You Must Remember This (Scene 4, Take 187)

(This week Quipu has been waxing nostalgic―and alcoholic―over the best movie ever made: Casablanca.)

When you see a movie as many times as I've seen Casablanca, it's impossible to ignore its vices. There are occasional bits of leaden dialogue, and there are some outrageously silly gaffes or outright inventions on the part of the writers (for example, Vichy France had no such thing as a Letter of Transit; Victor and Ilsa arrive in and leave Casablanca without luggage―we don't see any in their hotel room, either―yet Ilsa has a new outfit in just about every scene she's in, and Victor―who has just escaped from a concentration camp in Central Europe in November―is tanned, well-built and wearing a crisp summer-weight suit; in reality the Germans had no official presence in Casablanca). in addition, the film makes no reference whatever to the Arab inhabitants of the city or of Morocco.

But these flaws are minor. To me, Casablanca is virtually a perfect lesson in how to create a romantic story. It is as cynical on the surface, and sentimental underneath, as Rick Blaine could ever be. It's an entrancing combination of adventure, romance, wit and humour. It may well take place in a Casablanca that never was (outside of a back lot and sound stage, that is) but it is the essence of high-romance storytelling. To may way of thinking, nobody has ever done it better. Here's looking at you, kid.

As a prosaic aside, it's interesting to note that the wonder that is Casablanca could probably never have come about at any place or time but the Hollywood of the '30s and '40s. The tremendous layered effect of romance, idealism, cynicism and humour was the result of a synthesis. No one writer produced this wonderful story and marvellous dialogue: in fact, counting the writers of the original play, the film was the product of at least nine different writers.

At the beginning of this series I mentioned the stage play, Everybody Comes to Rick's, written in 1938. The first two writers, then, were playwrights Murray Burnett (a high-school teacher) and Joan Alison. In the stage play, the Rick character is a married lawyer and has an affair with the Ilsa character (who is American in the play), whereupon the man becomes so disgusted with the woman's duplicity that he abandons his family and law practice to run a saloon in Casablanca. The central plot revolves around obtaining exit visas, not for Victor and Ilsa, but for the young Bulgarian refugees Jan and Annina (reduced to minor characters in the movie).

The play was considered unproducible (the Ilsa character's sexual behaviour was too outrageous for the time) and the authors shopped it directly to the Hollywood studios―all of which passed. Only after several rewrites would Warner Bros. take it on. And the rewrites weren't done by Burnett and Alison either. They got paid $20,000 for their play and got sent on their way. Then the name was changed, the story was rearranged.

And no fewer than seven writers had a hand in writing the script. Only three were credited, because of a Screenwriter's Guild rule that only two writers or writing teams could share credit on a picture; the team was the brother tandem of Julius and Philip Epstein, while the solo was Howard Koch. Every one of these people contributed something to the final product; it's inconceivable that Casablanca would have become what it is had a single person written it.

Of course, it's equally inconceivable that the movie would have been as compelling as it is had the pure-minded Victor Laszlo been played by Warner Bros. first choice for the role: Ronald Reagan.