The Little Play That Could
Nobody set out to make the greatest romance in movie history. In January 1942, Warner Bros. story analyst Irene Diamond was reading through a pile of submissions when she came across an unproduced stage play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, written by a New York teacher named Murray Burnett and his writing partner Joan Alison. Burnett had been stranded in Europe in 1938 and had watched refugees pour through Vienna; the play was his attempt to bottle that atmosphere of desperation and waiting. Diamond was struck by it and passed it to producer Hal B. Wallis, who bought all rights for $20,000 — at the time, the highest price ever paid for an unproduced play.
Wallis immediately retitled it Casablanca and handed it to twin screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, who were told to give it humor, sparkle, and pace. The Epsteins, however, were soon lured away to Washington to work on Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, against the studio’s wishes. Howard Koch was brought in to keep the pages coming, and the Epsteins returned about a month later. Before the cameras stopped rolling, uncredited polish man Casey Robinson would also take a pass at the love story. It was, from the start, a script by committee — written in relays, under deadline, with the finish line moving every week.
A Script Written at Dawn
Principal photography began on May 25, 1942, and the production had an unusual problem: only about half the screenplay actually existed. New pages arrived on the set each morning, sometimes still warm from the typewriter. Howard Koch later put it flatly: “When we began, we didn’t have a finished script.” Director Michael Curtiz — the Hungarian-born Warner Bros. workhorse famous for shooting fast and speaking in gloriously fractured English — simply kept the cameras turning and trusted the writers to stay one step ahead of him.
The film was shot almost entirely on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California. The famous airport finale was filmed at what was then Los Angeles Municipal Airport in Van Nuys, dressed up with a fog machine, a cardboard Lockheed Electra, and little people hired to stand in the mist so the plane would look full-sized. Everything else — Rick’s Café, the blue-parrot bar, the foggy runway — was California plywood and ingenuity. The shoot wrapped on August 3, 1942.
The Ending Nobody Could Agree On
Here is where the legend gets interesting, because the truth is more nuanced than the myth. The broad shape of the ending — Ilsa boards the plane with her husband Victor Laszlo, and Rick stays behind — was there from the beginning. It is how Burnett and Alison’s original play ended, and it appears in the earliest drafts of the screenplay. The Production Code of the era would never have approved a married heroine running off with another man anyway, especially when the husband was a heroic resistance leader.
But that does not mean the ending was settled. Deep into the shoot, Wallis, Curtiz, and the writers were still genuinely wrestling with alternatives. Memos from the period show them debating whether Laszlo should be killed in Casablanca so Rick and Ilsa could leave together (rejected as politically unsound), whether Rick himself should die (too grim), and whether Ilsa should simply stay with Rick (too risqué for the censors). What was truly undecided, almost to the last minute, was how to make Ilsa’s departure believable — how to earn the sacrifice — and what Rick’s final line should be.
That last question wasn’t answered until August 21, 1942, nearly three weeks after the official wrap, when Wallis chose the closing line from among several candidates and had Bogart return to dub it. The rejected alternatives included “Louis, I begin to see a reason for your sudden attack of patriotism,” and “Louis, I might have known you’d mix your patriotism with a little larceny.” What survived was the one we all know: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Myths, Near-Misses, and Ingrid Bergman on Blocks
One persistent Hollywood fable holds that Ronald Reagan was originally cast as Rick Blaine. It isn’t true — but the studio started the rumor itself. On January 5, 1942, Warner Bros. planted an item in The Hollywood Reporter announcing Reagan, Ann Sheridan, and Dennis Morgan as the stars of Casablanca. The screenplay hadn’t even been started, no casting had happened, and Reagan — already a cavalry reserve officer awaiting active duty — could never have taken the part. It was a publicity plant, timed to give a boost to the three actors’ current releases. Studio memos show that Wallis wanted Bogart from the beginning; one memo records the picture as “being written for him.” George Raft later claimed he had turned the role down, but Warner Bros. records make clear Wallis was committed to Bogart all along.
For Ilsa, Wallis wanted Ingrid Bergman, then under contract to producer David O. Selznick. Getting her required a trade: Wallis loaned Olivia de Havilland’s services to Selznick in exchange. It was also a bargain — the other finalist, Michèle Morgan, would have cost $55,000, while Bergman came for $25,000. There was one physical complication: Bergman was taller than Bogart. In their two-shots, Bogart wore three-inch lifts, and in some scenes he stood on wooden blocks so the camera could frame the kiss at the right angle.
Bergman arrived with her own dilemma. Because the ending was still being debated, she genuinely did not know which man Ilsa truly loved — Laszlo or Rick. She asked Curtiz which way to play it. His answer, in so many words: play it in between. So she did, and that very ambiguity — the look of a woman torn between duty and desire — became one of the most magnetic performances in film history.
