Casablanca (1942) Casablanca (1942)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Casablanca) | Backbeats (Casablanca)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Michael Curtiz
  • Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch (based on the unproduced stage play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison)
  • Starring: Humphrey Bogart (Rick Blaine, expatriate American running Rick's Café Américain), Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund, Norwegian wife of Victor Laszlo and former lover of Rick in Paris), Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo, Czech Resistance leader), Claude Rains (Captain Louis Renault, Vichy prefect of police), Conrad Veidt (Major Heinrich Strasser, Third Reich officer), Sydney Greenstreet (Signor Ferrari, owner of the Blue Parrot and competitor café operator), Peter Lorre (Ugarte, small-time crook who steals the letters of transit), Dooley Wilson (Sam, Rick's pianist and longtime friend)
  • Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
  • Editor: Owen Marks
  • Music: Max Steiner
  • Production Company: Warner Bros.
  • Runtime: 102 minutes
  • Release Date: November 26, 1942 (premiere, New York); January 23, 1943 (general US release)
  • Awards: Won three Academy Awards at the 16th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Curtiz), Best Adapted Screenplay (Epstein, Epstein, Koch).

Overview

A wartime romance and political thriller set in the Vichy-administered Moroccan port city of Casablanca in December 1941, where European refugees with the right papers and the right contacts try to buy passage to Lisbon and on to America. Rick Blaine, an American expatriate with a private past and a public pose of neutrality, runs the most important nightclub in town. The arrival of his lost Paris lover Ilsa Lund and her husband Victor Laszlo — a Czech Resistance leader the Nazis are hunting — forces Rick to choose between the cynical isolationism that has kept him intact and engagement with a war he had refused to acknowledge. The film is the canonical exemplar of the bittersweet better-tools-sufficient pattern in the Two Approaches framework: Rick's growth is real, the new approach works at the airport, but the cost is the relationship the growth was about. Casablanca won three Oscars at the 16th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and has since become one of the most quoted, parodied, and re-screened films in the American canon.