Sentiments about Vichy France ran deep
That whole piece about Casablanca by Meredith Hindley is interesting.
With few Americans knowing Casablanca was a city in French Morocco — let alone how to find it on a map — the studio banked on audiences’ love of wartime intrigue, along with the star power of Bogart and castmates Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, to sell the film.
But on November 8, reports began to trickle in that the Americans and British had launched Operation TORCH with the goal of seizing Algeria and French Morocco from Vichy France. The assault was a new phase in the war against Nazi Germany, one designed to help the Soviets, who fought a bloody battle against the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Over the next few days, headlines and radio reports buzzed about the fighting in and around Casablanca, as the U.S. Navy battled the French fleet and 33,000 American soldiers stormed Moroccan beaches under the command of Major General George S. Patton, Jr.
Warner Brothers could hardly believe its luck — it had a movie in the can about a city that had just become the site of a major Allied victory. The studio couldn’t buy that kind of publicity. Rather than premiering the film in 1943, Warner Brothers hastily arranged a screening in New York on November 26, 1942, two weeks after the French surrendered Casablanca to the Americans.
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If audience members didn’t become verklempt watching Victor lead the patrons of Rick’s Café Américain in a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise,” they received another opportunity when the lights came up. Before the premiere, members of the Free French had marched down Fifth Avenue, and at the end of the movie, they assembled on stage and belted out the revolutionary anthem in front of a flag emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. “The occasion took the tone of a patriotic rally rather than the premiere of a timely motion picture,” noted the Hollywood Reporter. Sentiments about Vichy France ran deep — even in New York.
Or especially in New York.
I learned from the recent book, The Unfree French that ‘collaboration’ was not coined as a pejorative term. Petain proudly proclaimed a ‘new era of collaboration,’ and it was the official line of the ‘legitimate’ French government that assisting an occupying army was the height of patriotism.
I think its from ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ that I learned that, by 1945, more French military lost their lives fighting for the Germans than had fighting against them. Roald Dahl became a fighter ace flying against the French in Syria, not against the Germans.
I think I learned that from the recentish French tv series “Un village Français” – Pétain said it and the resisters used it as the label for Pétainistes and anyone else who went along. It’s woven into the history of France that far more people claimed to have been resisters after the war ended than actually had been.