detours, than never—[but] it also really shaped berg wrote a book published in 2008). But a lot of false turns,” he says. me as a person and dictated to a large his prolific oeuvre includes the Edgar It was while working on the Ulmer degree what I would do after Penn.” Allan Poe-meets-German Expressionism book, “and especially researching these After majoring in European history, he horror film The Black Cat with Boris Kar- communities of émigrés from largely gravitated to German studies for his mas- loff and Bela Lugosi, Yiddish-language German-speaking, but also French- ter’s degree (University of Washington) films, the all-black-cast melodrama Moon speaking, Italian-speaking, Middle and PhD (Berkeley), initially focused on Over Harlem, a series of public-service Europe who ended up in Hollywood dur- literature but “segueing, as time passed films for different ethnic groups about ing the rise of fascism,” that Isenberg by, more squarely into film.” He taught tuberculosis, musicals (Jive Junction, Club decided, “that’s really something that I at Wesleyan University from 1995 to Havana, Carnegie Hall), costume dramas wanted to focus on.” 2004, splitting his classes between (Bluebeard, The Wife of Monte Cristo, The At the time he was writing We’ll Always German and film studies, and then Strange Woman), and Cold War era sci-fi Have Casablanca, “I didn’t realize how 44 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Nov|Dec 2017 powerfully [the refugee theme] would A review in The Aufbau, a German-language resonate,” he says, but soon after the book came out he drew the connection Jewish newspaper read by immigrants, “talked in an essay published in The Daily Beast.