Nobody says play it again, Sam
CASABLANCA, released in 1942, is one of the most quoted films ever made, and one of its most famous lines is a misquote. Nobody in the film says play it again, Sam. The nearest is play it once, Sam, for old times' sake, and later play it. The script was still being rewritten while it was being filmed, and the cast did not know for certain how the story would end.
It was made as an ordinary studio picture with no great expectations, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture. A film becoming a classic is often a surprise to the people who made it.
Lost films found again
METROPOLIS, a German science-fiction film from 1927 with a giant futuristic city and a robot woman, was cut down heavily soon after its release, and for eighty years about a quarter of it was thought lost for ever. In 2008 a nearly complete copy was found in a film museum in Buenos Aires, and most of the missing scenes were restored.
Many films have not been so lucky. The Library of Congress has estimated that about three quarters of American silent feature films are completely lost: the early film stock was fragile, highly flammable, and often thrown away once a film had finished showing.
Record breakers
BEN HUR, from 1959, won eleven Oscars, a record later equalled by TITANIC and by the last of the Lord of the Rings films, but never beaten. Its chariot race took weeks to film on a huge purpose-built arena. GANDHI, in 1982, filmed a funeral scene with around 300,000 extras, one of the largest crowds ever gathered for a film.
REBECCA, in 1940, was the only one of Alfred Hitchcock's films to win Best Picture, and VERTIGO, a box-office disappointment on release in 1958, was voted the greatest film of all time in a major critics' poll in 2012.
The director dived to the real wreck
Before filming TITANIC, James Cameron made a dozen dives in Russian submersibles to the real wreck, nearly four kilometres down in the North Atlantic, to film it for the opening scenes. The ship built for the film in Mexico was almost full size. At around two hundred million dollars it was the most expensive film made up to that time, and many people expected it to fail.
Instead it became the highest-earning film in the world, a record it held for twelve years until Cameron's own Avatar passed it in 2010.
A stray cat in the Godfather
In the opening scene of The GODFATHER, Marlon Brando sits stroking a cat. It was not planned: the cat was a stray found wandering the studio lot, and it purred so loudly that some of the dialogue had to be recorded again. GIANT, from 1956, was the last film James Dean appeared in; he died in a car crash before it was released.
The rest of the grid holds more classics from across the decades — CHINATOWN, GOODFELLAS, NOTORIOUS, SPARTACUS, AMADEUS, PLATOON, FARGO, GIGI, PSYCHO, JAWS and ROCKY. Our movie stars page covers the actors who made them.