Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (1942) is the one of a kind classic cinema anti-Nazi tale of war time love and intrigue which regularly appears in greatest film of all time compositions and not that often in classic film noir selections nor even moderate noir canons, nor even in the non-canonical and noir at a stretch.

Funny that Casablanca was not an instant hit and funny that your first thoughts are that the special effects are not that good for the greatest film of all time. 

By which you mean that the basic investment made in this greatest film of all time seems moderate to say the least. The aeroplane and some of the attending dressing of scene, the special effects.

Its uniqueness is only hinted at, within the opening narrative montages and the quickly drawn character and scenes of local flavour, and of course, the reason you are really watching is because of Don Siegel, and the Don Siegel montage, the Godchild of Noir as he is, the Godchild of Noir.

Quickstepping through a nifty set of well-handled mises en scenes and methods, the introduction in Casablanca has to be one of the most generous and effective set of techniques from this based on a play masterpiece.

When one speaks of Casablanca (1942), one speaks of it yes AS the great film, the supreme exemplar of the art, invokes not merely a canonical artefact of Hollywood classicism but also a curious paradox in the history of film production. For all of its aura as an “A” picture, its reputation as a grand studio achievement, its seamless mythic aura as though sprung fully formed from the collective unconscious of wartime America, the film was in fact neither exorbitantly costly nor leisurely in its fabrication. 

The world according to Don Siegel montage in Casablanca (1942)

Indeed, its production history testifies less to the inflationary spectacle of Hollywood extravagance than to the calculated efficiency of the studio system at its zenith.

The official cost of Casablanca was approximately $878,000, a figure which placed it over budget by a modest margin of less than one hundred thousand dollars, or roughly eight percent. This sum, while not negligible, hardly constituted financial recklessness.

If one considers the later standards of cinematic excess, such as Total Recall in 1989, which devoured eighty million dollars in resources, Casablanca appears not as a profligate monument of wartime indulgence but rather as a restrained, almost economical endeavour.

Its schedule was similarly compressed: fifty-nine shooting days sufficed to generate its enduring cinematic legend, a period which itself exceeded the projected schedule by eleven days. In contemporary terms, when even television productions demand protracted months of preparation, the feat seems almost miraculous.

To juxtapose Casablanca with later Hollywood ventures is to expose the changed economic logic of cinema. The Godfather Part III (1990), for instance, consumed more than three times the production time and nearly fifty times the financial investment. 

Moreover, Coppola’s sequel concluded seven weeks behind schedule and eleven percent over budget, whereas Curtiz’s wartime melodrama, for all its supposed turbulence of scripting and improvisation, maintained a comparative parsimony. Such contrasts dramatize the gulf between the industrial precision of the studio era and the auteurist sprawl of the late twentieth century.

The profits of Casablanca likewise defy easy quantification. Hollywood, before 1947, refrained from publishing systematic box office figures, a fact which renders exact financial accounting speculative at best. Yet by triangulating contemporary reports, trade speculation, and the performance of analogous Warner Bros. titles, scholars have estimated that the film ultimately yielded some five million dollars, representing a return of roughly five hundred percent on the initial investment. 

Even if the precise arithmetic remains elusive, the magnitude of success is clear. Variety’s retrospective estimate in 1990 corroborates this assessment, confirming that the film, however chaotic in process, emerged as an industrial triumph.

The reasons for this efficiency are inseparable from the peculiar ecology of the studio system. Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s operated as a vertically integrated monopoly. The five dominant studios, which were of course MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, and Fox, yes these, they possessed not merely the means of production but also the distribution arms and the theaters themselves. They paid themselves to create, to circulate, and to exhibit. 

The so-called “Little Three”—Universal, Columbia, and United Artists—lacked theatres but nevertheless participated in the oligopoly. It was a system of concentrated cultural capital so profitable that nineteen of the twenty-five highest salaries in the United States by the mid-1930s were paid to film executives. Louis B. Mayer’s million-dollar annual income in the depths of the Depression exemplifies the obscene financial asymmetry.

This arrangement persisted until the landmark antitrust case of 1948, when the Supreme Court compelled the major studios to divest themselves of their exhibition chains. 

That legal rupture did not merely dismantle the vertical monopoly but permanently altered the conditions of production, paving the way for independent producers, stars as entrepreneurs, and a cinematic economy predicated less upon steady industrial rhythm than upon high-risk individual ventures. Casablanca, therefore, stands as one of the final triumphs of the integrated studio order.

The studio contract system further explains the relative economy of Casablanca. Actors, directors, and writers bound themselves to seven-year contracts, during which they worked exclusively for the employer studio. They could be loaned elsewhere only at the discretion of the studio chiefs, and refusal to accept a role meant suspension without pay. 

Lauren Bacall, recalling her own battles with Warner executives in the mid-1940s, described the suffocating coercion of the system, in which star personae were both manufactured and policed. Olivia de Havilland’s landmark lawsuit of 1944, which pried open the possibility of artistic independence, only underscores how exceptional autonomy was under this regime.

One of the most enduring sections of Casablanca takes us back to Paris in June 1940. The flashback sequences are filled with small historical references, fashion details, set inconsistencies, and even moments of propaganda. Together, they reveal how carefully the film was constructed, and how much of its legacy rests on both accuracy and illusion.

