wunder beta📘 A café on the French coast, and the war already in it
A film shot on a Burbank soundstage by a Hungarian director, acted mostly by people who had actually run from the Nazis, released the month the Allies took the city it was named after. How it was made, what its legends get wrong, and why it will not settle down.
What you’ll learn
- The Play Nobody Would StageTrace the film back to an unstaged play and a real café, and separate its origin from its publicity.A New York schoolteacher watched the war arrive in a café on the French coast in 1938 and wrote a play nobody would produce. It landed on a Warner Bros. desk the day after Pearl Harbor, was bought for a record price in January 1942, and was named after a city its audience had just started reading about.
- The Room Was Full of Real RefugeesExplain who was actually standing in Rick's café and why that changes what the film is.Thirty-four nationalities, and only three credited actors born in America. The Nazi major had fled the Nazis, the croupier and the weeping girl at the bar had come out on a refugee ship, the comic waiter had lost family in the camps, and the piano player could not play the piano.
- Three Writers and No EndingTake apart the legend of the unfinished script and see what was actually undecided.Six writers, a censor who had already ruled out one ending, an uncredited hand who proposed the one they used, twin brothers who cracked it at a red light, and a producer who wrote the last sentence himself and had it dubbed in after everyone went home.
- Made on a Soundstage in BurbankSee how the film was physically made, and hold its production myths to the evidence.Ten weeks on a Californian lot, one afternoon at a local airport, a budget with three competing figures, a plane made of fog and perspective, a famous line in none of the drafts, and a Nazi anthem swapped out for copyright reasons.
- Released Into the HeadlinesExplain how the war's timetable, not the studio's, decided when this film met its audience.The Allies landed at Casablanca and the release date moved. Roosevelt and Churchill met there in secret and the general release landed in the same week. A Los Angeles technicality pushed the film into the next year's Oscars, where two men stood up for the same statuette.
- Why It Refuses to SettleWeigh the readings and the arguments the film has generated, including the ones it cannot answer.A plot device that makes no legal sense, a semiotician's explanation that costs the film nothing, a script that agencies would not read, a colourisation fight that produced a national film registry, and a café that finally opened sixty-two years late.
Questions this course answers
What was Everybody Comes to Rick's when Warner Bros. bought it?
Murray Burnett and Joan Alison wrote it in about six weeks in 1940 and could not get it staged. The typescript reached Warner's story department on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor; the studio bought it in January 1942 for $20,000, by most accounts a record for an unproduced play.
Where does the story that Ronald Reagan was cast as Rick come from?
The studio put Ann Sheridan, Reagan and Dennis Morgan into the trade press to keep contract names warm. Reagan was heading into the Army and the studio knew it; the AFI Catalog records the announcement and notes that modern sources treat Reagan as never a real possibility. Wallis wanted Bogart early.
How many of the film's credited actors were born in the United States?
The AFI Catalog records actors of thirty-four different nationalities in the film, many of them refugees. Everyone credited except Bogart, Dooley Wilson and Joy Page had crossed a border to be there — including Conrad Veidt, who had left Germany in 1933 with his Jewish wife and spent the rest of his life playing the men he had fled.
What was true of Dooley Wilson, who plays Sam?
Wilson could not play the piano. Warner borrowed him from Paramount and had Carpenter play where Wilson could copy the hand positions. Hal Wallis had earlier considered writing Sam as a woman, with Hazel Scott, Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald floated for the part.
What does the surviving evidence say about the famous "nobody knew the ending" story?
Howard Koch's memory of an open ending is real, and killing Laszlo at the airfield was weighed. But Frank Miller's work for the fiftieth-anniversary book and Aljean Harmetz's research through the scripts and production files both show important scenes were shot after Bergman knew the outcome. The Production Code had already ruled out Ilsa leaving her husband.
Who wrote the film's final line, and when was it recorded?
