Casablanca (1942) remains one of the world’s best-loved films. Not just the best loved, but best remembered. Many cinephiles can quote large chunks of the dialogue by heart, and Casablanca has the most entries of any film in the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time list.
The romantic drama film, directed by Michael Curtiz, based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s unproduced stage play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains.
Set during contemporary World War II, it focuses on an American expatriate who must choose between his love for a woman and helping her and her husband, a Czech Resistance leader, escape from the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca to continue his fight against the Nazis.
Warner Bros. story editor Irene Diamond convinced producer Hal B. Wallis to purchase the film rights to the play in January 1942. Brothers Julius and Philip G. Epstein were initially assigned to write the script. However, despite studio resistance, they left to work on Frank’s Why We Fight series early in 1942. Howard Koch was assigned to the screenplay until the Epsteins returned a month later. Principal began on May 25, 1942, ending on August 3; the film was shot entirely at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California with the exception of one sequence at Van Nuys Airport in Van Nuys, Los Angeles.
It had its world premiere on November 26, 1942, in New York City and was released nationally in the United States on January 23, 1943. The film was a solid if unspectacular success in its initial run.
Exceeding expectations, Casablanca went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Curtiz was selected as Best Director and the Epsteins and Koch were honoured for writing the Best Adapted Screenplay. Its reputation gradually improved, to the point that its lead characters, memorable lines, and pervasive theme song have all become famous and it consistently ranks near the top of film lists.
The film has 22 major speaking parts and hundreds of extras. The cast is notably international: only three of the credited actors were born in the United States (Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page). The top-billed actors are:
Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine. Rick was Bogart’s first true romantic role.
Ingrid Bergman as Lisa Lund. Bergman’s official website calls Ilsa her “most famous and enduring role”. The Swedish actress’s Hollywood debut in Intermezzo had been well received, but her subsequent films were not major successes until Casablanca.
Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo. Henreid, an Austrian actor who had emigrated in 1935, was reluctant to take the role until he was promised top billing along with Bogart and Bergman. Henreid did not get on well with his fellow actors; he considered Bogart “a mediocre actor”; Bergman called Henreid a “prima donna”.
The second-billed actors are:
Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault. Rains was an English actor born in London. He had previously worked with Michael Curtiz on The Adventures of Robin Hood. He later played the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, with Ingrid Bergman.
Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser. He was a refugee German actor who had appeared in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He fled the Nazis but was frequently cast as a Nazi in American films. A star in German cinema before the Nazi era, he was the highest paid member of the cast despite his second billing.
Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari. Another Englishman, Greenstreet had previously starred with Lorre and Bogart in his film debut in The Maltese Falcon.
Peter Lorre as Signor Ugarte. Born in Austria-Hungary, Lorre fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after starring in Fritz Lang’s first sound movie, M (1931). Greenstreet and Lorre appeared in several films together over the next few years, although they did not share a scene in Casablanca.
Dooley Wilson as Sam. He was one of the few American-born members of the cast. A drummer, he had to fake playing the piano.

Humphrey DeForest Bogart was an American film and theatre actor. His performances in numerous films from the Classical Hollywood era made him a cultural icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected him as the greatest male star of classic American cinema.
Bogart began acting in Broadway shows after World War I. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he began his movie career in Up the River, a comedy directed by John Ford.
Bogart appeared in various supporting parts, struggling for several years, sometimes portraying gangsters due to his resemblance to John Dillinger. He was highly praised for his work in The Petrified Forest (1936), which was his big break into the Warner Bros. gangster pantheon. Bogart had originated the role of Duke Mantee in the 1935 Broadway production, but Warner Bros. wanted to cast the then much better-known actor Edward G. Robinson for the film adaptation—however Leslie Howard, who played the protagonist in both the play and the film, insisted on Bogart being given the part.
Bogart’s breakthrough from supporting roles to A-list stardom came with his performances in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon (both 1941). His first true romantic lead role came when he appeared alongside Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942), finally ending his typecasting as a gangster. He and Lauren Bacall fell in love when they appeared together in To Have and Have Not (1944). After their marriage, she also played his love interest in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). Bogart later starred in The African Queen (1951) with Katharine Hepburn, and several films released in 1954: The Caine Mutiny with Fred MacMurray, Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn, and The Barefoot Contessa with Ava Gardner. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Casablanca and The Caine Mutiny, and won for The African Queen.

Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won many accolades, including three Academy Awards. She is best remembered for her roles as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca (1942), and Alicia Huberman in Notorious (1946).
Bergman was born in Stockholm to a Swedish father and a German mother, and started her career as an actress in Swedish and German films in the 1930s. Her introduction to American audiences came with her starring role in the English-language remake of Intermezzo (1939). At her insistence, producer David O. Selznick agreed not to sign her to a contract – for four films, rather than the then -standard seven-year period, also at her insistence – until after Intermezzo had been released. Selznick’s financial problems meant that Bergman was often loaned to other studios. Apart from Casablanca, her performances from this period include Victor Fleming’s remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). Her last films for Selznick were Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946). Her final film for Hitchcock was Under Capricorn (1949).
After a decade in American films, she starred in Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950), following the revelation that she was having an extramarital affair with the director. The affair and then marriage to Rossellini created a scandal in the U.S. that forced her to remain in Europe for several years, after which she made a successful return to working for a Hollywood studio in Anastasia (1956), for which she won her second Academy Award. Although she starred in several Hollywood films in subsequent years, they were all shot in Europe, and she did not film in Hollywood again until 1969.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Bergman as the fourth-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

Michael Curtiz was a Hungarian-born American film director, recognized as one of the most prolific directors in history. He directed classic films from the silent era and numerous others during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the studio system was prevalent.
Curtiz was already a well-known director in Europe when Warner Bros. invited him to Hollywood in 1926, when he was 39 years of age. He had already directed 64 films in Europe, and soon helped Warner Bros. become the fastest-growing movie studio. He directed 102 films during his Hollywood career, mostly at Warners, where he directed ten actors to Oscar nominations. James Cagney and Joan Crawford won their only Academy Awards under Curtiz’s direction. He put Doris Day and John Garfield on screen for the first time, and he made stars of Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Bette Davis. He himself was nominated five times and won twice, once for Best Short Subject for Sons of Liberty and once as Best
Director for Casablanca.
Curtiz introduced to Hollywood a unique visual style using artistic lighting, extensive and fluid camera movement, high crane shots, and unusual camera angles. He was versatile and could handle any kind of picture: melodrama, comedy, love story, film noir, musical, war story, Western, or historical epic. He always paid attention to the human-interest aspect of every story, stating that the “human and fundamental problems of real people” were the basis of all good drama.
Curtiz helped popularize the classic swashbuckler with films such as Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). He directed many dramas which today are also considered classics, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Sea Wolf (1941), Casablanca(1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). He directed leading musicals, including Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), This Is the Army (1943), and White, and he made comedies with Life With Father (1947) and We’re No Angels (1955).

Soundtrack

The music was written by Max Steiner, who was best known for the score for Gone with the Wind. The song “As Time Goes By” by Herman Hupfeld had been part of the story from the original play; Steiner wanted to write his own composition to replace it, but Bergman had already cut her hair short for her next role (María in For Whom the Bell Tolls) and could not re-shoot the scenes which incorporated the song, so Steiner based the entire score on it and “La Marseillaise”, the French national anthem, transforming them as leitmotifs to reflect changing moods. Even though Steiner didn’t like “As Time Goes By”, he admitted in a 1943 interview that it “must have had something to attract so much attention.” The “piano player” Dooley Wilson was a drummer, not a trained pianist, so the piano music for the film was played off-screen by Jean Plummer and dubbed.

Farewell speech at the airport

Casablanca cafe owner Rick Blaine (Bogart) sacrificed himself with airport farewell speech to ex-lover Ilsa Lund (Bergman):
Rick: Because you’re getting on that plane.
Ilsa: “I don’t understand. What about you?”
Rick: I’m staying here with him [Renault] ’til the plane gets safely away.
Ilsa: “No, Richard. No. What has happened to you? Last night…”
Rick: Last night, we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.
Ilsa: “But Richard, no, I’ve…”
Rick: Now, you’ve got to listen to me. Do you have any idea what you have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?
Renault: “I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.”
Ilsa: “You’re saying this only to make me go.”
Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
Ilsa: “What about us?”
Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have – we’d – we’d lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa: “When I said I would never leave you.”
Rick: And you never will. I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, kid.

Source: www.bfi.org.uk, www.filmsite.org and en.wikipedia.org