When Rick and Ilsa hear the sound of artillery shells in the distance, Rick identifies them as the “new German 77.” The line points to the 77-millimeter field gun, a weapon used by the Germans in the First World War and carried over into the early years of the Second. In reality, the Germans had already introduced the far more powerful 88-millimeter gun by the mid-1930s, and its reputation as a deadly anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapon was well established by the time of the film’s production. 

Some lore holds that Warner Bros. inserted the reference deliberately, as if to mislead German intelligence into thinking the Allies were ignorant of the 88. In truth, the weapon’s existence was no secret. It had been tested in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and was already notorious on European battlefields. Whatever the line’s origin, the 88 remains the star artillery piece of the German arsenal in World War II.

Rick and Ilsa’s fictional experience finds confirmation in real news. On June 12, 1940, the United Press reported that Parisians in the outskirts heard the “roar of the night-battle” and saw flashes of artillery fire on the northwestern horizon. The sounds of war were not just a screenwriter’s invention but the lived experience of a city under siege.

Attention to costume helps reinforce the setting. Ilsa’s herringbone traveling suit is accessorized with a pillbox hat, which sits unused on a café table. It is a minor detail, yet one that feels carefully chosen. The beret she wears in Café Pierre embodies the bohemian spirit of Montmartre, while the pillbox conveys something more restrained and out of place in wartime Paris.

In one of their most hopeful exchanges, Rick suggests that he and Ilsa could marry on their way to Marseille, with the train engineer officiating. His reasoning is that if a ship’s captain can perform a marriage, why not a train conductor? In reality, neither has special authority to create a binding marriage. A ship’s captain can preside over a ceremony, but unless he also has independent legal credentials the marriage would not be recognized. 

At best, the couple might qualify as common law spouses, depending on local law. For Rick and Ilsa, the conversation is moot, since Ilsa’s secret would soon make their vows impossible.

Paris romance sequence in Casablanca (1942)

The dialogue itself provides a clue that their relationship is near its end. Ilsa urges Rick to kiss her “as if it were the last time.” In melodrama, that line rarely signals a happy future. Ingrid Bergman herself later insisted that despite the intensity of their onscreen kisses, she felt little personal chemistry with Humphrey Bogart. She once remarked that she kissed him but “never knew him.”

The chaos of occupied Paris comes alive in the train station sequence. At Gare de Lyon, a harried attendant shouts for passengers to board quickly, warning that only minutes remain before departure. Signs in the background ground the scene in reality. 

WW2 footage found in Casablanca (1942)

French warnings forbid crossing the tracks, while others point to baggage claim or customs booths. On the train itself, one car is marked for refugees and designated as a sleeping car. In June 1940, millions of displaced civilians from Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and beyond were indeed fleeing southward, crowding trains bound for Marseille.

Above the train windows appears the name of France’s national railway, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF). The company still operates today, but its wartime record later became the subject of controversy. SNCF trains were used in the deportation of more than 76,000 Jews from France to German camps. Fewer than 3,000 survived.

In the decades that followed, lawsuits sought reparations, and in 2010 SNCF expressed formal regret for its role. A U.S. settlement later established a $60 million fund for survivors and their families. The logo glimpsed in Casablanca thus carries with it a darker history.

Other station details carry their own stories. A signboard lists towns on the route from Paris to Marseille, including Dijon, Lyon, Avignon, and Nice. The six-hundred-mile journey would have been an overnight affair. Extras help populate the frantic atmosphere, though not always seamlessly. One man carrying a child and doll circles through the frame twice, evidence of a director eager to heighten the sense of confusion by reusing background actors.

Warner Bros. was thrifty in other ways as well. The train station set had already been built for Now, Voyager, another Warner production starring Bette Davis, Claude Rains, and Paul Henreid. Fencing and steel beams give away the shared origin of the set. 

Even the staging of train departures in both films looks similar, with mournful lovers framed in the doorways of coach cars as Max Steiner’s music swells. The studio’s recycling extended to music too: both films use the song “Perfidia” during dance sequences.

At the emotional climax of the Paris scenes, Rick receives Ilsa’s farewell note:

Richard,

I cannot go with you or ever see you again.

You must not ask why.

Just believe that I love you.

Go, my darling, and God bless you.

The note devastates him, and for good reason. In a few short lines Ilsa ends the relationship without explanation. The heartbreak is compounded by a small continuity error. Rick and Sam appear rain-soaked through most of the scene, yet when they board the train their hats and coats look almost dry.

The flashback ends and returns us to Rick’s café, where his half-empty bourbon bottle shows he has been drinking steadily during his reminiscence. The presence of an extra empty glass hints at an original script idea in which Rick set a place for Ilsa, expecting her to appear. Even minor prop changes creep in. The bottle and glass switch hands between shots, and Rick’s seating position changes from the start to the end of the flashback.

Historical context surrounds Ilsa’s background. She reveals she is from Oslo, Norway. Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, simultaneously with its occupation of Denmark. Denmark surrendered immediately, but Norway resisted until June. Ingrid Bergman, though playing a Norwegian, was Swedish. 

Her path to Hollywood came after producer David O. Selznick remade her Swedish film Intermezzo. Bergman’s career ranged widely, from playing a barmaid in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) to a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945).

