Casablanca (1955 TV series) veers into spies, killers and Cold War intrigue. Billed fourth through seventh in the film's credits are Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault, Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser, Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari and Peter Lorre as Ugarte. The TV series retains the French police chief who bears a slightly different surname, Captain Renaud, played by Marcel Dalio (who was unbilled as Emil, Rick's gambling table croupier in 1942). The Nazi major, who had been fatally shot by Rick at the end of the film, was eliminated as a character, but Ferrari, the Fat Man with the powerful connections, was now
Casablanca (film) right. The Jack Benny Fan Club can feel vindicated." The film was based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's then-unproduced play "Everybody Comes to Rick's". The Warner Bros. story analyst who read the play, Stephen Karnot, called it (approvingly) "sophisticated hokum", and story editor Irene Diamond, who had discovered the unproduced play on a trip to New York in 1941, convinced producer Hal Wallis to buy the rights in January 1942 for $20,000, the most anyone in Hollywood had ever paid for an unproduced play. The project was renamed "Casablanca", apparently in imitation of the 1938 hit "Algiers". Although an