Background
Michael Curtiz was born on 24 December 1886 in Budapest, Hungary.
Michael Curtiz was born on 24 December 1886 in Budapest, Hungary.
The long career of Michael Curtiz began in the Budapest theatre in the last decade of the Austro- Hungarian Empire. He was an actor and a producer before beginning to work for the cinema in Sweden, Hungaiy, and Germany. He served in the First World War and then directed in Germany before being invited to Hollywood by Harry Warner. He remained Warners loyalest director until 1953. His thrillers are slacker than Raoul Walsh’s, but the Errol Flynn picture was really more Curtizs invention than the actor’s, and Curtiz’s status improved notably after Captain Blood. Thus he began to act and talk like a Hungarian star. There were more Curtiz jokes than films, and David Niven named a book after one of them— Bring on the Empty Horses.
Eventually, durability betrayed him, and by the 1950s his adventure films and biopics were uninspired throwbacks. But until about 1945 he was an admirable exponent of American genres and an enthusiastic orchestrator of actors and technicians. The Adventures of Robin Hood is a classic swashbuckler; Yankee Doodle Dandy is one of the most enjoyable of biopics; Casablanca is the best of wartime espionage movies; and Mildred Pierce is the most throbbing of Joan Crawford melodramas. None of those films survives as art, but Curtiz seems to have been intoxicated by Americana in those war years. Granted that the players make special contributions to all those films, still one must allow Curtiz the credit for making melodrama and sentimentality so searingly effective and such glowing causes for nostalgia for the 1940s.
To adopt a musical term, in the early 1940s Curtiz achieved an outstanding vibrato, as if Hollywood’s swan song sensed its climax. Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca, and Mildred Pierce are an unrivaled trinity of inventiveness transforming soppiness to such an extent that reason and taste begin to waver at the conviction of genre in full How. One has only to compare Yankee Doodle Dandy with Curtiz’s later biopics, or Casablanca with White Christmas, to gauge the real distinction of the earlier films. Nor is there any reason to scorn the craft of the wartime films, not even the flashback within a flashback within a flashback of the nutty Passage to Marseilles. It would be a happier cinema today if complex stories could be told as swiftly and clearly as Casablanca.