The Fundamental Things Apply
With undoubtedly the most misquoted line from a classic Hollywood movie, ‘Casablanca’ nevertheless boasts one of the most exquisitely poignant songs with a piano accompaniment featured in any film before or since.
This of course came in the shape of the now iconic, timeless, waltz infused, ‘As Time Goes By’.
For while Ingrid Bergman’s character Ilsa Lund, most definitively did not ask the pianist at Rick’s Café Americain, to ‘play it again Sam’, instead simply requesting ‘play it once Sam, for old times sake’, the song she wants to hear is infused with a wistfully romantic flavour, that is half nostalgia, half pained regret.
‘As Time Goes By’, as we’ll see, has enjoyed a much-storied history both before, and more so after, the 1942 release of ‘Casablanca’.
Amongst its many adventures, this has seen the song both covered by a Milky Way’s worth of stars, and reappear in various guises in no fewer than five other subsequent films.
Although the soundtrack of Casablanca, scored by Max Steiner, featured ‘As Time Goes By’ in various musical incarnations as a motif throughout the film to represent the changing fortunes of Bogart and Bergman’s characters’ love for each other, the song was not written for the movie.
Rather, it was originally penned in 1931 by the New Jersey songwriter Herman Hupfeld, for a modestly successful Broadway musical called ‘Everybody’s Welcome’, which ran for 139 performances at New York’s Schubert theatre between October 31st 1931 and February 13th 1932.
In the show the song was sung by Frances Williams, an actress whose main claim to fame was that she had appeared in several of the Marx brothers’ films.
A number of artists then recorded the song at the time, including orchestral versions by Jacques Renard and Fred Rich, as well as ones sung by Binnie Hale, and most significantly for our story, Rudy Vallée.
Although Renard’s recording reached a higher position in the US charts than Vallée’s – peaking at numbers 13 and 15 respectively – the Rudy Vallée rendition was the one bought and obsessively played by a young Cornell student.
This was Murray Burnett, who would go on to play a pivotal, although now largely forgotten, role in the creation of both ‘Casablanca’, and the central place within it occupied by ‘As Time Goes By’.
Had it not been for Burnett’s fortuitous fixation with the song as an undergraduate, it would undoubtedly have slipped quietly from the American public’s consciousness, and never reached the global awareness it most certainty went on to achieve in the wake of ‘Casablanca’.
After graduation, Burnett moved to Manhattan where he became a teacher and subsequently married his girlfriend Frances, who shared his Jewish faith.
Then in 1938, Murray inherited a small bequest and decided to use the money to bankroll a trip to Europe in the form of a summer vacation for himself and Frances.
As part of their European tour, the couple stopped off in Vienna with the objective of trying to help a number of relatives to leave the Austrian capital, in view of their increasingly perilous position as Jews, following the Anschluss, which had seen Austria effectively absorbed by Nazi Germany.
Despite his best efforts as an advocate, Murray Burnett found that his entreaties for assistance to the American Consul in Vienna fell on deaf ears.
Disgusted by both the clear threat spawned by the poisonous antisemitism of the sinister representatives of the German Third Reich they observed on the streets of Vienna, and the equally apparent unwillingness of their own country’s officials to act in the interests of their family members in the face of such hatred, the Burnetts left Austria crestfallen, to travel to the south of France.
Arriving in the French riviera, the New York couple gravitated to the coastal holiday resort of St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where one evening they decided to spend some time at a club called La Belle Aurore.
It was here, while delighting in the songs played by a black pianist, that Murray Burnett turned to his wife, and remarked that the club would make an atmospheric setting for a play.
Back home in the States he set about writing it.
Everybody Comes to Rick’s
Working in collaboration with Joan Alison, a friend, fellow-writer and former competitive billiards player, the pair penned an anti-Nazi play called ‘Everybody Comes to Rick’s’.
As later acknowledged by one of the screenwriters of ‘Casablanca’, Howard Koch, the play contained much of the spine of what soon was to become, in terms of characters, themes and plot, one of the most iconic films in America’s movie-making history,
Koch, along with two writing collaborators, the twins Julius and Philip Epstein, were soon to be awarded Best Screenplay Oscars for their efforts on ‘Casablanca’, while Burnett held a life-long resentment rooted in feelings that neither he nor Alison received much in the way of recognition for their contribution.
This was something that was to fuel a number of later waves of litigation against Warner Brothers instigated by the authors of ‘Everybody Comes To Rick’s’.
But all of this was in the future in the summer of 1940, when Burnett and Alison were battling to get their play staged.
At this point their problem was that they couldn’t get their play performed on Broadway, not because of any doubt about its quality, but due to assessments that an element of the plot broke an aspect of the era’s puritanical moral code concerning the manner in which female sexuality could be portrayed.
For while the Broadway producers Carly Wharton and Martin Cable had taken out an option on ‘Everybody Come’s to Rick’s’, which should have heralded subsequent success, Wharton and Cable couldn’t get any theatre to accept a production, because the script inferred that the female lead character had had sex with Rick, the male lead, in order to secure travel documents for herself and her husband.
Wharton and Cable urged Burnett and Alison to rewrite their script to finesse matters to make this issue disappear. The playwriters demurred and took back their play.
History however was shortly to bulldoze aside any impediment to the world becoming familiar with the events and surrounding intrigue at Rick’s gin joint and gambling den.
The attack on Pearl Harbour
On December 7th 1941, Japan’s attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, propelled the United States into the second world war on the Allied side.
Suddenly the major Hollywood studios, like Metro Goldwyn Mayer; 20th Century Fox; Paramount and Warner Brothers, were hungry to find scripts with relevance to the conflict that the United States had just plunged into.
In January 1942, Warner Brothers seized on ‘Everybody Comes To Rick’s’ when producer Hal Wallis, acting for the studio, agreed to pay Murray Burnett and Joan Alison $20,000 dollars each for the rights to the play.
As the equivalent of around $430,000 in today’s money, both authors received an unheard-of amount for the rights to an unproduced play.
Wallis’s goal was to turn the play into a film now earmarked to become ‘Casablanca’.
In Burnett’s estimation, given in an interview with ‘The Los Angeles Times’ in 1991, the play provided 80% of the film’s content, including characters; setting; plot; iconic lines; and, themes.
Hal Wallis as producer, and the initial quartet of screenwriters at Warner Brothers, introduced a range of new dimensions, including critically, the creation of a fresh ending, the introduction of a number of memorable lines of their own, and flipping the play’s lead female character from being the American Lois Meredith to become the Norwegian Ilsa Lund, a move designed to better mirror the looks and accent of the Scandinavian actress cast for the role – one Ingrid Bergman.
Amongst the elements of the play Warner Brothers left unchanged, was the direction that ‘As Time Goes By’ was to feature as Rick and Ilsa’s song, reflecting Murray Burnett’s decade-long infatuation with the tune, stretching back to when he’d bought Rudy Vallée’s version of the number.
With Humphrey Bogart lined up to play the seemingly self-serving hard-boiled schemer Rick Blane, all that was left to do was to cast the piano player Sam – wasn’t it?
To be continued…
