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Famous Aljean Harmetz Quotes

“By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie.”

“The solitary chess game Rick is playing when the camera first focuses on him in Casablanca was a real game Bogart was playing by mail with Irving Kovner of Brooklyn. Bogart would play chess with anyone at any time, and, when he was making Casablanca he was also doing his patriotic duty by playing a number of mail games with sailors in the U.S. Navy. Whatever the quality of his game, Bogart loved chess. "I enjoy chess because there's no luck to it," he told Ezra Goodman.”

“It is possible that one of the seven other major studios might have bought and made a movie from Everybody comes to Rick's, an unproduced play about a cynical American who owns a bar in Casablanca. (One producer at M-G-M, Sam Marx, did want to buy the play for $5.000, but his boss didn't think it was worth the money.) It wouldn't have been the same movie, not only because it would have starred Gary Cooper at Paramount, Clark Gable at M-G-M, or Tyrone Power at Fox but because another studio's style would have been more languid, less sardonic, or opulently Technicolored.”