1. accidental

      

“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].

         For instance, MGM wouldn’t buy the play,

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.