1942 102 mins. Warner Brothers
Casablanca is arguably The Movie, as critic Roger Ebert has dubbed it. It's got that indefinable quality of immortality that comes from being more than the sum of its parts. It makes everyone's top ten list, and is one of those rare movies where, the more you see it, the more you see in it, and the deeper the emotional reverberations become.
Recipient of three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay), and five other nominations, it made Ingrid Bergman an American superstar and forever put Humphrey Bogart into the leading man category – a process that had started just two years earlier with The Maltese Falcon. In fact, Bogart became the world's highest paid actor for several years after Casablanca; yet he and Ingrid Bergman would never appear in another movie together.
World events helped gain the film publicity. It opened in New York on Thanksgiving, 1942, just three weeks after the Allies landed at Casablanca, and two months after the film came out, Casablanca was again in the news – as the scene of a major diplomatic conference.
Ronald Reagan was originally slated to play Laszlo, and Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lamarr, and even a Russian ballerina the screenwriter was in love with were all floated as possibilities for Ilsa; but producer Hal Wallis insisted on Bergman and "borrowed" her from David O. Selznick.
Some final bits of Casablanca trivia: Dooley Wilson, who plays "As Time Goes By" in Rick's cafe, was not a pianist at all, but a drummer and singer. His piano playing was dubbed by a studio musician. And originally considered for Wilson's part as cafe entertainer: both Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald.
