Everybody comes to Rick's

Casablanca

(1942)

Vacation and the women's World Cup final and introducing my kids to Orphan Black and (on Bastille Day itself!) tattooing and the All-Star Game pushed back my annual screening past its usual target week, and then an 18-inning Mets game (a rare victory!) knocked it off last Sunday's agenda. But hey, know what? Even in late July, it works.

Since last year's screening, a good friend got hold of the long-hard-to-find play on which Julius and Philip Epstein based one of the best screenplays ever. In reading it, I discovered, unsurprisingly, that the screenplay improved in significant ways on the play: an infinitely more satisfying ending, for example, and a critical demotion of the subplot involving the Bulgarian couple, which in the play nearly overwhelms the main plot; most significant, in the play Ilsa [Lois] is selfishly amoral and sexually promiscuous, making the stakes for her decision--and thus the stakes of the whole damn story--much lower. There are also sacrifices to the Hays Office--especially details of the sexual predations of Rinaldo (right: the Vichy officer who will be Renault in the film has an inexplicably Italian name), who lacks any trace of Claude Rains charm.

Most surprising, however, was to find that many of my favorite lines and elements were introduced not by the brothers Epstein but by the playwrights, Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. E.g.:

• For a price, Ugarte, for a price.
• Gestapo spank, eh?
• I don't have time to spend what I make here. [though rendered in unfortunate "Negro dialect"--the play is far less interested in Sam {the Rabbit}'s dignity and humanity. Well, hell, let's just say the treatment of the Rabbit is appallingly racist throughout.]
• the Marseillaise-drowning-out-the-German-patriotic-song (though a different German song) scene 
• and yes, the iconic value of "As Time Goes By"

One of the few unfortunate changes: the suggestion that DeGaulle's signature on the letters of transit would carry any weight with Vichy has always struck me as one of the film's few false notes. Presumably the Epsteins were just looking for a name Americans would recognize; the signature in the play is Marshall Weygand, whom I'd never heard of but who makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, if you love this film a tenth as much and know it a tenth as well as I do, you'll get a kick out of clicking on that link above and comparing a promising but deficient source with the masterpiece it became. In writing and staging, as in love, the fundamental things apply.