12 Reasons Why Casablanca is the Greatest Film of All Time

6. Song

Admit it. You've never, ever heard the song €œAs Time Goes By€ without thinking of Casablanca. I don't think it's possible to do otherwise. Casablanca even won an Oscar for Best Music featuring "As Time Goes By". The song is so much a part of Casablanca as to be inseparable from the movie, yet it almost didn't make it into the film. "As Time Goes By" was written in 1931 by Herman Hupfeld, presumably for a Broadway musical titled Everybody€™s Welcome. The play was not a success and as with most songs, this one quickly faded away and was nearly forgotten. A few years later, in 1940, a man named Murray Burnett was writing a play about a bar in Casablanca. The play, entitled Everybody Comes to Rick€™s, featured "As Time Goes By" whenever the play's ill-fated lovers, Rick and Ilsa, spent time together in Paris (sound familiar?). Burnett eventually sold the rights to the play to Warner Brothers, who turned it into the classic film, Casablanca. Warner Brothers nearly decided to re-shoot a portion of the film and use a different song. The only thing that stopped the re-shooting was Ingrid Bergman's hair. At the conclusion of her work on Casablanca, Bergman quickly moved on to For Whom the Bell Tolls, a film in which she cut her hair MUCH shorter than seen Casablanca. This effectively ended talk of a re-shoot, and "As Time Goes By" took its place among the immortals.

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