The reason Howard Hawks turned down ‘Casablanca’: “I never had any faith”
When you consider great works of art, it’s rare that you also consider how different they would have been had alternative choices been made by those involved.
For instance, we could have had The Beatles with Pete Best instead of Ringo Starr making Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Howard Hawks of all people helming Casablanca into possible oblivion rather than one of cinema’s biggest classics.
At the start of the 1940s, as World War II raged in Europe, it was still peaceful in the United States, and the golden age of Hollywood was in full swing, with director Howard Hawks in his prime. Many years after helming the original Scarface, he had shown his versatility in 1938 by directing the brilliant screwball comedy Bringing up Baby with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and thus was much feted by movie makers.
At the time, a stage play was doing the rounds in Los Angeles at the time called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the film rights to which had been purchased by Warner Bros, who in turn were considering different directors to lead the project, with one of those being Michael Curtiz and another was Hawks. Curtiz was attached to do a movie called Sergeant York, a film about a decorated World War I soldier starring Gary Cooper, but a lunch between the two directors proved pivotal.
As Hawks explained in fellow director Peter Bogdanovich’s book Who the Devil Made it: “First of all, I was asked to make Casablanca. It was a play called [sic] A Night at Ricks. At that time, there was no thought that Bergman and Bogart were going to be in it, but still, I thought it was kind of a musical comedy, and I was very careful not to make a musical comedy out of [later movie] To Have and Have Not.”
Concerned about the tone involved in Casablanca as well as several musical numbers, the two men decided over their meal that they should swap pictures, with Curtiz, who had previously directed more family-friendly fare like Robin Hood taking on Casablanca and Hawks taking the reins on Sergeant York, which would go on win a host of Oscar nominations including a win for ‘Best Actor’ for Cooper.
Hawks added, “There was an awful musical comedy quality, as far as I was concerned, about Casablanca. I remember the men standing up and singing the French national anthem, and I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t do scenes like that’. Of course, Mike Curtiz did them beautifully, and the whole picture came out different because of the two people in it. They made you believe something. When I saw Casablanca, I liked it, but I never had any faith in my doing anything like that.”
Ironically, perhaps feeling that he’d missed a trick by passing on a film that went on to win the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’, Hawks ended up doing exactly that when he cast the same lead actor, Humphrey Bogart, in a thematically very similar film two years later.
1944’s To Have and Have Not put Bogart with Lauren Bacall, and while it received a good amount of criticism for being derivative of Curtiz’s classic, the chemistry between the two leads was evident, seeing as they had started a real-life relationship during filming, and like Casablanca, many of the film’s best lines of dialogue have passed into folklore.
It was based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway, and Hawks mischievously riled the legendary author by declaring he could make a great film out of his worst novel. While Curtiz went on to direct musicals, including one of the best of all time being White Christmas, Hawks would have hit after hit, often with Bogart, including the Raymond Chandler adaptation The Big Sleep in 1946.
