Henreid struggled with typecasting after 'Casablanca'

"Welcome back to the fight," Nazi resistance leader Victor Laszlo says to Rick Blaine at the end of "Casablanca" -- as the famous plane to Lisbon sputters and roars. "This time I know our side will win."

It's one of the finest Hollywood scenes ever -- apotheosized by black and whites of Humphrey Bogart (Rick) and Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund) face to face in the night fog, saying goodbye at the airport so her husband Laszlo can escape. They will always have Paris.

Of this trio, the elegant character of Laszlo, played by the refugee Austrian actor Paul Henreid, is nearly forgotten -- in film and in real life. He went on to play roles as European types, Nazi heavies and freedom fighters, as well as raised war bonds in Washington. But he got blacklisted in the McCarthy era for refusing to divulge the political views of fellow actors and ended up directing TV fare for 25 years.

Bogart got an Oscar nomination for "Casablanca." Henreid got typecast.

Today Henreid's daughter, Monika, raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood, shuttles from the U.S. to Vienna to reconstruct her father's life on film.

"He played heroic screen characters but often got slapped around in life, so he constantly tried to reinvent himself," says Monika Henreid, whose father died in 1992. "People think he is French. No one can pronounce his name. He is known as Victor Laszlo, but he spent much of his life in L.A., working and directing. He gave Richard Dreyfuss his first film job; he discovered Burt Reynolds. But being typecast took a toll."

Henreid came from an aristocratic Viennese family. He hung out with film director Otto Preminger and studied at the Max Reinhardt center. But in 1934 he refused to sign a Nazi loyalty oath that was part of a lucrative Berlin film contract. He escaped to London, worked on stage, but became a deportable alien after the Anchluss in 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria. Desperate to flee to America, he despaired when authorities told him the Austrian emigre list was full.

Then a U.S. consulate official noticed Henreid's birthplace, Trieste, formerly a part of Austria but by then in Italy. "Oh, we've got lots of space on the Italian list," his daughter says the consular official told him. "When would you like to go?"

"Tomorrow," he answered.

"Casablanca," shot in 1942, continues to rank No. 1 or 2, along with "Citizen Kane," as the best film of all time. Romance, moral tension, Nazis, heroes, intrigue -- all collide in Rick's Cafe Americain.

Film critic Pauline Kael attributed much of Casablanca's authenticity to its many European actors -- refugees playing refugees. Of 14 main roles, only three are U.S.-born actors. "There were Austrians, Czechs, Lithuanians," Monika Henreid notes. "The script was rewritten every day. The actors got their lines, and would balk. Yugoslavs or Russians would say, 'I can't speak like a guy from Nebraska if I'm a central European emigre to North Africa.'"

Henreid himself criticized Laszlo's authenticity. He doubted a resistance leader who escaped Nazi camps could waltz into the swankest cafe in town wearing a white suit with his wife on his arm. Nor would Laszlo be able to negotiate with Vichy police and Nazi officers.

But nothing came of the protestations. It was Hollywood, in 1942. Casablanca's "airport," to give perspective, was the Van Nuys airfield in suburban Los Angeles, with a load of potted palms added for Mediterranean flavor.

Henreid, along with European actors like Peter Lorre and Marlene Dietrich, gets credit for helping build a genre later known as "film noir," edgy black-and-white psychological thrillers -- such as "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Big Sleep." Henreid received critical acclaim for "Now, Voyager," with Bette Davis. But he got few leading roles after "Casablanca."

Monika Henreid now lives in Montana. After a recent screening of "Casablanca" in Vienna, where she has come to do her documentary work on her father, she laments that the man who played Laszlo, and whose life was forever altered by not signing a Nazi oath, spent many creative years in a McCarthy-era limbo.

Henreid's wife, Lisl, kept him going. After the war, the Henreids sometimes summered in Austria. But he never returned to live. The "Vienna my father grew up in was gone, physically and culturally," his daughter says. "He wasn't famous when he left, anyway. We couldn't come back for so many reasons ... Sometimes life just interferes with your plans."

Like getting an iconic part and then getting pigeonholed. On the other hand, if Henreid hadn't done the movie, he probably would have regretted it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of his life.