Wallis's memo of 7 August 1942 asked his editor to get Bogart in to record two wild lines, and listed the candidates — including one about mixing patriotism with a little larceny. He chose "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", which later placed twentieth on the AFI's list of great movie quotations.
Grounded in trusted sources
- Casablanca (1942), AFI Catalog of Feature Films, American Film Institute — the source for the 25 May–3 August 1942 production dates, the 26 November 1942 New York opening and 23 January 1943 general release, the $20,000 purchase of Everybody Comes to Rick's at story editor Irene Lee's suggestion, the Sheridan/Reagan/Morgan announcement and the note that Reagan was never really a possibility, the writing chain from Kline and MacKenzie through the Epsteins, Koch and Casey Robinson, Wallis's authorship of the final line, Dooley Wilson's loan from Paramount and Elliot Carpenter's dubbing, the Breen objections, the Max Steiner and Bergman-haircut account of "As Time Goes By", the thirty-four nationalities, technical adviser Robert Aisner's escape via Casablanca, and the Academy Award wins and nominations — https://catalog.afi.com/Film/27175-CASABLANCA
- "The birth of Casablanca: A playscript of Everybody Comes to Rick's, with Warner Bros. reader's report and synopsis", Bonhams, New York, 24 November 2014, lot 61 — the source for the 8 December 1941 arrival of the typescript, Stephen Karnot's 11 December 1941 reader's report and its verdict, and the accompanying twenty-page synopsis — https://www.bonhams.com/auction/22196/lot/61/the-birth-of-casablanca-a-playscript-of-everybody-comes-to-ricks-with-warner-bros-readers-report-and-synopsis/
- "The beginning of a beautiful friendship", Stars and Letters — reproduces Hal Wallis's memo to editor Owen Marks of 7 August 1942 requesting two wild lines from Bogart, and the four candidate closing lines including the two Wallis wrote himself — https://starsandletters.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-beginning-of-beautiful-friendship.html
- "Casablanca — the myths debunked", drawing on Frank Miller, Casablanca: As Time Goes By (50th Anniversary Commemorative, 1992) — for the Reagan press-handout origin of the casting myth, the shooting-schedule evidence against the "shot in sequence because there was no script" claim, and the finding that Bergman filmed key scenes after learning the ending — https://www.dejongenskamer.nl/casafilm.htm
- "The real-life refugees of Casablanca make it so much more than a love story", NPR, 23 January 2023 — for the émigré cast, S. Z. Sakall's family losses, and Marcel Dalio and Madeleine Lebeau's flight from Paris via Lisbon aboard the SS Quanza — https://www.npr.org/2023/01/23/1150791939/casablanca-war-movie-film-refugees-nazis
- Noah Isenberg, "In Casablanca, Madeleine Lebeau Became Forever the Face of French Resistance", Humanities (National Endowment for the Humanities), Winter 2017 — for Lebeau's age and escape, the forged visas, the Marseillaise close-up and "Vive la France!", Leonid Kinskey's verdict on the scene, and the Vichy reuse of Dalio's photograph — https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/winter/feature/in-casablanca-madeleine-lebeau-became-forever-the-face-french-resistance
- "75 Years Later, A Look At The Life, Legend, and Afterlife Of Casablanca", NPR, 11 October 2017 — Noah Isenberg on the refugee cast, the unsettled ending and Casey Robinson's uncredited work on the love story — https://www.npr.org/2017/10/11/557101633/75-years-later-a-look-at-the-life-legend-and-afterlife-of-casablanca
- Murray Burnett's New York Times obituary of 29 September 1997, quoted on the Central Commercial High School tribute page — the source for Burnett being a 27-year-old English teacher at a New York vocational high school when he went to German-occupied Vienna in the summer of 1938 to help Jewish relatives smuggle out money, and for his returning to the United States with the idea for an anti-Nazi play. The bar-with-a-pianist detail is Burnett's own retelling rather than anything the obituary establishes, and the lesson flags it as such — https://sites.google.com/view/centralcommercialhighschooltri/home/centralites-stories/murray-burnett
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