The Paris flashback also raises a question left unexplored by the film: how did Rick rise so quickly in Casablanca? He left Paris with little money and no clear plan, yet by December 1941 he owned the most popular café in the city and carried great influence. The film leaves his rapid ascent to the imagination, but it remains one of its many intriguing gaps.

What is clear is that Warner Bros. combined resourcefulness with artistry. Sets were reused, dialogue was written at the last minute, and some details blurred historical accuracy. Yet the effect is timeless. Even minor inaccuracies—whether in artillery nomenclature, continuity errors, or costume choices—serve the larger narrative of love and loss against the backdrop of war.

The Paris flashback in Casablanca endures because it compresses history, propaganda, romance, and tragedy into a few unforgettable minutes. Its blend of detail and invention continues to invite close viewing, reminding us that the power of film lies as much in what it suggests as in what it shows.

As for salaries, the figures reveal both the hierarchy and the inequities of the system. Humphrey Bogart received $4,583 per week, while Ingrid Bergman earned $2,000 under her Selznick contract, though Warner Bros. paid Selznick $3,125 for her services. Dooley Wilson, whose performance as Sam is among the most iconic in the film, was paid a mere $437.50 weekly, though Warner Bros. compensated Paramount an additional $3,500 for his loan. By contrast, director Michael Curtiz received $9,175, producer Hal Wallis $6,500, and the Epstein brothers, Julius and Philip, earned $1,901 each. 

One must also note the cost-saving devices embedded in the production itself. With the exception of the initial airport sequence, the entirety of Casablanca was shot on Warner’s Burbank lot. The film’s often “cardboard” visual texture is the direct result of its reliance upon studio sets, matte paintings, and the controlled artificiality of the soundstage. 

Such an approach minimized expense in comparison with location shooting, which only later became fashionable, particularly under directors such as Oliver Stone who sought a documentary verisimilitude. In Curtiz’s Hollywood, the back lot sufficed.

The mythology of Casablanca is further enriched by the story of its music. The song As Time Goes By, originally written by Herman Hupfeld for a forgotten Broadway revue in 1931, had by the early 1940s receded almost entirely from public memory. Its resurrection in Casablanca owed less to deliberate calculation than to playwright Murray Burnett’s nostalgic attachment, having heard it in his college years and later in a French café that inspired Rick’s establishment.

DAY ONE—DECEMBER 2, 1941: Our first day in Casablanca starts in an open-air market with the local authorities rounding up suspects for the murder of two German couriers, and ends at the Café in the wee hours with Ilsa calling on a bitter, drunk and emotionally troubled Rick. In between, the following events take place:

- Major Strasser and his Nazi entourage arrive at the Casablanca Airport

* Ugarte asks Rick to temporarily safeguard two letters of transit lifted off the murdered German couriers

* Ferrari and Rick discuss business

- Captain Renault and Rick talk on the Café terrace, then repair to Rick’s office where they discuss Victor Laszlo’s arrival in Casablanca

- Ugarte is arrested as a suspect in the German courier murders

* Rick is questioned by Major Strasser

* Victor and Ilsa arrive at the Café, then connect with fellow Resistance member Berger

* Rick stumbles upon Ilsa as Sam plays “As Time Goes By’ for her

* Major Strasser confronts Victor and Ilsa

* Rick and Ilsa reacquaint while in the company of Captain Renault and Victor

* Rick sulks in the Café after hours over Ilsa’s unexpected appearance, recalling their heady days in Paris before receiving a late-night visitor

PARIS FLASHBACK—SPRING 1940-JUNE 11, 1940: In flashback mode, Rick takes us through his time with Ilsa in Paris. A springtime montage includes a boat ride on the River Seine, a drive though the city and countryside, afternoon drinks, a night on the town and some late-night romance. June 11 opens at a Paris café, with Rick and Ilsa learning that the Germans are nearing Paris.

The action then moves to a nearby bistro, with Rick, Ilsa and Sam preparing to leave Paris. The day’s final scene takes place at a Paris train station.

DAY TWO—DECEMBER 3, 1941: Our second day in Casablanca begins at 10:00 a.m. at Casablanca’s police headquarters. In Captain Renault’s office, Victor, Ilsa, Major Strasser and Captain Renault discuss Victor and I|sa’s future in Casablanca.

The rest of the day is chock-a-block with activity:

¢ Rick pays a morning visit to Ferrari at the Blue Parrot

* Rick and Ilsa cross paths in the market, just outside the Blue Parrot

¢ Victor and Ilsa call on Ferrari in search of exit visas

- Tempers flare at the Café bar over Yvonne’s socializing with the enemy

* Rick helps a Bulgarian couple gamble their way out of Casablanca

* Rick and Victor meet in Rick’s office to discuss the letters of transit

* German and French Café patrons square off through song, prompting Major Strasser to close the Café

- Victor and Ilsa have a heart-to-heart talk in their hotel room

- Ilsa returns to the Café to confront Rick

* Victor seeks refuge from the authorities inside the Café before being arrested

DAY THREE—DECEMBER 4, 1941: Our third and final day in Casablanca also starts in Captain Renault’s office, this time with Rick calling on Captain Renault to propose a mutually beneficial deal involving Victor and the letters of transit.

