As Time Goes By

Rick and Ilsa at the piano with Sam in Casablanca

In my previous post, I put up a video of Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds commercial, where the setting reminded me of the film Casablanca. I wrote "Casanova" for the film. I would think that Casablanca is now part of our our iconic imagery that this didn't cause too much confusion. Perhaps I had the casino scene in mind, which prompted me to write "Casanova".

Here is the scene where Sam (Dooley Wilson) sings "As Time Goes By" at Ingrid Bergman's request. In this scene, Ilsa Lund (Bergman) is waiting for Rick Blaine (Bogart), the man she fell in love in Casablanca thinking that her husband Victor Laszlo, a resistance fighter, had been killed during the war (WWII). She left Casablanca and Rick for her husband when she heard that Laszlo had escaped a Nazi prison. She has come back to Casablanca with her husband to ask Rick to help them with refugee papers. Later, Ilsa confesses to Rick that she is still in love with him. Later still, Rick does all he can to get the two out of Casablanca safely. But, as convoluted (and perfectly credible) the plot is, we cannot but be optimistic about the final outcome.

Everybody Comes to Rick's, the original play that developed into Casablanca, was produced in Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1946. But the film version became much more successful, and long-lasting.

Casablanca is referenced in many films, television shows, books, plays and musicals, and even in at least one cartoon. Below is a short list (as far as this list goes) of such occurrences. As I've written before, one superior piece of art (film, book, painting) will constantly furnish references across the art disciplines, and across the ages, and gets embedded within countless works. It becomes part of our culture.

References to Casablanca in films, plays, books, television, etc.

- The Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca is set in Casablanca
- Passage to Marseilles reunited Bogart, Rains, Curtiz, Greenstreet and Lorre in 1944
- There are many similarities between Casablanca and two later Bogart films, To Have and Have Not and Sirocco
- It provided the title for The Usual Suspects, from Captain Renault's line "Round up the usual suspects."
- Neil Simon's The Cheap Detective casts Peter Falk in Humphrey Bogart's mold
- The two best-known radio versions were a thirty-minute adaptation on The Screen Guild Theater in 1943, starring Bogart, Bergman, and Henreid, and an hour-long version on the Lux Radio Theater in 1944.
-- Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam took Bogart's Casablanca persona.
- The Bugs Bunny cartoon Carrotblanca parodies Casablanca
- It was a plot device in the science-fiction television movie Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
- There were two television series, the first aired on ABC from 1955 to 1956, another on NBC in 1983
- Casablanca is referenced in Terry Gilliam's Brazil
- When Harry Met Sally references Casablanca's storyline, as well as using "As Time Goes By" during the credits and in the film
- The film Barb Wire sets Casablanca in a futuristic 2017
- In Casablanca, a novella by Argentine writer Edgar Brau, the protagonist finds himself in Rick's Café Americain and listens to a strange story told by Sam.
- The novel As Time Goes By, written by Michael Walsh and published in 1998, picks up where the film left off, and also recounts Rick's mysterious past in America.

The song "As Time Goes By" was written for the Broadway musical Everybody's Welcome by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. Francis Williams sang the song in the original Broadway show. I cannot find a recording of her singing that song, but here is a song she sang in 1933, to get an idea of her style: "Sunny Disposish".

Here's a short list (Youtube links), from the very long one available, of singers who have performed this song:

- Billie Holiday (1937)
- Bing Crosby (1940s)
- Frank Sinatra (1940s)
- Vera Lynn (1961)
- Barbra Streisand (1963)
- Sammy Davis Jr. (just a short sample, 1970s)
- Rosemary Clooney (1977)
- Shirley Bassey (1978)
- Carley Simon (1987)