Casablanca was a rushed wartime A-picture nobody expected to last
Warner Bros. bought an unproduced play in January 1942, shot entirely on the Burbank lot from May to August, and hurried the premiere to ride news of the North Africa landings. Nobody on set thought it would outshine the year's other studio product. Then it took Best Picture—and never left the culture.
Michael Curtiz directed Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund, and Paul Henreid's Victor Laszlo in a Vichy Casablanca of refugees, letters of transit, and Nazi Major Strasser. The script grew from Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison; Julius and Philip Epstein began it, Howard Koch filled the gap while they worked on Why We Fight, and all three shared the Adapted Screenplay Oscar with Curtiz's Best Director win. Supporting turns from Renault's prefect to Strasser, Ferrari, Ugarte, and pianist Sam filled a roster in which only three credited players were U.S.-born.
Principal photography ran 25 May to 3 August 1942, almost wholly at Warner Bros. Studios plus one Van Nuys Airport scene. The New York world premiere fell on 26 November 1942; national U.S. release followed 23 January 1943. Early box office was solid rather than spectacular, yet the film later entered the Library of Congress National Film Registry's 1989 inaugural class. Copyright renewed in 1970 points toward U.S. public-domain entry on 1 January 2038.
Roger Ebert joked that if any movies deserve a capital M, this one should head the list. Its café set pieces—from "As Time Goes By" to drowning out German officers with La Marseillaise—and Rick's foggy parting line about a beautiful friendship turned studio craft into lasting myth. Veidt, a German exile who often played Nazis, was the highest-paid cast member despite second billing; Bergman called Henreid a prima donna while he dismissed Bogart as mediocre. The gaps between gossip and icon only deepen the film's strange afterlife.
Source: Casablanca (film)