Later in the day, Rick visits the Blue Parrot to finalize the sale of the Café to Ferrari. That evening, Rick is back at the Café for an encounter involving Ilsa, Victor, and eventually Captain Renault. Finally, all four head to the Casablanca Airport for the climatic unfoldings on the tarmac.

When Burnett and Joan Alison wrote Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the play upon which Casablanca was based, the song was already embedded as the leitmotif of lost love. Curtiz and his writers retained it without apparent reflection, and only after filming did composer Max Steiner protest. He disliked the song, not so much for aesthetic reasons but because he coveted the royalties that would have accrued had he been permitted to compose an original theme. 

Yet professional obligation prevailed, and Steiner integrated the melody with consummate skill, weaving it throughout the film’s structure, making it inseparable from the cinematic text. The irony is that a half-forgotten Broadway number became the most indelible auditory emblem of the classical Hollywood period.

The release of Casablanca was itself opportunistically aligned with geopolitics. Though initially scheduled for mid-1943, Warner Bros. advanced its premiere to November 1942, scarcely two weeks after the Allied invasion of North Africa under Operation Torch. The synchronicity was uncanny: as American troops entered Casablanca, American audiences entered theaters to witness a dramatized version of the same city. The film’s immediate resonance was thus fortified by current events, and its Academy Award for Best Picture in 1944 can be understood as both an artistic coronation and a patriotic endorsement.

By 1989, when the Library of Congress established the National Film Registry, Casablanca was among the first twenty-five films selected as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Its canonization was no surprise. 

Yet what ought to be remembered is that the film’s aura of timelessness was forged through contingent industrial practices: a modest budget, an accelerated schedule, the contractual subjugation of its cast, the recycling of a forgotten song, and the exploitative efficiencies of the studio system. The miracle of Casablanca is not that it transcended these constraints, but that within them it found its perfection.

Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues in the darkened temple of cinema/ Permit me to commence with what we might call the archaeology of illusion. Casablanca (1942) opens with the image of Mediterranean ships, vessels that seem to shuttle refugees with casual ease from Marseille to North Africa, as though wartime mobility were simply a matter of nautical leisure. 

Yet history tells us otherwise. This sequence, with its brisk montage of tramping hulls, is less documentary evidence than an act of mythopoesis. To depart Marseille required not only an exit visa but also a reckless courage, for the waters were thoroughly patrolled. Any clandestine boat, once intercepted, guaranteed its passengers a fate not of liberation but of internment in the labyrinth of French concentration camps. 

Already, then, we perceive Curtiz’s cinema as an economy of shortcuts, where bureaucratic nightmares are sublimated into the cinematic talisman of the “letters of transit,” a pure invention, non-existent in French law, but serving as the diegetic hinge of the narrative.

One must insist on the point: no French authority ever minted such magical documents. Yet the fiction is not wholly divorced from reality. Exit visas were in fact indispensable, nearly unobtainable, and surrounded by a penumbra of forged passports, bribed officers, and forged demobilization papers. 

Men of daring would purchase discarded French uniforms, memorize the details of imaginary military service, and attempt to ferry themselves to Casablanca disguised as soldiers. Thus we witness the paradox: Curtiz and his writers are inaccurate in the letter yet accurate in the spirit, for the reality of refugee experience was indeed predicated on artifice, fraud, and performance.

It is crucial to recognize Lisbon as the actual point of egress from Europe. Portugal declared neutrality, maintained air and maritime links with the Americas, and was buffered by Spain’s ambiguous posture. Yet Curtiz routes his refugees through Marseille, Oran, and Casablanca, a circuit that led directly into the arms of Vichy governance. It was, historically, the riskier path.

Arrest in North Africa without papers meant forced labor in Algerian camps. The logic of transit, therefore, was not geographical but ideological: Portugal was accessible, but Morocco was cinematic.

Permit me to return for a moment to bureaucratic detail, for the historian must relish the very texture of documentation. To reach Lisbon legitimately, one required not only a French exit visa but also French transit papers, foreign entry visas from some country willing to receive the refugee, transit visas from Spain and Portugal, and of course a valid passport. 

Consider the irony: countless refugees, deprived of nationality by Nazi decree, could not even hold a passport. Thus the world of Casablanca condenses an entire bureaucratic universe into a single MacGuffin, those letters of transit. Real history, by contrast, was a labyrinth whose doors rarely opened.

The question arises: even had such letters existed, would they have worked? Stolen from murdered German couriers, they would surely have provoked Nazi scrutiny rather than conferred immunity. Curtiz knew this. Wallis knew this. The scriptwriters knew this. Yet the fiction was preserved. Artistic license prevails, and in its very implausibility we discern the potency of cinema: a fantasy more durable than archival fact.

Let us shift our gaze to Casablanca itself, or rather, to its Warner Bros. simulacrum. The first image of the city is not a street, nor a café, but a minaret, its muezzin intoning a call to prayer. The authenticity of the architecture—the pointed horseshoe arch, aesthetically refined and structurally stronger than its Roman cousin—is offset by the suppression of religious content. 

Producer Hal Wallis feared the chants of “Allah, Allah, Allah” would render the film operatic, too foreign, too distracting. Thus we are left with architecture but no theology, a sanitized exoticism in which the call to prayer is muted so that Hollywood’s call to melodrama might be heard.

