A specific Thanksgiving week. November 26, 1942, the Hollywood Theatre on West 51st Street in Manhattan. Warner Bros. premieres Casablanca, eighteen days after Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, has put the city of Casablanca itself on the front page of every American newspaper. The audience inside the theater on opening night includes Warner Bros. executives, journalists, and a handful of New York socialites. None of them know yet that the film they are watching will become the most quoted, most referenced, most imitated American film of the next eighty years. Two of them know that the United States Army’s 3rd Infantry Division has just walked through the real Casablanca’s port two weeks earlier. The film begins. A globe rotates. A narrator explains how refugees from occupied Europe are trying to reach the Americas through Morocco. The first set is a soundstage in Burbank. The decade is about to find its visual vocabulary.
The Film
Hal B. Wallis, head of Warner Bros.’ production unit, optioned an unproduced stage play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison in December 1941, three weeks after Pearl Harbor. He assigned the twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein to adapt the script, with a third writer, Howard Koch, brought in to deepen the political content. The screenplay was rewritten daily during shooting, with actors often receiving the day’s pages an hour before camera.
The Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz, a Warner Bros. contract director with eighty films behind him, kept the production moving on schedule and on budget. English was his fourth language. His malapropisms became legend on set, and several of them ended up in the script as Curtiz lines.
The cast was assembled from the Warner Bros. roster: Humphrey Bogart as Rick, Ingrid Bergman on loan from David O. Selznick as Ilsa, Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo, with Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre filling out the European refugee community in the bar. The film was shot entirely on Warner Bros. soundstages in Burbank between May and August 1942. Wallis rushed the release to coincide with the Casablanca Conference, where Roosevelt and Churchill met in the real city from January 14 to 24, 1943. The film won three Academy Awards at the ceremony in March 1944: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Hollywood at War
The studio system as wartime infrastructure. American cinema attendance hit eighty million weekly tickets in 1946, in a country of approximately 140 million people. Average household movie attendance was twice a week. The eight major Hollywood studios (Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Columbia, United Artists) produced more than 400 features in 1942 and over 450 in 1946.
The Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, established in June 1942, reviewed every Hollywood script for wartime appropriateness and either approved, requested revisions, or rejected outright. Roughly one in three Hollywood feature films released between 1942 and 1945 dealt directly with the war.
James Stewart enlisted in the Army Air Forces in March 1941, flew twenty combat missions over Europe as a bomber pilot, and rose to the rank of Colonel by V-E Day. Clark Gable enlisted after his wife Carole Lombard died in a war bond tour plane crash on January 16, 1942, and flew five missions as a B-17 gunner. Tyrone Power served in the Marines. Henry Fonda served in the Navy. Robert Montgomery commanded a PT boat.
The Hollywood Canteen at 1451 Cahuenga Boulevard, founded by Bette Davis and John Garfield in October 1942, served free meals and dancing to servicemen with celebrity hosts every night the war lasted. Roughly three thousand servicemen passed through each night.
The Costume Designers
The shadow industry. The Hollywood costume designer was a recently professionalized role in 1942, and the four practitioners who mattered most shaped what civilian American women wore for the next decade.
Edith Head, at Paramount, dressed Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), gave Stanwyck the cheap blonde wig and the ankle bracelet that defined the femme fatale silhouette, and eventually won eight Academy Awards for costume design, a record that still stands.
Adrian, at MGM until 1942 and then independent, had defined Joan Crawford’s shoulder line through the 1930s and continued the practice into Crawford’s wartime work, including the broad-shouldered suits in Mildred Pierce (1945).
Orry-Kelly at Warner Bros. dressed Bergman in Casablanca, working within L-85 fabric restrictions, and produced the suit Bergman wears in the Paris flashback that became one of the most copied women’s silhouettes of the decade.
Travis Banton at Paramount and then 20th Century Fox handled the studio’s high-glamour assignments.
Magazine editors at Photoplay and Screen Romances published the designers’ sketches alongside the film stills. Department store buyers ordered ready-to-wear adaptations within weeks of premiere. Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs ran sections of clothing explicitly labeled as Hollywood-influenced. The Hollywood costume designer was the most influential garment designer in the United States during the war years, more directly than any of the Seventh Avenue manufacturers whose work she or he was unconsciously dictating.
Film Noir
The emerging style. The term film noir was coined by the French critic Nino Frank in the magazine L’Écran français in August 1946, in a review of four American films released in Paris after the liberation: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, and Laura. Frank identified a new visual and narrative mode in American cinema characterized by high-contrast black-and-white photography, urban settings, doomed protagonists, fatalist plotting, and femmes fatales. The style had been emerging since 1941 without a name.
Many of the directors driving it were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria who brought the visual language of German Expressionism into the American studio system: Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann. The pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain provided the literary substrate. The technological precondition was the wider availability of faster black-and-white film stocks (Kodak Plus-X and Super-XX) that could produce usable images in low-light situations the previous generation of stocks could not handle.
By 1947, every major studio was producing noirs at scale. The Big Sleep (1946), Out of the Past (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Force of Evil (1948) extended the style to its limits. The visual grammar of film noir (rain-slick streets, venetian blind shadows, cigarette smoke in beams of light, single-source lighting on a face) has remained the default vocabulary for American crime cinema for eighty years.
The Trench Coat
The civilian style adoption. The trench coat was originally British military issue, designed by Burberry and Aquascutum for officers in WWI and intended to keep them dry in the trenches of the Western Front. The garment had specific functional features (D-rings for attaching equipment, storm flaps, gun-flap, raglan sleeves for shoulder mobility) that had no civilian justification. It had been a marginal civilian item in modest circulation through the 1920s and 1930s.
Humphrey Bogart wearing one in Casablanca, paired with a charcoal-grey fedora and a white silk scarf, in the airport scene that closes the film, made it the canonical menswear silhouette of the next thirty years. He wore the coat again in To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Dark Passage (1947). The translation from screen to street was nearly complete by 1948.
American department stores stocked trench coats by the thousands in the late 1940s. The Burberry coat went from being a specialist British export to a mass-market item. Aquascutum opened American distribution. Domestic manufacturers (Misty Harbor, London Fog after 1954) produced the silhouette for the middle of the market.
The fedora went through the same translation, riding alongside the trench coat through the entire decade. The 1940s American man’s outdoor wardrobe was visibly mediated by Bogart, his costumer (the Casablanca trench was reportedly Bogart’s own coat, brought from his personal wardrobe), and Curtiz’s lighting team. The civilian wearing it was unconsciously quoting a Burbank soundstage.
The Women
The female side of the cinematic style transfer. Ingrid Bergman’s pageboy hair in Casablanca, with a side part and a soft inward curl at the jaw, became the most requested hairstyle in American salons during 1943.
Lauren Bacall’s debut in To Have and Have Not (1944) at the age of nineteen introduced a heavy-lidded sidelong gaze with the head tilted slightly down. The Warner Bros. publicity department called it the Look. Women’s magazines diagrammed it for readers within a month, with arrows showing how to angle the chin.
Rita Hayworth’s black satin strapless gown in Gilda (1946), designed by Jean Louis, sold out every comparable evening dress in American department stores within a season. The Jean Louis design used a single curved piece of fabric and was reportedly engineered around Hayworth’s anatomy rather than around standard pattern-cutting.
Joan Crawford’s shoulder pads in Mildred Pierce (1945) drove the silhouette of working women’s suits through the late 1940s, after wartime L-85 restrictions had already established the broad shoulder as the standard.
The translation was direct and fast. A woman watching Gilda in a Cleveland theater on a Friday could be wearing a near-copy of the dress to a Saturday wedding two weeks later, from a Sears Roebuck catalog. The pattern would have been adapted by the catalog’s house designers from production stills published in Photoplay the previous week.
Closing
Cinema in the 1940s functioned as the public visual square that nineteenth-century Paris had been and that mid-twentieth-century television would attempt to be. The decisive fact about Hollywood was scale. Eighty million Americans were sitting in dark rooms looking at the same images every week, with the same lighting, the same wardrobe, the same hair, the same posture. The image bank that resulted shaped postwar civilian style across an unprecedented breadth of population.
The 1920s Paris piece argued that one arrondissement in one city organized modern visual culture for a generation, through the proximity of artists, galleries, salons, and ateliers. The argument worked at a population of perhaps fifty thousand people seeing the work in person, supplemented by a few hundred thousand more reading about it in magazines.
The 1940s cinema piece argues that a soundstage in Burbank did the same job at a hundred times the scale, with national projection booths replacing the gallery walk. Casablanca‘s premiere on November 26, 1942 is still the most influential single screening of the decade. The film has been quoted, sampled, parodied, restored, and watched continuously for eighty-four years.
The trench coat is still in production. The hair is still being requested. The salon has been outsourced to a projection booth.