Film historians seek to restore one of cinema's holy grails—the original 1942 Casablanca
By William Dannreuther | Posted: March 31, 2017
It's one of the most beloved films of Hollywood's Golden Age. Yet the Casablanca you see today is not the film that audiences saw in 1942—not precisely, anyway.
By the time that Casablanca took the Oscar for Best Picture, producer Hal Wallis knew that he had made the film of his career. It was a triumph for him and for director Michael Curtiz and stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, among others.
"But Wallis didn't seem 100% satisfied with the result," says film historian and preservationist Monte Beragon. "He seems to have imagined an even better Casablanca in his head."
The frequent reissues of the 1942 film over the years gave Wallis the chance to tinker with the film to get it closer to his vision. This kind of reediting was not uncommon in those days—"Lost Horizon was recut for reissue, Gone With the Wind saw alterations, Disney planned to add new sequences to Fantasia every time it was reissued. It was taken for granted that you might change things here and there for the sensibilities of modern audiences," says Beragon.
One of the first changes came in the film's first postwar reissue in 1946. "In the original version, Humphrey Bogart's Rick shoots Conrad Veidt's Major Strasser as soon as he pulls up at the airport. Audiences of 1942 were happy to see a Nazi get it and didn't need any social niceties about it." But with the Cold War on the horizon and Germany now an ally against the Soviet Union, Wallis had the scene recut to show Strasser pulling his pistol before Rick guns him down out of necessity, showing his regret by saying "I was willing to shoot Captain Renault and I'm willing to shoot you."
"True devotees of the original know that Rick shot first," says Beragon.
A larger change was made somewhere in the late 1940s. In the original cut, Signor Ferrari, Rick's rival as the owner of the Blue Parrot, was a mythical figure referred to but never seen. Curtiz had shot a scene in which Bogart's Rick met with Ferrari, seen only in shadow, but it wasn't used in the final picture in 1942.
Original 1942 cut, and 1949 reissue with Signor Ferrari added.
Wallis decided that film technology had finally advanced sufficiently to the point where the creators' original vision of the shadowy Ferrari could finally be realized, and actor Sydney Greenstreet was hired to speak Ferrari's dialogue. Special effects wizard Fred Jackman convincingly put a lifelike Greenstreet in the same frame as the Bogart sequence, shot years before.
The Warners special effects department was used to add other things to the film over the years—many details, from the airplanes in the sky to the exotic characters who populate the backgrounds of the film as we know it today, were added over the decades. But as Beragon says, "The original Casablanca had a charm and an innocence of its own that the versions with these later additions have lost."
Now a project is at work to recreate Casablanca as audiences would have seen it in 1942. "We'll take out the effects that weren't there in 1942, delete the added scenes, and return it to where Rick shoots first," says Beragon. "This despecialized edition will finally be the Casablanca that a audiences saw in 1942, complete with its original ending, in which Rick and Ilsa get on the plane together to join the rebel alliance in the Free French city of Dagobah."
)