Off camera, the two stars were cordial but distant. They barely spoke between takes, and Bergman later admitted she never really got to know Bogart. Yet on screen, that professional reserve reads as something else entirely: the ache of two people who once loved each other in Paris and are pretending, badly, that they don’t anymore. Sometimes chemistry isn’t friendship. Sometimes it’s just two great actors, fully present, in a scene that matters.
“Here’s Looking at You, Kid”
The most famous line Bogart ever spoke may never have been in the script at all. According to studio lore, “Here’s looking at you, kid” was something Bogart said to Bergman off camera — a bit of poker-table patter he used while teaching her the game between takes during the Paris flashback sequences. Curtiz overheard it, liked the easy intimacy of it, and had it worked into the dialogue. It appears first in Paris, as a private lovers’ joke, and returns at the airport farewell, where it lands like a benediction.
Whether improvised or scripted, the line became Bogart’s signature, voted the fifth most memorable movie quotation of all time by the American Film Institute. It works because it is so un-Bogart on paper — tender, playful, almost soft — and so completely Bogart in delivery: the half-smile, the eyes that have seen everything, the voice that makes affection sound like a secret.
“Play It, Sam” — and the Line That Was Never Said
Ask a casual fan to quote Casablanca and many will say, “Play it again, Sam.” Those exact words are never spoken in the film. What Ilsa actually says, when she slips into the empty café, is: “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake.” When Sam hesitates, she presses him: “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.'” And Rick, hearing the song he banned from his own establishment, says simply: “Play it!”
“As Time Goes By,” written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931, had been a modest hit and was nearly forgotten when the Epsteins wove it into the script as Rick and Ilsa’s song. Dooley Wilson, who played Sam, was a singer and drummer — not a pianist — and he mimed the keyboard while performing the number himself. The song’s plainspoken lyric — “You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss” — became the film’s emotional thesis: that some things, unlike borders and regimes, do not change.
A Hill of Beans
The film’s moral climax arrives not with a gunshot but with a speech. On the foggy tarmac, Rick forces Ilsa onto the plane with Laszlo, and to make her go, he tells her the truth about what their love is worth against the scale of the world:
“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.”
It is the moment Rick Blaine completes his transformation. When we met him, his creed was “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He ran the most popular nightclub in Casablanca precisely by being neutral — selling exit visas to whoever could pay, refusing to take sides between the Vichy police, the Nazis, and the resistance. The Paris flashbacks show us the man he was before Ilsa left him at the train station: an idealist who ran guns to Ethiopia and fought for the Loyalists in Spain. Heartbreak turned him into a cynic. The film’s final act turns the cynic back into a man — one who understands that love, real love, sometimes means putting the beloved on a plane.
Bogart plays the speech without raising his voice. That was his genius in the role: Rick’s heroism is all interior, conveyed in the set of the jaw and the tired eyes. He doesn’t become a different man at the end; he becomes himself again.
The Premiere That Beat the Headlines
Warner Bros. rushed Casablanca into theaters to capitalize on current events. The Allied invasion of North Africa — Operation Torch — had begun on November 8, 1942, and American troops were, at that very moment, fighting not far from the real Casablanca. The film premiered at New York’s Hollywood Theatre on November 26, 1942, and went into general release on January 23, 1943.
Critics admired it, audiences embraced it, and the Academy crowned it. At the 16th Academy Awards in March 1944, Casablanca won Best Picture, Best Director for Curtiz, and Best Screenplay for the Epsteins and Koch. Bogart earned his first Best Actor nomination — and lost to Paul Lukas for Watch on the Rhine. He would wait nearly a decade for his Oscar. But the loss hardly mattered. Something larger had happened: the 43-year-old former gangster-movie heavy had become a romantic lead, and the movies would never quite be the same.
The Definitive Romantic Antihero
Before Rick Blaine, the romantic hero of American movies was typically earnest, upright, uncomplicated. Rick is none of those things. He drinks too much, trusts no one, and opens the film by turning a desperate refugee couple away from his roulette table — or seeming to. What makes him irresistible is not virtue but wounded virtue: the sense, which Bogart conveys in every frame, that this is a good man who has decided the world doesn’t deserve his goodness, and who is wrong about that.
Every romantic antihero who followed — from the weary spies of the Cold War to the damaged detectives of neo-noir — walks in Rick Blaine’s shadow. The trench coat, the cigarette, the line delivered sideways rather than straight on: Bogart didn’t invent the type, but in Casablanca he perfected it, and in doing so gave the movies its most quoted, most beloved, most imitated performance. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Eighty years later, we’re still walking into Rick’s place — and we’ll always have Paris.