Casablanca: How an Unproduced Play Marched Into Movie History
Thom Delapa traces how Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's unproduced 1940 play Everybody Comes to Rick's became Casablanca after Pearl Harbor. Warner Bros. bought it immediately, rushed it into production, and released it just as U.S. troops took the real Casablanca. The film won three Oscars including Best Picture, made Humphrey Bogart Hollywood's highest-paid actor, and turned Rick's Café into an allegory for America's journey from neutrality to engagement.
The film's topical brilliance resides in how Rick is, in fact, an allegorical stand-in for America itself on the eve of World War II.
- compiler-guy
I once saw Casablanca with a friend who hadn’t seen it, and she said, “Wow. This movie jam packed with cliches. It’s off putting. Wait. This is the source of all the cliches isn’t it?”
Which it is. One of the most quotable movies of all time. If memes were a thing in 1942, it would have been the king. Still quotable today.
- rmason
I did not know this back story. The script was so good it called into question for me was why it was ever rejected for the stage. Movies has been repurposed for Broadway.
So I did a little searching and found in the nineties it was in the planning stages. The play ran on London's West End for only six short weeks and the Broadway producers abandoned the idea. Maybe the couple did not realize they were not writing a play but a movie script instead?
- gramie
I have probably watched this movie a dozen times, and I delight in all the tiny, barely-acknowledged references throughout.
The Italian and French soldiers walking into the bar, and the Italian not able to get a word in edgewise.
The German couple saying, "Leibchen, what watch is it?" "Six watch" "Such watch" because that is the literal translation into English of the German "uhr".
The singing of "La Marseillaise" by extras who were mostly themselves refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe -- the emotion was real.
I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid," it always began. (Rick is calling Ilsa a whore.)
Every scene is a gem.