Could you make Casablanca even better?
Eric Felten
If you were to ask me how Casablanca might be improved, my response would be slack-jawed incomprehension. Improve the greatest movie ever made? That’s crazy talk! Or is it?
The very notion is beyond daunting. What, does anyone think they could assemble actors today who would improve upon the best performances turned in by the best actors of a golden era? Only Bogart could be so vulnerable without losing his tough-guy armor. Where would you find a leading lady more intelligent or more beautiful than Ingrid Bergman? It’s greedy to even contemplate.
How about a soundtrack better than that composed by Max Steiner, who all but invented incidental music in film, and who is at his best with Casablanca? Would one have had anyone other than Dooley Wilson sing and pretend to play the piano?
Then again, there is Sydney Greenstreet. One could argue he’s the film’s one weak spot. The great fat man, who clashed so compellingly with Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet is not utilized in Casablanca to his full capacity for duplicitous menace. That said, Greenstreet’s frequent on-screen sidekick, Peter Lorre, is at the peak of his weaselly, cringing smarm.
No, the film is as close to perfection as any film has ever come. Thus, I was delighted to learn that on March 5 and 8, Fathom Events will be showing Casablanca on big screens at theaters across the country.
I learned this not from a newsletter or email blast or other modern promotion device but through that traditional movie tease, the “trailer” shown at a movie theater before the feature film. It came with a shock, however. The trailer demonstrated that, contrary to my beliefs and expectations, at least one part of the Casablanca package could stand to be changed, even improved. And that was the trailer itself.
The trailer I saw the other night advertising Casablanca was not the original theatrical promotion, which even devotees of the film have to admit is pure corn. The original begins with some running and shooting superimposed with a series of placards, “IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE” / ”YOU WILL FIND IT” / “IN CASABLANCA.” Then comes a voice-over from a third-rate travelogue narrator: “The meeting place of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, refugees, lured into this dangerous oasis by the hope of escape to the Americas. But they are all trapped because there is no escape…”
What isn’t wrong with the original trailer? There’s the frantic pace of it, at odds with the brooding nature of the movie. It also is generic. From the trailer you might think it was a buried treasure tale, not a love story.
By contrast, the recently updated trailer (not to be confused with the revised trailer for the 50th anniversary theatrical release) is a powerful treatment that, even though it is unabashedly modern, is more effective and true to the movie than the original promo reel.
It starts with a close up of a plane taxiing. A plaintive note is plunked on a piano. The propellers whoosh and whir. The piano plinks an arpeggiation. “The plane to Lisbon. You’d like to be on it?” says a man in a white French uniform. “Why? What’s in Lisbon” responds the man in the white dinner jacket. Brass comes in with heavy pressed chords. Gone is the exposition of the old trailer, replaced with snappy clips of dialog from the film. Quick cuts riff off the piano, with its relentless plinking and plunking, soon overcome with choppy strings. Instead of a preface of the story to come, the modern trailer becomes a fever dream.
The original trailer, toward its end, gets back to its old placard tricks: “CASABLANCA” / “WHERE EVERY BURNING MOMENT BRINGS A NEW DANGER” / “WHERE EVERY KISS MAY BE THE LAST.” We’re left again wondering if it’s a Western or maybe a gangster flick.
If only the trailers had been made back in the ‘40s with the artistry and skill of the feature attractions. Today is quite the opposite problem: If only modern filmmakers made their movies with the care they bring to the crafting of trailers.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?