“Movies made under the
studio system were accumulations of accidents, and Casablanca was no exception. (…) A classic movie is the biggest
accident of all. A thousand things have to fit together.”[1]
“It was an accident, of
course, that Casablanca blended a
theme and half a dozen actors, an old song and a script full of cynical lines
and moral certainty, into 102 minutes that have settled into the American
psyche. But every movie is a creature built from accidents and blind choices –a
mechanical monster constructed of camera angles, chemistry between actors, too
little money or too much, and a thousand unintended moments.”[2]
“If history is viewed
as a series of accidents that become fact, then the history of Warner Bros.
Production No. 410 is a series of lucky accidents that brought together the
perfect script, director and stars to create the definitive romantic thriller.”[3]
“If any Hollywood movie
exemplifies the ‘genius of the system,’ it is surely Casablanca – a film whose success was founded on almost as many
types of skill as varieties of luck.”[4]
Going over the making-
of
of the film
they all seem to agree: Casablanca was
“a mosaic of fortune – good
and bad.”[5]
“But it
all worked. There’s a lot of serendipity here.”[6] And
it ended up being “the happiest
of happy accidents”[7].
they thought 5,000 dollars was too much[8],
but if they had,
well,
they might have produced some Metro-Goldwin-Merde[9],
a Technicolor
turd.
For instance, Warner Brothers scheduled
it
first
as a B
movie, I want you guys to make this one fast
and cheap.[10]
For instance,
composer Max Steiner “hated”[11] ‘As Time Goes By’,
and hadn’t Ingrid Bergman already had her hair
cut short
to interpret María in For Whom the Bell Tolls
the scenes around the song might have been
reshot[12],
and Ilsa would have hummed for Sam a different
tune.
For instance, what
if Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan had played
the parts
of Rick
and Ilsa
instead?[13]
of course, in our script a lot of things have been
accidental:
my believing I was a new
widow,
(which marked me as available
again, and brought out, nature’s a naughty
bitch, the heat,
I would ramble the streets of Paris like a doe
in season),
my husband’s unexpected
secondcoming
(and sick, too, so I had to nurse him back into
his heroic role),
our following the “refugee trail” (“Paris
to Marseilles,
across the Mediterranean to Oran,
then by train,
or auto,
or foot,
across the rim of Africa
to Casablanca”),
and coming into Rick’s Café and bitter
(after)life
(but there were only two “gin joints” in town,
and,
as the title of the play advertised
and Captain Renault actually said in the
picture,
“everybody comes to Rick’s”)
now “brush up your Shakespeare”, à la Cole Porter, let
the upstart crow from
Stratford-upon-Avon’s idiots (aren’t we
all?)
snore their lines
on cue,
comment, like an off-stage discordant chorus,
aside,
on our actions,
indeed, “never
Fortune
has play’d a subtler game”[14],
and sure, we can’t (how
could
we?)
“outrun the heavens”[15],
for “ourselves
we
do
not
owe”[16]
but the Bard’s “spirits” contradict each
other,
and this one bragged that “men
at some time
are masters of their fates…”,
and yeah, Cassius was right as well, “the fault,
dear [Richard],
is not in our stars,
but in ourselves”[17],
that we fucked (that we fucked
up)
for
we
willed
it
all,
didn’t
we,
our Paris affair,
and our scene upstairs, in your apartment over
the Café
(during the soft dissolve in Howard Koch’s
draft,
which the
Hollywood censors erased)
(and
yeah,
we are,
or used to be,
“terrible
people”,
even though someone wrote that truth too
off
the script),
and also the righteous,
self-sacrificing endings we divised,
first, in Paris, I stood you up at the Gare de
Lyon, ditched
you,
and then you did “the thinking for both of us” in
Casablanca,
sent me
off
on that plane to Lisbon
and America
and married purgatory
but then the word “accidental” comes from ad cadere,
falling,
and perhaps it was so in that first we stumbled
onto love and blissful
fornication
and then out of allthatjazz
[1] Harmetz (1992 B: 267 –
268).
[2] Harmetz (1992 A: 6).
[3] Miller (1992: 10).
[4] Hoberman (1992: 269).
[5] Harmetz (1992 A: 7).
[6] Julius Epstein. En
Lebo (1992: 13).
[7] Film critic Andrew
Harris, quoted in Harmetz (1992 A: 75).
[8] Harmetz (1992 A: 8).
[9] Dorothy Parker, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy
Parker.
[10] Brown (1992: 9).
[11] Producer Hal Wallis,
quoted in Lebo (1992: 180).
[12] Harmetz (1992 A: 7).
[13] “The first publicity
on Casablanca was planted in the Hollywood Reporter on January 5, 1942:
‘Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan co-star for the third time in Warner’s Casablanca, with Dennis Morgan also
coming in for top billing.”Harmetz (1992 A: 72 – 73).
[14] William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, V, IV, 112 – 113.
[15] William Shakespeare, Segunda Parte de El rey Enrique VI, V, II, 73.
[16] William Shakespeare, Noche de reyes, I, V, 314.
[17] William
Shakespeare, Julio César, I, II, 138
– 140.
