BOOK

Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II. This book, originally published in 1992 as Round Up the Usual Suspects, is not a standard-issue piece of celebrity-oriented fluff but a snappily written, hugely entertaining primary-source history that delves deeply into the genesis of the iconic studio-system picture of the Forties. It may well be the most informative book ever written about the making of a Hollywood picture, and among many other useful things, it leaves the attentive reader in no possible doubt that the auteur theory of film is utterly irrelevant to the creation of an assembly-line film like Casablanca (TT).