The mise-en-scène of the marketplace is dense with ethnographic detail: jugglers, bread-sellers, monkeys bartered over, parrots perched on poles, Moroccan candies hawked amidst donkeys and bargaining men.

 Yet even this abundance is compromised by economy. Warner Bros., notoriously parsimonious, reused sets from The Desert Song and Now, Voyager. The same archways, the same winding street perspectives, the same cacophonic swirl appear with only minor adjustments. Indeed, The Desert Song arguably constructed a more convincing Morocco, replete with location shots and plausibly native music, whereas Casablanca remains an emphatically studio-bound affair. In this sense, the exotic is not discovered but recycled, second-hand orientalist décor pressed into service for wartime romance.

Cinematic genealogy demands mention of Pépé le Moko (1937) and its Hollywood twin Algiers (1938). Both feature criminals ensnared in the North African casbah, both dramatize doomed romance with visiting European women, both exploit the trope of entrapment within colonial labyrinths

Bogart’s Rick Blaine shares something of Pépé’s world-weary charisma, though without the criminal flamboyance. Even the supporting cast recalls earlier iterations: Marcel Dalio in Pépé le Moko, Leonid Kinskey in Algiers, both transposed into Casablanca. Influence is not plagiarism but sedimentation. Curtiz layers traces of earlier films into his own, creating an echo chamber of cinematic memory.

Let us not forget the mechanical details, for even automobiles carry ideological freight. The police car racing through the souk appears three times, always past the same poster, an inadvertent revelation of set recycling. Its grille displays the Mercedes-Benz logo, though the vehicle is in fact a disguised 1927 Lincoln L Series. A luxury car masquerading as German authority: the metaphor is almost too perfect. Authenticity is sacrificed for plausibility, and plausibility itself is revealed as artifice.

Consider also the poster glimpsed during the roundup. It proclaims the fidelity of Philippe Pétain, the octogenarian marshal who capitulated to collaboration. Pétain’s image, long in the tooth yet vaunted as Victor of Verdun, presides over Casablanca’s market scene as silent propaganda. 

His slogans—“I hold my promises, even those of others” and “I made a gift of myself to the fatherland”—are not inventions but authentic citations from radio addresses of 1940 and 1941. The Vichy regime enters Curtiz’s film less as a political system than as iconography, its mottos juxtaposed with roundups of refugees. Cinema here becomes a palimpsest, in which real propaganda is repurposed as set dressing, at once naturalized and ironized.

The suspect gunned down beneath this poster carries Free France papers. Thus the struggle between Vichy and de Gaulle’s London-based government-in-exile is inscribed not in dialogue but in props. The postcard of the submarine Surcouf, emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine, functions as a synecdoche for Free France, condensed into pocket-sized propaganda. 

When Victor Laszlo later accepts a ring after glimpsing its Lorraine cross, the viewer understands that visual recognition carries ideological weight. History and narrative intertwine through the semiotics of small objects.

Here we must linger on the Surcouf. Once the pride of the French navy, seized by the British, suspected of duplicity, briefly triumphant in liberating Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and then lost at sea under mysterious circumstances—this submarine embodies the ambiguity of Free France itself. To include its image in Casablanca is to nod toward both glory and fragility, resistance and disappearance.

The architecture of Vichy governance is further inscribed in the Palais de Justice and the Préfecture de Police. Here the motto of the French Republic, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, is replaced by Pétain’s more parochial Labor, Family, Fatherland. The mise-en-scène reveals authentic court directories rendered in French, yet the heraldry above—the star and crescent—bears no historical authenticity. Again, the tension between accuracy and invention animates the set.

Airplanes, ton Casablanca, the second night at Rick’s Café Américain begins with the arrival of Yvonne on the arm of a German officer. What follows is a swirl of cocktails, jealous glances, insults, and songs that pit national pride against occupation. It is one of the film’s richest sequences, filled with details that reveal both character and history.

The first surprise is the drink that Yvonne and her companion order. They settle on the French 75, a cocktail named after the French army’s famous 75-millimeter field gun of World War I. The weapon was the pride of the French military, 

renowned for its rapid fire and reliability, and even adopted by the Americans when they joined the war. The drink, though its exact origins are disputed, became popular in Parisian bars between the wars. Harry’s Bar still claims credit for its invention. Some recipes call for gin, others for cognac, with champagne always the defining element. 

However it is mixed, the drink carries a sting as sharp as the weapon that gave it its name. For Yvonne, choosing a French 75 is natural enough, but for a German officer to sip the French army’s signature cocktail feels almost treasonous.

The flirtation quickly curdles. A nearby French officer, irritated both by Yvonne’s new allegiance and by her accidental swipe with her purse, confronts her. Their exchange in French is tense. He accuses her of disgracing herself with the enemy, while she tells him to mind his own business. The German officer steps in, and a brawl erupts. 

Yvonne pleads for the men to stop, her cries dubbed awkwardly over her image. Rick breaks up the fight, and the French officer, humiliated but unbowed, hurls one last insult at the German: “Dirty Boche. We will have our revenge.” The word boche had been a French slur for Germans since the First World War.

If the skirmish is petty, the larger backdrop is not. Around the café, shadows fall across walls decorated with props like the giant Russian samovars that serve more as ornaments than functional urns. They contribute to the exotic atmosphere of Rick’s, a place where smoke, drinks, and politics mix. Nearly everyone has a cigarette in hand.

