Lauded by critics and audiences alike, Casablanca holds a place in the collective hearts of film lovers. Based on an unproduced play titled Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the material was considered nothing more than “sophisticated hokum” but was purchased by Warner Brothers nonetheless for the then-record price of twenty grand. Film icons Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman smoldered with charismatic chemistry while Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre also delivered memorable performances. Shooting began without a completed script and it wasn’t until filming neared its completion that the actors discovered how it would end.

That story takes place primarily in the titular Moroccan town of Casablanca where neutral club owner Rick Blaine (Bogart) slakes the gambling thirsts of Vichy French, Nazis, refugees, and robbers. An underhanded thug (Lorre) is arrested (by Rains’s Captain Renault) shortly after trusting Rick with a pair of priceless documents that will ensure escape from the war-torn country. Rick thinks nothing of it until the object of his embitterment walks right back into his life. Former flame Ilsa (Bergman) and her Resistance leader husband arrive to beg Rick for the documents so that they can escape to America to continue their efforts. But Rick remembers all-too-well the time he and Ilsa spent in Paris before she inexplicably left him. Her husband, presumed killed at the hands of Nazis, had come back into her life.

The Germans force the closure of Rick’s club when --in challenge to a band of Nazis singing “Wacht am Rhein” -- he belts out the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Rick eventually relents, sacrificing almost everything to help the couple. After forcing Renault at gunpoint to help them get to the airport, Rick then admonishes Ilsa to leave him once again and go with her husband. As the plane takes off, Captain Renault saves Rick and the two walk off into the mist, presumably to join the Resistance with Rick’s famous line, “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
The film’s premiere paralleled the actual invasion of Casablanca while its wide release coincided with Roosevelt and Churchill’s Casablanca Conference in January of 1943. Roosevelt would later return from that conference and request a private screening of the film at the White House. It would capture the major Academy Award of Picture, Director, and Screenplay, but the film itself was only a modest, albeit steady success. Though only the seventh highest grossing film of the year, its popularity slowly built. In 1977, it showed on television more frequently than any other film. Parodies have emerged without number, including most notably A Night in Casablanca (starring the Marx Brothers) and Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. Two television series prequels came out that lasted only a short while. Francois Truffaut allegedly turned down the opportunity to remake the film in 1974 because of its cult status and the only official sequel exists in Michael Walsh’s 1998 novel As Time Goes By.