On the morality level, the cult film ‘Casablanca’ seemed like it was doomed from the beginning.
A bar, Rick’s Cafe American, was the main setting, where alcohol, people willing to do anything and everything to obtain exit visas, a murder, corrupted officials and a forbidden romance have been the key elements. Casablanca is like a purgatory where these sins must be traded in order to escape the city. Clearly, these elements were major issues when it came to the Production Code Administration that sent back the script with several modifications to make. As mentioned at the beginning, the PCA would expect decency and morality and therefore, no bed was to be shown in Rick’s apartment (it was highly immoral that Ilsa had a relation with Rick years before in Paris, while she was married to Victor Lazlo) and Captain Renault was not allowed to verbally suggest that he was granting visas to women in exchange for sex. Even the original play ‘Everybody Comes to Rick's’ by Burnett and Alison never made it in Broadway partially because of Ilsa’s affair with Rick. The script was rewritten several times before being accepted by the PCA, reason why what we see today is different from the original idea. Captain Renault’s explicit sexual favors disappeared, explicit references to Rick and Ilsa’s previous relation was not an option anymore. But what about censorship for political reasons?
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When ‘Casablanca’ entered pre-production in 1942, America had deeply changed. The United States had officially entered World War II (December 1941) and anti-Hitler films were the rule, not the exception anymore. The Office of War Information (OWI) was established in June 1942 with the aim to keep update the public with news from the battlefront. Now Hollywood had two inspectors, with the only difference that the OWI checked that the filmmakers were sending the right message: the American heroes were going to win the war against the evil Nazis. ‘Casablanca’ did not seem giving them a hard time in this aspect, as many anti-Nazi elements were there: the French national anthem is sung in opposition to the Germans singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’, Rick shot the Nazi Strasser, used to fight for the Loyalists in Spain and joined the Free French garrison in Brazzaville. However, it did not take long until the totalitarian regimes of Spain, Italy and Germany banned the film.
In Spain, ‘Casablanca’ was not released until 1946, when the war was by now over. Moreover, the Francoist censorship omitted Rick’s past fighting on the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War. Rick also ran guns to Ethiopia during its war with Italy and this could not be accepted by fascist Italy, where ‘Casablanca’ became one of the most censured films. Indeed, the film is screened in Italy in 1946 too and the support to Ethiopians becomes a support to the Chinese. Furthermore, the Italian signor Ferrari, involved in Casablanca’s black market, becomes signor Ferrac, a French man. As the film was anti-Nazi propaganda, it was clearly banned in Germany too and released in 1952 in West Germany and in 1983 in East Germany. However, all scenes with Strasser and all references to Nazism and the war were cut, while other scenes were dubbed in order to have different meanings (for instance, Victor Laszlo became an atomic physicist, Victor Larsen). It essentially became a crime film, as West Germany, now enjoying the ‘economic miracle’, did not need to remember this inglorious past anymore.
Apart from the pro-Axis countries, Ireland was another country where ‘Casablanca’ encountered several difficulties. For a short time, the censorship had political grounds: the film was immediately banned under the Emergency Powers Order (EPO) as it would infringe Irish neutrality. However, few years later real concerns would emerge from Catholic institutions. Rick and Ilsa’s past relation and their strong intimacy will not be accepted until the 1970s, when censorship will be relaxed all over Western countries. Consequently, the final did not make much sense for the Irish audience for many years, leaving them bewildered.
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