 In fact, if one were to keep count, Rick lights up sixteen times across the film, far more than anyone else. Victor Laszlo, who has less screen time, manages seven. Renault and Strasser tie with five each, while Ugarte smokes three before his arrest. Ferrari enjoys a single cigar. Ilsa, by contrast, never smokes at all, a decision that reflected Ingrid Bergman’s real habits at the time, though she later took up the vice.

Amid the haze, smaller dramas unfold. The Leuchtags, a refugee couple played by Ludwig Stossel and Ilka Gruning, receive a farewell cognac from Carl the waiter. Speaking in German, Carl offers them the “finest brandy,” a gesture of comfort before their departure for America. The actors who played the Leuchtags were themselves émigrés. 

Both were born in Austria-Hungary and fled Europe after the Anschluss in 1938. Their relatives, like so many Jewish families, suffered confiscation of property and worse. On screen, their presence lends authenticity to the refugee milieu of Casablanca.

Another refugee couple, Jan and Annina Brandel, thread through the narrative. Their appearances are scattered, reflecting how the film pared down their storyline from the original play. In this night’s events, Annina reveals her desperation to Rick, explaining that in her homeland of Bulgaria “the devil has the people by the throat.” 

Historically, her words capture the moment well. In early 1941 Hitler compelled Bulgaria to join the Axis, promising territory seized from neighbors. German troops poured through Bulgaria during the invasion of Greece. Though Bulgaria avoided the worst devastation of the war, annexed territories saw harsh rule and deportations. For Jan and Annina, escape through Casablanca is both urgent and plausible.

The casting of Annina brought its own intrigue. She was played by Joy Page, a seventeen-year-old newcomer whose stepfather happened to be Jack Warner, the head of the studio. While Page’s performance has often been seen as tentative, it is easy to forget the pressure of delivering difficult lines opposite Humphrey Bogart in her very first film. 

Behind the scenes, her biological father, actor Don Alvarado, briefly worked as assistant director on Casablanca during the screen tests, including those for his own daughter. Studio politics soon moved him off the project, but the family connection is striking.

Page’s screen partner was Helmut Dantine, who played Jan. A Viennese actor, Dantine had fled Austria after being imprisoned in a labor camp for anti-Nazi activity. By the time of Casablanca, he was already a familiar face to audiences from Mrs. Miniver (1942), where he played a captured Luftwaffe pilot. In that role he ranted about German superiority before being subdued by Greer Garson’s heroine. His intensity there made him a natural fit for Casablanca’s subplot about desperate refugees.

Back in Rick’s gambling room, Jan finally catches a break. Rick guides him to bet on number 22, and the ball miraculously lands there twice in a row. The odds of that happening naturally are one in 1,369, which makes the coincidence suspicious. Whether the wheel was rigged by Emil the croupier or nudged along by Rick’s influence is left unexplained, but the effect is heartening. For once, fortune smiles on those who need it most.

Meanwhile, in the main room of the café, the night builds toward its defining moment. German officers commandeer Sam’s piano to belt out Die Wacht am Rhein, a patriotic tune dating back to 1840. The song had been popular in the German Empire, though by the Nazi era it was no longer the official anthem. Its lyrics celebrate the defense of the Rhine from French aggression, an irony not lost in occupied Morocco.

Laszlo responds by ordering the band to play La Marseillaise. The café erupts as voices rise in defiance. The French anthem, written during the Revolution, is bloodthirsty in its imagery, calling citizens to arms and imagining the furrows of fields watered by enemy blood. On screen, it is pure catharsis. Extras weep as they sing, none more convincingly than Madeleine LeBeau as Yvonne. Only moments earlier she had clung to her German escort, but now she cries openly as she sings for France. According to fellow actor Marcel Dalio, LeBeau’s tears were genuine, shed anew each time the scene was filmed.

The music itself carries subtleties. Max Steiner, the film’s composer, synchronized the two songs so they overlap briefly without clashing, before La Marseillaise triumphs. He also wove quotations from Deutschland über Alles elsewhere in the score to mark the German presence. The duel of songs in the café remains one of the most memorable uses of music in cinema.

The aftermath is swift. Strasser orders the café closed. Yvonne sits once more with her German companion, though her enthusiasm has evaporated. She cannot even watch the toasts raised by the officers. For the audience, her conflicted loyalties underline the human complexity of occupied territories, where survival, collaboration, and resistance blurred together.

The scene also reminds us of the performers behind the roles. LeBeau, like Dalio, was a French émigré who had fled the Nazis. Their participation in the film lent gravity to what might otherwise have been Hollywood melodrama. For them, singing La Marseillaise on set was an act of remembrance and of hope.

From Yvonne’s French 75 to the gambling table, from Annina’s plea to the swelling anthem, this portion of Casablanca demonstrates how the film constantly layers historical fact, dramatic invention, and personal truth. It may be remembered as a romance, but its true strength lies in how it captures the world of refugees, occupiers, and exiles who all found themselves, for a moment, in Casablanca.o, betray their constructedness. 

