OPPapers.com

Casablanca

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It is a sad truth that the visual media have a history of neglecting to prize that which lies at the
bottom of any of their creations, however well received and whether deservedly so or not: the written
word. This has likely never been more so the case than with one of Hollywood's all-time-classics, the
film that reached third place in the American Film Institute's (AFI) call for its members to vote for the
ten best American films of all time in 1977, and second place in AFI's repeated voting in 1998:
Casablanca.1 Not only are the names of credited screenwriters Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein,
and Howard Koch likely not to be known by the majority of the audience, but much less the fact that
the film is based on the stage play Everybody Comes to Rick's, written by Murray Burnett and Joan
Alison, even though they, too, received screen credit. This, however, might be attributed to the fact
that the play has to this date only been produced twice: as Casablanca in 1946 at the Casino Theater
in Newport, Rhode Island, and as Rick's Bar Casablanca in 1991 at the Whitehall Theatre in London.2
A written text, when compared to an audiovisual product, can hardly ever imprint so distinct a
memory in the recipient as its counterpart, for it lacks the kind of stimulus to the senses the combined
effort of twenty-four frames per second and accompanying audio arouse. Therefore, to have a fairer
and sounder basis for judgement, the present text is restricted to analysing the written play against its
film counterpart: the screenplay to Casablanca. However, as it is often the case with the motion
picture industry, there is no one definitive and complete screenplay, and the one used for the purpose
of this text is “a synthesis of extant versions of the shooting script, the continuity script, and a close
analysis of the finished film.” 3
Upon first reading both stage play and screenplay, one is tempted to jump to the conclusion
that Casablanca is one of the...