“Everybody Comes to Rick’s” becomes Casablanca - the movie: Part One
The movie, Rick's Cafe and the city of Casablanca
Casablanca was based on the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s.
This copy, with notes from Warner Bros. staff, sold at auction for a little more than $106,000 in 2014.
This fact gives us a clue about how the movie stays in the limelight eight decades after its release.
What is the most iconic American film of all time?
Consider this: Most telecast movie in the US ever is Casablanca.
Consider the following lines:
Rick: “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine…”
Sam: “Boss, ain’t you going to bed?”
Rick: “…Not right now.”
Sam: “Ain’t you planning on going to bed in the near future?”
Rick: “…No.”
Sam: “You ever going to bed?”
Rick: “…No!”
Sam: “Well, I ain’t sleepy either.”
Rick: “You know what I want to hear. … You played it for her, you can play it for me!”
Sam: “…Well, I don’t think I can remember…”
Rick: “If she can stand it, I can! Play it!”
(Sam plays ‘As Time Goes By.’)
And that brings us to *that* piano Sam plays in the movie.
The piano still lives. In 2014, it sold for US$3,413,000 at an auction - thus becoming the most expensive piano ever to be sold.
The second most expensive piano is a much grander affair as far as pianos go. It is made entirely of crystal - used in front of an audience of a billion people during the Beijing Olympics. Yet it sold for less than the modest piano from Casablanca. Therein lies the appeal of Casablanca.
https://mordents.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/crystal-piano-heintzman.jpeg.webp
There are some exchanges that would be used in sitcoms today:
Take this one:
“What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?”
“…My health, I came to Casablanca for the waters.”
“The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.”
“...I was misinformed.”
Or this one:
“Where were you last night?”
“…That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”
“Will I see you tonight?”
“…I never make plans that far ahead.”
From Reel Life to Real Life
One early break the movie got was what happened in real life. In November 1942, Casablanca, the real city, was liberated by the Allied Forces from French Vichy control.
This is a real life picture of the Allied Forces marching through central Casablanca, November 1942.
The Allied Forces played it up. Roosevelt and Churchill held planning meetings for their Africa Campaign right in Casablanca.
Executive result: All of that gave the movie a huge publicity boost that no amount of advertising could buy.
Heartbreak Hotel
The audience is teased with all sorts of ironies. Consider this encounter of Rick and Ilsa in the market. There are two sets of conversations going on about cheating.
One was the merchant trying to cheat Ilsa by overcharging what he was selling. And then Ilsa drops the bomb, “Victor Laszlo was my husband even when I knew you in Paris.” There is the second cheating in the scene that the audience is left with.
This kind of a situation created a problem for the movie’s producers. Hays Code was in vigor. That meant sexual relations outside marriage was forbidden to be shown.
It created a problem for the producers as to how the movie should end. Should Ilsa go with Rick? Halfway through the movie, the script writers were still struggling with the ending. As a result, Ingrid Bergman found it difficult to strike the right note, since the script was still not completed and she was unsure if she was supposed to be in love with Rick or her film husband, the resistance fighter Victor Laszlo. When she asked the Hungarian American director of the movie Michael Curtiz, his advice: “Play it in between.”
Curtiz’s life was made into a Netflix movie.
Set Making in Wartime America
There were restrictions on the use of material for movies during the war. Often the same sets were used for more than one movie.
Despite all of that, Warners meticulously created a Montmartre, Paris street corner right at the lot of Studio 7 in Los Angeles.
Similarly, other sets were created with an eye to detail. Keep in mind, none of these sets are complete 360 degrees. If the camera is turned 180 degrees, you will be staring at bright lights, movie cameras and a room full of wires.
Why does the movie resonate so much with so many?
The reason is the most iconic lament from the movie:
“We’ll always have Paris.”
Here, Paris is a metaphor of what could have been - it is never realized - due to a misunderstanding or a change of situation or one of the two parties got cold feet.
For a good friend of mine, it *is* literally Paris. And I don't mean Paris, Texas but Paris, France.
For my father, it was Patna, India.
For me, it was Portland, Oregon.
For a student of mine, it was Pachuca, Mexico.
You think your romantic dream is going to come true in a city. Then, you realize it would never happen. You will be left with the shattered and fragmented memories of that city where you lost the love of your life - either literally or metaphorically. It will always be a bittersweet memory.
Casablanca slices through that memory raw and holds it up to your face. This is why the movie holds such a universal appeal.
The other understated appeal comes from the electric presence of Ingrid Bergman.
The shooting of the scene where Rick and Ilsa say goodbye for the last time
Even though Bogart did not care to work with Bergman, he delivered an intense performance - it was just that - a performance for the camera and nothing more.
A publicity photo of Bergman taken by Life magazine in 1942
It was not lost on Bogart how the very presence of Bergman altered the dynamics of the movie itself. He lamented to his future fourth wife Lauren Bacall, “I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn’t done in 20 movies before that, and suddenly they discover I’m sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal.”
[In part two, how life imitates art.]
I remember going to Rick's Cafe in October 2019 for a beer. No points for guessing which movie was showing on the TV screen in the cafe