The taxiing aircraft is a Fokker Super Universal, a relic of late-1920s aviation, rebranded as a Nazi transport through repainted markings. Its real registration, NC-9724, locates it in Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Airport at Van Nuys, which, through matte painting, is transfigured into coastal Casablanca. That the same airport appears in Lost Horizon (1937) and even in Laurel and Hardy’s The Flying Deuces (1939) only underscores Hollywood’s economy of illusion.

What, then, does all of this teach us? That Casablanca is a palimpsest of inaccuracies, a bricolage of recycled sets, borrowed plots, disguised cars, matte paintings, fictional documents, suppressed prayers, and muted propaganda. Yet from this very inauthenticity emerges the film’s enduring aura. Accuracy is sacrificed not because Curtiz and Wallis were indifferent but because the logic of melodrama required condensation, simplification, and myth.

The film noir sensibility, we might argue, is predicated precisely on this dialectic between illusion and exposure. Casablanca offers the fantasy of escape through letters of transit even as it tacitly acknowledges that no such letters could ever guarantee freedom. It constructs Morocco through recycled sets and stock props even as it hints, through Pétain posters and Free France postcards, at the geopolitical stakes of 1942. It provides the viewer with Bogart’s weary romanticism while eliding the brutal bureaucratic labyrinth of visas and exit papers that refugees truly endured.

Thus, in conclusion, let us affirm that Casablanca is not a document of war but a document of wartime cinema. Its inaccuracies are not failures but constitutive strategies. Its illusions are not mere deceptions but allegories of the refugee condition, in which every paper may be forged, every route fraught, every promise provisional. In the gap between history and representation, Curtiz created not truth but legend. And as we know, in cinema as in politics, legends endure longer than documents.

This is from Jeff Siegel's Casablanca Companion, and would that it were that data was so available today for the wastrels of cinema. Check these sums:

• Bogart: $4,583
• Bergman: $3,125 (which Selznick got; Bergman received the $2,000-a-week salary her contract with Selznick called for)
• Henreid: $3,125
• Claude Rains: $4,000 (and he was freelance)
• Peter Lorre: $1,750 (and his contract, which was on loan to Universal, had to be bought out at $2,750 a week)
• Sidney Greenstreet: $3,750
• Conrad Veidt: $3,125 (not including $5,000 a week to borrow him from MGM)
• Dooley Wilson: $437.50 (which didn't include paying MGM, which was loaning him from Paramount, $3,500 a week)
• S.Z. Sakall: $1,750
• Leonid Kinskey: $400
• Joy Page: $200
• Michael Curtiz: $9,175
• Hal Wallis: $6,500
• Julius Epstein: $1,901
• Philip Epstein: $1,901
• Howard Koch: $525
• Secretaries: $793.75

And a first pass might leave the impression of romance, intrigue, and witty repartee. But tucked in the margins are details, cuts, and curiosities that reveal the countless decisions that shaped the finished film. From lines cut at the last moment to prop oddities that flash for mere seconds, Casablanca is a film where the game continues even when the camera shifts focus.

Take for instance a little-known script detail concerning Major Strasser and Captain Renault. In early drafts, just before filming, Renault was meant to order a glass of Rhine wine to honor his German guests. Strasser, in return, would demonstrate his own connoisseurship by suggesting a wine from Reutlingen, a modest town south of Stuttgart. The exchange would have neatly mirrored Renault’s earlier show of deference, a parallelism the scriptwriters seemed to delight in. Yet the gag never made it on screen. 

Someone, with an eye for rhythm and pacing, evidently judged the moment too cumbersome for so slight a payoff. The whole exchange was halved, leaving audiences none the wiser. Such pruning is a reminder of how Casablanca achieves its seemingly effortless tempo—it is not that the film lacks indulgences, but rather that it is disciplined about what it indulges.

Other moments beg more questions than they answer. At around the twenty-four-minute mark, Strasser retrieves Rick’s personal dossier from the American’s hands. For a moment, the camera angle reveals handwritten notes on one of the exposed pages. None of the words are legible, though the handwriting is unmistakable. What did the props department scrawl across those sheets? 

Was it a jumble of nonsense scribbles, or did someone write out a fictive biography for Rick Blaine? This tantalizing detail remains a minor mystery, a relic of Hollywood craftwork that has received scant attention. One imagines how valuable such a prop would be today—not merely as memorabilia but as an artefact testifying to the invisible labour behind the screen.

The arrest of Ugarte is a sequence that invites scrutiny. One might expect Renault’s men to seize him with force and drama. After all, Renault is eager to impress Strasser, and Ugarte is suspected of murder. Yet the gendarmes are curiously polite. 

They approach Ugarte in the gambling room, politely request his company, and even allow him to stall with the transparent ruse of cashing in his chips. No handcuffs, no rough handling. Their courtesy proves narratively convenient, since it creates the opportunity for Ugarte’s desperate and ultimately doomed escape attempt. 

His flight across the gaming tables, cigarette dangling absurdly from his lips, is one of the film’s most vivid bursts of energy. But it is also comically implausible: Ugarte fires four shots at close range, missing every target. 

The hapless display has led some viewers to suspect that he was never the triggerman behind the earlier killing of the German couriers. Even the extras join in the illusion—look closely, and Abdul the waiter reacts to a shot as if struck in the shoulder, only to reappear later, unscathed.

