Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was without doubt one of the most important directors in film history, yet he has never been granted his deserved recognition and no full-scale work on him has previously been published. The Casablanca Man surveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musical, swashbuckler and western, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of documentary evidence gleaned from archive research at Warner Brothers, rather than the hearsay on which so much of his consistently under-rated reputation rests. This access to the production and financial details of Curtiz' Warner Brothers films from 1926 to 1953 is the most distinctive feature of Jim Robertson's work, most of it never having been made available to the general public. Concentrating on Curtiz' best-known films - Casablanca , Angels with Dirty Faces , Mildred Pearce and King Creole among them - Robertson explores his practical struggles over, for example, screenplays, his use of reality footage in his feature films, and the instinctive visual sense which governed his work.
Alongside these technical details the author examines Curtiz' friendships and rivalries with other film celebritites, including Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and James Cagney, and his discovery of futures stars. iCasablanca Man n is the first comprehensive critical exploration of Curtiz' entire career and as such the first book to link his European work and his subsequent American work into a coherent whole, re-establishing his true standing in the history of cinema.