You
shouldn’t have played it, Sam
You’ve
felt the pulse of a thousand
tunes
beneath your magic fingertips,
know
that harmony and tempo fuse
out
of the blue into a moonlight and
stardust
I’ll-love-you-forever song.
A
song you’d stopped playing until
Ilsa
saw you in the Café Americain,
hummed
da-di da-di da-di as though
the
three of you were in still Paris:
sipping
champagne, making plans.
You
should have shaken your head,
crooned
some harmless old standard.
Now
you’ve started you can’t scale
backward
along the piano mouthing
is kiss a this
remember must you.
Rick
needs the full number, will order
you
tonight - play it - while a street lamp
pretends
it’s the moon, bourbon ripples
with
laughter, Ilsa is present and past
and
rain weeps over her inked goodbyes.
-- Laurent Durieux
Murray Burnett, a high school teacher, and his wife Joan Allison wrote “Everybody Comes to Rick's” in 1940, before the American entry into World War II, but failed to find a Broadway producer (it was not staged until 1991). However, in 1942 they sold the script to Warner Brothers for $20,000 (a record for an unproduced play). A series of screenwriters, including Howard Koch and twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein, turned it into a film under the new title, “Casablanca” (in imitation of the successful 1938 film, “Algiers.“ That film had been the 1st to star Hedy Lamarr, and she was initially intended to star in the new movie.”). Filming began in late May 1942, but only the 1st half of the script was ready and no one was certain how the movie would end. The 2 sets of screenwriters never worked together in the same room and hardly communicated with each other. The director Michael Curtz contributed little to the development of the script and completed filming in early August. (The director and screenwriters all won Academy Awards for their work, and the movie was named Best Picture.) Release was scheduled for early 1943, but the debut was moved up to November 1942 to take advantage of the publicity generated by the Allied invasion of North Africa. The film was a moderate success financially, being the 7th-highest grossing movie of 1943, but it has continued to gain in popularity and respect. The plot centers on Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart), the owner of Rick's Café Américain in Casablanca, Morocco, governed by the pro-German French regime. When Sam the house pianist begins playing “As Time Goes By,” despite Rick’s orders to never play it, he is shocked to see that his former lover Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bertgman) is the one who had requested the tune for old times’ sake. She tells him that when she had met him in Paris in 1940 she thought her husband, a Czech resistanceleader, against he Nazis, had been killed trying to escape from a concentration camp but then deserted Rick to nurse her sick husband after she learned he was alive; but she also admitted that she still loved Rick. Rick arranges for the husband to escape, and for Ilsa to remain with him in Casablanca, but at the last moment Rick forces her to board the plane with her husband, telling her that she would regret it if she stayed—"Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."
ReplyDeleteOne of the lines most closely associated with the film—"Play it again, Sam"—is never spoken. When Ilsa first enters the Café Americain, she asks him to "Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake," but Sam pretends ignorance and she responds, "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By'." Later that night, alone with Sam, Rick says, "You played it for her, you can play it for me," and "If she can stand it, I can! Play it!" (The misquoted line became the title of a 1969 play by Woody allen, which he converted into a movie in 1972.) The tune was written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931 and had been part of the musical comedy “Everybody's Welcome,” and Burnett and Alison had included it in their play. Max Steiner, who scored “Casablanca,” wanted to replace it with his own composition, but Bergman had already cut her hair short for her next role (Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”) and was unable to reshoot the scenes which incorporated the song, so Steiner based the entire score on it and "La Marseillaise", the French national anthem. Dooley Wilson (who played Sam) was a drummer, so the piano was actually played by Jean Plummer. Even after shooting had been completed, producer Hal B. Wallis wanted to overdub Wilson's vocals as well.
ReplyDeleteYou must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by
And when two lovers woo
They still say "I love you"
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by
Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his mate
That no one can deny
It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by
Moonlight and love songs
Never out of date
Hearts full of passion
Jealousy and hate
Woman needs man, and man must have his mate
That no one can deny
It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by