movie trivia: a song of defiance

The scene in which Victor Laszlo leads the band and patrons of Rick's in singing "La Marseillaise" was copied from Jean Renoir's 1937 film La Grande Illusion (1937), in which French service members in a German POW camp sing the song as a similar gesture of defiance. In La Grande Illusion (1937) the song was led by a prisoner who was in drag for a show the prisoners were putting on.