10 Movies That Actually Benefitted From Studio Interference

Casablanca is such a hardcore classic movie that if you looked up ‘Classic’ in the dictionary you’d probably see Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman staring back at you… probably. The film tells the timeless tale of world-weary expatriate Rick Blaine being forced to choose between the love of a married woman or doing the right thing, all set against the backdrop of a Vichy controlled Casablanca.

The iconic ending sees Blaine do the unromantic “right thing” by packing Bergman’s Lisa Lund on a plane to safety with her equally endangered husband Victor Laszlo. Pointing out she’ll regret staying behind, saying, “maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life”. And having just uttered the most beautiful sentence in the history of cinema, Blaine walks off into the proverbial sunset; a reinvigorated man with new friends and a hopeful sense of purpose.

This might not have always been the case, however. Casablanca is actually based on an unproduced play called Everyone Comes to Rick’s. In a rare case of an adaptation, many people agree the film is a far superior piece of work compared to the play, which saw Rick Blaine as a weak-willed wet-flannel of a man and Bergman’s noble Lisa Lund reduced to a one dimensional, amoral caricature of a woman called Lois. In the end, Lois does indeed fly off with her husband, at Rick’s behest, but this time poor Rick is arrested and carted off to an unknown, but surely awful, fate.

It’s a downer ending if ever there was one and, had it been translated to the big screen, there is no doubt Casablanca would not have had the staying power it’s enjoyed these past eight decades. It should be pointed out the genesis of this plot change came primarily from writers Howard Koch and Julius & Philip Epstein but without the studio encouraging such a re-write, we simply wouldn’t have gotten our victorious - if bittersweet - ending.