The filmmakers’ attention to sound design lends subtle touches to the scene. Ugarte lingers in the gambling room, separate from the main café where the band is playing “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” The music is muffled until the gendarmes swing open the connecting doors, at which point the tune floods in. It is a tiny detail, but one that deepens the sense of spatial reality within Rick’s Café. 

When the croupier shouts over the commotion, his table calls seem at first routine: “The game continues!” “Place your bets, gentlemen, ladies!” 

Yet those words resonate with the broader mood of the film. Life in Casablanca is a game of survival, a constant gamble, and while individuals come and go—captured, deported, or killed—the game rolls inexorably forward.

Continuity, however, does not always hold steady. When the patrons in the main room react to the noise of Ugarte’s arrest, they look toward the wrong side of the room. In earlier and later shots, the gambling room lies to the left of the bar, but here their gazes suggest it is on the opposite side. A minor gaffe, yet for the sharp-eyed it becomes a reminder that the geography of Rick’s Café exists only as long as the camera maintains the illusion.

Rick himself is no stranger to contradictions. After Ugarte’s arrest, a patron accuses him of betrayal. Rick shrugs it off with the iconic line: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Yet audiences have just seen him do precisely that by agreeing to hide the letters of transit for Ugarte. 

The claim is pure self-deception, a denial that underscores Rick’s carefully cultivated neutrality. Later, Renault describes him as “completely neutral,” echoing the American policy of isolationism during the late 1930s. 

Neutrality laws passed by Congress sought to prevent U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, forbidding aid to both aggressors and victims alike. Rick embodies that isolationist stance, even as the world conspires to drag him back into history.

The dossier Strasser carries provides its own revealing glimpse: Rick is thirty-seven, from New York, and unable to return home. Renault speculates darkly that Rick may have committed murder, and the idea is not wholly implausible given his violent temper. Yet there are more prosaic explanations. 

Rick fought in both Ethiopia and Spain, directly violating American neutrality legislation. Worse, his participation on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War would have branded him a communist sympathizer, ensuring scrutiny from the U.S. government. 

Another possibility is that Rick failed to register for the draft under the 1940 Selective Service Act. If he was still thirty-five that October, his absence abroad would not have excused him. In any case, the portrait that emerges is of a man estranged from his own country not by chance but by politics and law.

The music choices throughout the café scenes further color the atmosphere. After the chaos of Ugarte’s arrest, Rick signals Sam to play something soothing. Sam selects “Heaven Can Wait,” a 1939 hit ballad. 

For the patrons it is calming, but the irony is sharp: Ugarte’s own wait for heaven will soon end. Interestingly, this choice replaced other planned songs. At one stage, the production considered “Old Man Moses,” a dirge from the original play, and later penciled in a new composition titled “Dat’s What Noah Done.” 

The latter was recorded but cut, a comic racialized number about Noah’s Ark that would have sat uneasily alongside the film’s tone. The substitution of a mainstream hit was both more palatable and more poignant.

Other musical moments carry sly double meanings. When Ilsa and Victor arrive, Sam greets them first with the tender “Speak to Me of Love,” then with Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale,” a song about prostitution that was banned from radio in later years. 

The juxtaposition is telling: love in Casablanca is always entangled with commerce, survival, and performance. Even Ilsa’s casual reference to Sam as “the boy who’s playing the piano” reflects the racial casualness of 1940s Hollywood, an unthinking reduction of an accomplished musician to a stereotype.

The historical backdrop constantly intrudes upon the romance. When Strasser boasts about the possibility of Germans overrunning London, he raises a question already answered by history: the Battle of Britain had been fought and won by the RAF in 1940. Hitler’s Operation Sea Lion, an intended invasion of Britain, had collapsed under the resilience of British defense. To contemporary audiences, the boast would have rung hollow, even laughable. 

Likewise, the references to Victor Laszlo’s underground newspaper in Prague allude to the real Czech resistance, which gained international renown after the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia. Casablanca thus situates its fiction within the contours of wartime history, grounding its melodrama in contemporary memory.

Amid these historical and political echoes, the cast themselves brought their own lived realities. Conrad Veidt, who so chillingly embodies Strasser, was himself a German émigré and a committed anti-Nazi. Once celebrated for his silent-era roles, including the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, he fled Germany in 1933 after marrying a Jewish woman and speaking out against Nazi propaganda. 

He eventually gained British citizenship and came to Hollywood, where he played villains to sustain the war effort. His performance in Casablanca, so convincing in its menace, carried the bitter irony that he was the opposite of the character he portrayed. Less than a year after filming, he died suddenly of a heart attack on a golf course at the age of fifty.

Casablanca was among his final works, a last testament to an actor who understood evil well enough to act it convincingly.

In the end, Casablanca thrives on its details. Props glimpsed for seconds, continuity errors, musical substitutions, stray lines of dialogue—all of these fragments accumulate into the texture of a film that feels both spontaneous and meticulously crafted. 

The croupier’s shout that “the game continues” captures its spirit. The game of love, politics, and survival never truly ends in Casablanca. People may come and go, Ugarte may fall, Strasser may sneer, Rick may protest neutrality while hiding a broken heart—but through it all, the game continues.

Casablanca (1943)

Directed by Michael Curtiz

Genres - Crime, Drama, Romance, War  |   Sub-Genres - Film Noir  |   Release Date - Jan 15, 1943  |   Run Time - 103 min.  |