The Casablanca Man : The Cinema of Michael Curtiz

Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was without doubt one of the most important directors in film history, yet he has never been granted his deserved recognition and no full-scale work on him has previously been published. The Casablanca Man surveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musicals, swashbucklers and westerns, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of unprecedented archive research at Warner Brothers. Concentrating on Curtiz' best-known films - Casablanca, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pearce and Captain Blood among them - Robertson explores Curtiz' practical creative struggles and his friendships and rivalries with other film celebrities including Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and James Cagney, and his discovery of future stars. Casablanca Man is the first comprehensive critical exploration of Curtiz' entire career and, linking his European work and his subsequent American work into a coherent whole, Robertson firmly re-establishes Curtiz' true standing in the history of cinema.

Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was one of the most important and prolific directors in the history of cinema, yet he has never been granted the recognition he deserves. The Casablanca Man is the first full length work on Curtiz, surveying his unequalled mastery over diverse genres: biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musical, swashbuckler, and western. The book also examines Curtiz' relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls, based on documentary evidence culled from archive research at Warner Brothers, rather than the hearsay which has caused his underrating. The access to production and financial details of the Warner Brothers films from 1926 to 1953 makes Robertson's work unique, most of the material never having been available to the general public.

The Casablanca Man surveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musicals, swashbucklers and westerns, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of unprecedented archive research at Warner Brothers. Concentrating on Curtiz' best-known films - Casablanca, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pearce and Captain Blood among them - Robertson explores Curtiz' practical creative struggles and his friendships and rivalries with other film celebrities including Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and James Cagney, and his discovery of future stars.

Library Journal

Though his name is not as readily recognized as that of contemporaries Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Frank Capra, Curtiz nevertheless was Warner Brothers's top director during Hollywood's golden years of the 1930s and 1940s. This volume is essentially a detailed filmography of his remarkable career. From his fledgling days in Hungary in 1912 to his last big-budget studio production in 1961, Curtiz directed nearly every genre with true finesse. With Casablanca alone Curtiz secured a hallowed place in film history, but the coupling of that extraordinary title with The Adventures of Robin Hood , Angels with Dirty Faces , Yankee Doodle Dandy , Mildred Pierce , and numerous others put him at the forefront of the cinema's elite; it is hard to imagine American film without him. Though Robertson is overly forgiving of his subject's failures and could have given the text greater substance by adding more biographical material, his book admirably achieves its primary goal. This long-overdue paean to one of the movies' most creative personalities is recommended for large film collections.-- Michael Rogers, ``Library Journal''

Critical exploration of film-maker Curtiz's European and American work, based on the films Casablanca, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pearce and Captain Blood Nothing definite is known about Michael Curtiz's early life except that he was born as Mihaly Kertesz in Hungary during the late nineteenth century.