Departments
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Week of 13 November 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 14 |
Feature
Article
As Time Goes By
Rick and Ilsa recast in COM professor's novel treatment
By Amy E. Dean
"The opportunity to tackle the Holy Grail of sequels wasn't on my agenda, to say the least," writes Michael Walsh, College of Communication visiting professor of journalism and visiting fellow of The University Professors, in the October 11 New York Times. With his sequel novel to the 1942 film Casablanca now a month into release, Walsh has garnered both praise and intense criticism for As Time Goes By.
Sometimes sequels work, but more often than not they fail to capture the magic of the original. Revisiting success is risky business, and it becomes even harder when the original ranks number two on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American films ever made and has a cast that includes Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Dooley Wilson. But Walsh wasn't intimidated at the prospect of continuing a classic story. "Sequels are an old and honored literary tradition," he says. "For example, there has been a variety of treatments of the Don Juan myth, such as Mozart's Don Giovanni."
Standing alone
Unlike Alexandra Ripley, who wrote Scarlett, the much-panned
sequel to Gone With the Wind, Walsh has created a book that
many critics say can stand on its own as well as complement
Casablanca. That is exactly what Walsh intended to do. "I've
tried to write this book so it can survive on its own," he
says. "The original movie is incorporated into the book." He
blends the elements of both a sequel and a prequel into the
story of Casablanca and suggests plausible answers to the
movie's well-known list of unanswered questions: Where are
Ilsa and Laszlo really going when their plane takes off?
What is Laszlo's great underground mission? How did Rick
meet Sam? Why can't Rick go back to New York?
After finishing Walsh's book, some readers find that the movie Casablanca is fuller and richer because the characters' secrets are finally unlocked, revealing the sources of their anguish, anger, and c'est-la-vie attitude. Jeannie Williams of USA Today points out that the depth of characterization that Walsh brings to his novel helps one understand not only why these people have ended up in Casablanca, but why they are who they are. ". . . Ilsa's character expands," she writes, "Sam the piano man has a bigger part, and we learn of Rick's mysterious past as a Jewish gangster in New York."
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Michael Walsh knew he was
treading into dangerous territory when he wrote a
sequel to Casablanca, but critics say he has
emerged intact.
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Renault: The plane to Lisbon. You would like to be on
it.
Rick: Why? What's in Lisbon?
Renault: The clipper to America. I've often speculated why
you don't return to America. Did you abscond with the church
funds? Did you run off with a senator's wife? I like to
think that you killed a man; it's the romantic in me.
Rick: It's a combination of all three.
"Whatever happened to Rick is beyond comprehension," Walsh says. "It doesn't just come from a broken love affair. He's a very tough character, but he's lost his whole life. He can't go back to America."
Not-nice Jewish boy
Walsh uses flashbacks to transport the reader to 1930s New
York, to Rick's young adult days, to his tough guy
beginnings, as he discovers who he is, what's in his heart,
and what happens after his heart -- and his spirit -- are
broken. Walsh digs into the other personalities as well, and
helps them grow based on both the circumstances of war
(Pearl Harbor is bombed shortly after the book begins) and
through the normal course of maturation. Ilsa becomes a
stronger woman in the sequel, evolving from the passive and
helpless female who tells Rick in Casablanca, "You have to
think for both of us -- for all of us," to a woman who can
think for herself:
"Back in Casablanca," she said, "I asked you to do the thinking for both us. I was a different person then. I didn't know what I wanted; I didn't know my own mind. I do now. When we parted the last time, it was on your terms, Richard. Now, we part on mine."
"I wanted to make Ilsa more active," says Walsh. "I had an editor -- a woman -- and we worked together to make her a less passive character. Remember, she's been dragged from pillar to post for over 18 months, plus being on the run in France. I wanted her not to be dragged around anymore."
Walsh insists that the whole notion of Casablanca as a romantic movie -- a love story -- isn't accurate. "The cult fans have got it absolutely wrong," he says. In the movie, Casablanca is never portrayed as a place where people can find happiness, but a place they seek to escape no matter what the cost, where the innocent are rounded up and shot in cold blood. "In the original theatrical trailer, not seen by moviegoers," explains Walsh, "there are three scenes of gunplay, including the scene where Rick shoots Major Strasser at the airport. Rick is not an idealistic, drunken soul; he's not a nice guy; and he's very willing to use his gun." Walsh reunites the main characters from Casablanca in As Time Goes By in an on-the-edge, against-all-odds wartime assassination plot, and romance still figures into the formula.
Sui genres
Walsh says that he likes to write in various genres. "As
Time Goes By is written visually," he says. "It's very much
a genre book. My first novel, published in July 1997, was a
police spy novel called Exchange Alley. The book I'm working
on now, And All the Saints, is a gangster immigrant epic."
Sometimes, however, it's a really bad idea to create a sequel -- especially since it's impossible to please the purists. "Fans of Casablanca won't find that old Hollywood magic in this lackluster sequel," writes a Woodsfield, Ohio, reader to amazon.com's online book review Web page. But most readers in this "customer comments" section seem to appreciate having a new way of looking at an old and cherished classic: "The book kept me reading well into the night and was worth every minute," writes one from Richmond, Va.
"If the author has one wish for As Time Goes By," writes Walsh in the New York Times, "it is this: that when the reader is finished, he or she will find that the film has been enhanced, not diminished; that while some of the screenplay's most intriguing mysteries might have been removed (or cleared up), others have popped up to take their place. I won't tell you who dies and who lives to love again, but I will tell you this: we'll always, all of us, have Paris."