“Casablanca” won three Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Curtiz), and Best Screenplay (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch), and is listed as the 2nd Greatest Film in the AFI List

Most of the time when chaos reigns during a film's production, the results are serious compromises that often dilute a project's original power to a tepid film, with little chance of achieving immortality. Like “Gone With The Wind,” Casablanca” went through various cast selections, constant re-writes during shooting, and cast members often wondering where the film was going when the ending hadn't been chosen. The composer hated the theme song, the Breen Office wanted all the sex from the original play removed for the safety of kiddies and prudes, and the progress of World War II could make the film's topicality outdated if not finished quickly.

Warner Bros have assembled a huge collection of extras to satisfy fans and neophyte cineastes, starting with dual commentaries and numerous featurettes. The danger, of course, lies in the duplication of facts, and while critic Roger Ebert and Rudy Behlmer repeat the top notables, they also fill in spots the other left out, and sometimes contradict each other (making their opinions all the more fun). Ebert's views are accessible, often personable, and very enjoyable; it's only towards the end that gaps form, and Ebert's clearly done with production anecdotes, and focuses on the film's technical prowess.

Historian and noted author Behlmer has expanded and adapted his chapter from “Behind the Scenes;” where Ebert adds enjoyable portraits of cast, crew, and executive characters, Behlmer digs out mouthfuls of quotations from vintage memos and documents for added authenticity.

A more intimate portrait of the leading cast – Bogart and Bergman – are given by Stephen Bogart and Pia Linstrom in the brief featurette, “The Children Remember.” Lauren Bacall provides a more engaging portrait in a feature-length documentary, “Bacall on Bogart,” produced in 1988 for PBS. Using many fascinating vintage movie clips, stills, and color home movies, we're treated to a really moving portrait of an actor who struggled to achieve greater creative freedom after years of gangster roles, and death scenes in the final reel.

Ported over and upgraded from the 1992 laserdisc release is the documentary “You Must Remember This,” which is unique in containing lengthy interviews with screenwriters Julius Epstein and Howard Koch, playwright Murray Burnett, surviving crew members from the production, and Henry Mancini on Max Steiner's stirring score.

Deleted scenes and outtakes briefly glimpsed in the documentary are collected in separate galleries, on Disc 2. Though no sound exists for both collections, the footage of an unused jail scene and a Nazi's barroom death contain subtitles, adapted from the screenplay.

Merely excerpted on the Criterion laserdisc, the DVD includes the complete 1943 radio broadcast, and a generous gallery of production memos, letters, and vintage still and publicity art. There's also “Carrotblanca,” a more recent cartoon that makes good use of Warner Bros' insane cartoon logic, but the most interesting extra is an extract from the 1956 premiere episode of “Casablanca,“ a short-lived ABC drama, part of “Warner Brothers Presents,” which aired every third week.

Originally a one hour drama, the 16 minutes of edited scenes illustrate how impossible it is to recapture the magic of the Bogart-Bergman classic, and why “Casablanca” is so much the rare exception of beauty, created from the chaos of brilliant creative minds under pressure.

This DVD is available separately or as part of “The Bogart Collection” boxed set, which includes “Casablanca,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “To Have And Have Not,” and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

© 2003 Mark R. Hasan