Adapted from the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Rick owns an American cafe in Casablanca, which is a major stopping point for European refugees on their way to America during World War II. He pretty much keeps to himself, successfully avoiding both love and war-time politics until a woman from his past suddenly shows up with well-known anti-Nazi Victor Laszlo.
I'm noticing some definite trends when plays are adapted to movies, and this is no exception. The most obvious one is location changes. Everybody Comes to Rick's takes place entirely in one section of the cafe. While Casablanca is mostly set at Rick's, we see many different areas within the cafe, and characters leave it not infrequently, and then, of course, there's the Paris flashback, which is shown in the movie but only discussed in the play. Some of the characters tend to change names in adaptations from stage to screen: in this case, Victor Laszlo's wife is Lois in the play and Ilsa in the film, and the prefect of police is Luis Rinaldo in the play and Louis Renault in the film. This latter name change is an example of another trend I've found, not just in play adaptations, but in most adaptations, at least in early Hollywood: most character changes are to make the characters more likable. Hence, the prefect is changed from an evil Italian (remember, this was made during the war) to a more sympathetic Frenchman. Granted, he's still a pretty despicable character in the film, but less explicitly so than in the play - the stage was evidently less censored than the screen - and he does come around eventually, in what could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, which definitely does not happen in the play.
Speaking of which, I couldn't help but note that most of Casablanca's other famous lines did not appear in Everybody Comes to Rick's either. There's no "Here's looking at you, kid," or "We'll always have Paris" or "Round up the usual suspects". The only really iconic line that I noticed in both was "Play it, Sam". She's even talking about "As Time Goes By" in both versions, and she doesn't say the word "again" in either. But considering that Casablanca is so well-known for its quotable lines, I was expecting at least a few more in the play. The part when the dialogue is most similar in both versions is the beginning when Rick is talking to Ugarte, and people don't tend to quote that too often.
I've read that the filmmakers weren't sure how the movie was going to end until the day they shot it. I don't know if that's true or not, but having heard that I was expecting the end of the play to be very different. In many ways, it was, especially for Rick and Luis/Louis, but Victor and Lois/Ilsa get essentially the same ending in both versions, which was somewhat surprising. But the characters themselves were so different that even the aspects of the ending that are the same have a completely different effect. It isn't only the prefect of police who is changed to become more likable in the movie: the details of Rick and Lois/Ilsa's affair in Paris are significantly altered - in the play, he was married and she was with some other random guy and they broke up because they were caught, whereas in the movie he was single and she was married to Victor but thought he was dead and they broke up because Ilsa never showed up on the train they were supposed to take together - and Victor seems a little more noble in the movie - he's in Casablanca because he escaped from a concentration camp, instead of running off with all the money he made from his anti-Nazi newspaper. I guess the film implies that Victor has money because he offers it to Rick, but in the play that's the reason the Germans are after him, which is not mentioned in the movie. It's not that the characters in the movie aren't flawed, but they're significantly less so than their original counterparts, which is something I've noticed in almost all of the adapted screenplay winners so far. I'm wondering if this is a trend that has continued to this day, or if it's more of an old Hollywood thing. Only time will tell.
When I started this project, I didn't realize how many Best Picture winners also won Best Adapted Screenplay, including this one. I was hoping that they were mainly movies I hadn't seen before, so I could read the original material without being biased by my opinion of the movie. To my surprise, however, I'm finding that I greatly enjoy reading the original material of films that I've seen many times, like Casablanca, because it's fun to immediately recognize what was changed and what was kept the same while reading. And then I get to re-watch the movie with a completely different perspective from the one I'm used to. It may be taking much longer than my previous Oscar blog projects, but so far it's been worth it. We'll see if I still feel that way by the time I get caught up.
Okay, I know I said that 1936 was going to be the last year I was going to skip, but it turns out I lied. The 1944 Best Adapted Screenplay winner was Going My Way, which also won Best Picture, but it was based on a story by Leo McCarey, the director. So since it wasn't actually based on a published work, I'm going to skip to 1945's winner, The Lost Weekend (yet another Best Picture Winner), based on the novel of the same name by Charles R. Jackson.
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