Flashback, November 1942: ‘Casablanca’ Becomes Improbable Hit

One of the most beloved movies of all time, Casablanca—released 75 years ago this month in New York—was also one of the most unlikely films ever to become a classic.

It was not the kind of biopic, costume drama or adaptation of a major novel or play that is traditional Best Picture Oscar bait, but instead a picked-up property, an unproduced drama called Everybody Comes to Rick’s.

Once Warner Brothers and producer Hal Wallis passed on the two actors originally considered for the leads (George Raft and Ann Sheridan), they still faced the difficulty of making the assembled cast and crew cohere. 

With no settled ending during much of production, Ingrid Bergman was uncertain how to play her love scenes as Ilsa (although she was certain that the actor who portrayed her husband, Paul Henreid, was self-important). The actress was also taller than Humphrey Bogart, so their size difference had to be eliminated by having him stand on boxes and being photographed from favorable angles. Even that didn’t completely mollify Bogie, who—in the death throes of his first marriage—was drinking heavily and bickering constantly with one of the studio’s favorite directors, Michael Curtiz.

Somehow, in the end, despite its numerous problems throughout shooting, the world did come to think that “the problems of three little people” “amount[ed] to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Casablanca turned Bogart not just into a lead who could carry a film (as he had been since High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon the year before), but also as a romantic—if unconventional and complicated—leading man, even as an international prototype of an existentialist hero who, despite a cynical surface, is forced to act for good amid an evil world.

While his innate acting skill and his offscreen anguish combined to produce the requisite misery of Bogart’s Rick Blaine, we can’t bypass the script. The credited screenwriters, Koch and the Epstein brothers, contributed unique points of view to the final product, including many of the most quoted lines in film history (Claude Rains’ “Round up the usual suspects”). 

But it was the uncredited Casey Robinson who may have made the most significant contribution, according to Frank Miller, author of a book on the making of the film. It was Robinson who thought that Rick should tell Ilsa to get on the plane for the good of the cause.

For a fine brief retrospective of this improbable cinema triumph, what many think of as the “Great American Movie,” I urge you to read Robert Garnett’s excellent article in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal.