Writing Prompt #11: Take a famous scene from a classic story and rewrite it in a completely different era.

One of my favorite classic film scenes is from Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. The key moment I love, though, wasn’t performed by any of the three stars; it was performed by Claude Rains.

The film is set in the titular North African city. The year is 1941, Nazi Germany has occupied most of Europe, and Allied forces (including the United States) would not land on and capture Normandy beach for another two years. Morocco was ostensibly governed by France, but France itself had been occupied by Germany in 1940. As a result, French officials in Casablanca answered to German authority, and the city itself was portrayed as a last port of exit for refugees hoping to flee across the Atlantic.

Claude Rains portrays French Captain Louis Renault, the “unabashedly corrupt” commander of the Casablanca police force. The film makes clear that Renault’s only real concern is his own survival and prosperity, so he is quite happy to cooperate with visiting German military officers so long as he can remain in command and continue enriching himself at the expense of desperate residents and travelers. Early in the film, he cheerfully assures a visiting German official (in search of some letters of transit taken from a pair of murdered German couriers) that he has rounded up “twice the number of usual suspects” as a show of cooperation with Nazi forces.

Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine, an American expatriate who settled in Casablanca and purchased a nightclub that hosts a purportedly secret gambling den in the back room. Despite gambling being ostensibly illegal in occupied France, Rick’s gambling operates with a wink and a nod to the right people and is perhaps the worst-kept secret in Casablanca. Rick enjoys a special understanding with Captain Renault: he allows Renault to gamble in the back room and in return Renault pretends the gambling den doesn’t exist.

Midway through the film, Renault is under intensifying pressure from the visiting German officers to locate the missing letters of transit and arrest someone they can blame for the murdered couriers. Renault, less interested in law enforcement than he is in graft, has no prospects but understands that his continuing survival depends on satisfying his patrons. (Or as Rick wryly puts it, “Gestapo spank.”)

When German Major Strasser orders the nightclub closed, Renault immediately uses the gambling den he already knew full well existed as justification for the shutdown. When Rick approaches from the back, demanding to know what’s going on, Renault loudly declares for everyone to hear:

“I’m shocked! Shocked to find that there is gambling going on in here!”

At that moment, with impeccable timing, a cashier approaches Renault with a stack of money.

“Your winnings, sir,” he says to the French police chief. Renault doesn’t miss a beat, smiling pleasantly at the man and pocketing the cash.

“Thank you. Thank you very much,” he says, politely, before going back to shouting at customers to leave immediately.

Rains’ line, and the ironic contempt with which he delivers it, has come to represent the hypocrisy of any corrupt authority figure who feigns shock at discovering his own criminality. Unfortunately, Casablanca is such an old film at this point that most people don’t understand the reference anymore.

The other memorable thing about Casablanca, for me, is the song that represents Rick’s impossible romantic relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character: “As Time Goes By”. It always gets a reaction out of me.

I know I was supposed to rewrite it in a different era, but I think I wrote enough about it. Don't be surprised if it pops up in one of my stories at some point, though, probably in a very different setting.