Viking Cruises

41 | Viking Explorer Society News Anthony Dennis explores the real Casablanca—the city that inspired a Hollywood legend but never hosted a single scene. What he finds is a destination with stories of its own, worthy of the spotlight. We'll Always Have CASABLANCA A towering minaret soars over the thronged metropolis, a brick, stone and tile sentinel immediately above the city's frenetic souk heaving with humanity. Below that sacred skyscraper seemingly every nationality is represented either behind or in front of goods-laden market stalls, nudging and weaving their way through what passes for its central passageway or loitering over coffee at al fresco Parisian-style corner cafes. This is the stirring opening scene of Casablanca, the classic 1942 film which some consider, along with Citizen Kane, the greatest ever made. But, as astonishingly accomplished as the opening black-and-white shot is, the viewer, as time goes by, must remember this: a kiss may well be just a kiss and a sigh may just be a sigh, yet when it comes to Tinsel Town the fundamental myths almost always apply. As you may be aware, not a single scene of Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, was shot on location in what is now Morocco's largest and most important city. Frankly, Bergman and Bogie's masterpiece is a bit bogus, since Casablanca was filmed entirely on a Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California, with the famed airport scene shot in an Los Angeles aerodrome. Casablanca, the Moroccan city, not the movie, has since the release of Casablanca, the film not the city, struggled to meet the impossible expectations of visitors. It's in the real Casablanca that I find myself ashore from my cruise ship, Viking Saturn, on a day's visit as part of Viking's 16-day Malta, Morocco & the Mediterranean, en route from stops at the equally exotic North African ports of Tunis and Algiers. While it is often dismissed by its critics as Morocco's least compelling and least romantic city, compared to Marrakesh, Fes and Tangier, I'm more than willing to give "Casa", as its citizens affectionately refer to it, the benefit of my doubt. In my wanderings, I wonder, perhaps sacrilegiously, what if George Clooney and Cate Blanchett were cast in those celebrated leading roles in a remake filmed, not on that Burbank backlot, but entirely in Casablanca itself? LOCATION ONE: THE OLD MEDINA To be fair to Hollywood, which is no easy task, it would have been an impossibility to shoot on location, even before the US entry into World War II, as French Morocco was controlled at the time by the French Vichy government, a notorious puppet regime of the Nazis. After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, Casablanca, the largest Atlantic port in Africa, became a shadowy transit point for refugees escaping a war-torn Europe to the still-neutral Americas. It was this tense and then-topical intrigue that directly informed the celebrated screenplay of Casablanca. I can detect no tension or intrigue when at 8.30am on the day of my visit to Casablanca I enter the city's Old Medina, or city, via its northern entrance, composed of the remnants of the city's 18th-century fortifications. As far as I can tell, I'm the sole Western tourist here (take that, Marrakesh) within the narrow, haphazard laneways, the walls of buildings daubed sparingly but fetchingly with bold primary colours. One of the major landmarks of the Old Medina, which dates to the 7th-century Berber era, is the two-star blue and white- painted Hotel Central. A working remnant of Morocco's French colonial era and as faded as any Hollywood fade-out, you can envisage a scene in which Cate, in the Ilsa Lund role, emerges down the twisting, crescent-shaped stairway to greet a waiting George as Rick Blaine. Further along, it is not only tourists who are conspicuously absent from the souk, but most of its night-owl market traders, clearly in no hurry to open to the public. It's a far cry from that frantic opening scene of Casablanca, but even with a visit to the souk, overshadowed by the high-rise office blocks of Morocco's contemporary commercial capital, you get the picture. Film poster

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