Word: casablanca
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Most of the people who will jam the Brattle for the next two weeks have seen Casablanca at least once, and will see it once again not because they remember the complex plot of intrigue and love and compromised virtue, but because each actor made his character indelible...
...Brattle has timed Casablanca's reshowing wisely; the picture was filmed back in Humphrey Bogart's prime, and before Ingrid Bergman became an untouchable to the gossip-columnist caste. Just now, however, the temperers of public sentiment have shed tears for the late, great Bogie, because he is dead; and Miss Bergman is living her renaissance...
...presence," and allowing French farmers to pay 20% less tax than a Moroccan. They displaced the Moroccan administrators. They dug mines, made Morocco the world's second in production of phosphate, fifth in manganese, seventh in lead. They built roads and railroads, power plants and dams, constructed ports (Casablanca handles more tonnage than Marseille). They built 133 hospitals, at one time boasted they were opening a school a day. But the roads mostly went to French farms or French factories, the schools were chiefly for French children. Even now, only one in five Moroccan children goes to school...
Mohammed began collecting guns, race horses, and fast cars which he drove himself (he once drove a Bugatti 55 miles from Rabat to Casablanca in 32 minutes). He kept a reported 40 concubines, frequently adding fresh ones and sending faded beauties off to a convent. The French encouraged such distractions from more serious affairs of state (though later, to discredit him, they spread the word that he dealt savagely with servants who seduced some of his concubines, had one whipped to death). He exercised fully the Sultan's traditional right to exact gifts from his subjects, and the saying...
...educators came to him in 1940 to complain that the French would not allow them to organize a school for girls did he realize that nonroyal Moslem girls did not go to school, promptly promised, "I will make my daughter Aisha the missionary of feminine emancipation." During the wartime Casablanca Conference, President Franklin Roosevelt invited him to dine. It was the first time Morocco's Sultan had been allowed to meet any foreign head of state, and though he would not agree to declare war against Germany, he got from the meeting an increased sense of his own policical...