A historian's analysis made the rounds of film circles: "Casablanca" wasn't an original screenplay at all, but an adaptation of the play "Everybody Comes to Rick's," which Hollywood bought the day after Pearl Harbor. In the discussion thread lay a viewer's remark: "So many clichés... wait. This is the SOURCE of all clichés." And then a second detail that turned the hook into something irresistible: the play that spawned the most beloved film of the twentieth century first reached the stage only in 1991 — half a century after the screen adaptation.
The film that three screenwriters assembled overnight, shot without a finished ending, and which the studio expected nothing from, became the benchmark against which all romantic cinema would be measured. You don't plan something like that — it just happens. And everything that follows is built around the question of "how exactly did this happen."
In the summer of 1938, Murray Burnett — a young English teacher from New York's Central Commercial High School — traveled to Vienna with his wife not for sightseeing: the family was helping her Jewish relatives smuggle money out of the just-annexed Austria. What he witnessed was enough to make anti-Nazism a personal matter. The couple returned through the south of France, and in the town of Cap Ferrat stumbled upon the café La Belle Aurore — a "backwater establishment" overlooking the Mediterranean, where a Black pianist played jazz for a motley crowd: French, Nazis, and refugees. Remember this scene — it will become the setting of the future film.
In the summer of 1940, Burnett spent six weeks writing a play with his writer friend Joan Alison about a cynical American café owner in Casablanca. They initially wanted to set the action in Lisbon, but it moved to Morocco — Rick's café was almost copied from that very establishment at Cap Ferrat. On Broadway, the play was destined for failure: an option from writer Carly Wharton and actor Martin Gabel expired because "it wouldn't work as a screenplay," and a second company refused to stage it when the authors wouldn't rewrite an "indecent" scene — Lois, the heroine of the play, spent the night with Rick to obtain exit documents. The play that no one dared to stage was sent by the agent to Hollywood.
The chronology gets confusingly vivid from here — itself a diagnosis of the era. One version has the manuscript languishing a year among papers in Warner's New York office until editor Irene Lee unearthed it from a pile of typescripts — a dog-eared copy with the address of producers who'd left it unanswered. Another version has the play in manuscript read and praised by editor Irene Diamond. Names and dates diverge, but the essence is the same: the fate of the greatest romantic film was decided by someone digging through a pile of papers. The play was presented to Wallis as "sophisticated hokum."
The purchase date is part of the story. On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, a Warner analyst reads the play and writes an enthusiastic report; Wallis decides: the cynic Rick is the perfect role for Bogart. On January 12, 1942, Burnett and Alison sign a contract for $20,000 — a record for an unstaged play by unknown authors (roughly $350,000 in today's money). The wording in the contract promises the studio all rights "of any kind and nature, whether now known or hereafter conceived." Years later, Burnett himself joked that he'd made a deal "from the days when D.W. Griffith was still alive."
The screenplay was written in four hands, or more precisely — in three shifts: Casey Robinson worked out the romantic line (and didn't even get a credit), the Epstein twins — "the Boys" with a reputation as script doctors — took on structure and wit, and Howard Koch, the man whose 1938 radio production of "War of the Worlds" terrified America, handled politics. During shooting, only Koch remained, writing scenes on the fly. When producer David Selznick asked why he should even lend him Bergman, the script didn't yet exist — Wallis told the Epsteins to "improvise." Selznick agreed, partly out of fear: if neutral Sweden suddenly joined the Axis, his star would become "damaged goods."
Filming ran from May 25 to August 3, 1942, and nobody at the studio expected anything special from the picture. The ending wasn't written until the last day: Bergman approached Koch asking "which one should I love more?" and got the answer "don't know, play them both equally." Her on-screen mystery has since been explained by the fact that the actress herself didn't know who Ilsa would leave with — though an analysis of all screenplay drafts by researcher Aljean Harmetz shows that key scenes were shot after the ending was decided, and the confusion was "emotional, not factual." Julius Epstein summed it up most honestly: "We had more corn than Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works — there's nothing better."
The premiere was rushed on November 26, 1942 — to capitalize on fresh hype about the Allied landing in North Africa, and the film went into wide release on January 23, 1943, right during the Casablanca Conference, where Roosevelt and Churchill stood in person in that very city. The government's Office of War Information, however, forbade showing the picture to troops in Africa — they feared that the luxurious white insouciance of "Rick's" would anger soldiers in the field. In March 1944, the film would take three Oscars — for picture, direction, and screenplay — and all three went to the studio and "the Boys." The play's authors got a line "from the play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison" in the credits.
And now the main thing, the reason the scene where Rick's patrons drown out the Nazi chorus with "La Marseillaise" still hits: the refugees on screen were played by real refugees. Madeleine Lebeau, playing Yvonne singing with tears in close-up, fled France in 1940 with her husband — the Jew Marcel Dalio, star of Renoir's "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game," whose face Vichy propaganda had already plastered on anti-Semitic posters. Lisbon, forged visas, the Portuguese steamer "Quanza," Mexico, Canada — and finally the Warner studio lot. Her tears in this scene are not an acting technique: in close-up, a person relives her own escape.
Beside her — an entire gallery of similar fates. Helmut Dantine at nineteen led Vienna's anti-Nazi youth movement, was arrested after the Anschluss, ransomed by his family and sent overseas — on screen he plays the refugee at the roulette wheel whom Rick "accidentally" enriches. Conrad Veidt, a German with a Jewish wife who fled the Nazis, plays the Nazi Major Strasser. The Hungarian S.Z. Sakall, whose family perished in the camps — the waiter Carl; the Viennese Jew Peter Lorre — Ugarte. "When people here speak, the accents are real," recalled Leslie Epstein, son and nephew of the screenwriters. "In a sense, they're playing themselves." Yet refugees in the film are never once called Jews: Hollywood's unwritten code of those years didn't allow it — they're visible, but not named.
In 1984, Umberto Eco delivered a lecture in Toronto that would become a classic: "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage." His thesis sounded blasphemous: by strict standards this isn't a masterpiece but a "hodgepodge of sensational scenes"; a work becomes cult not despite its rough edges but because of them — a perfect film is remembered as a whole, while a "loose" one can be taken apart and carried with you. "Casablanca is not one film. It is 'the movies,'" Eco wrote: the first twenty minutes unfold like an overture where five genres change in two minutes, and then fairy tale archetypes take over — Casablanca as magic door, visa as magic key, airplane as magic steed.
Rick, according to Eco, is an impossible bundle of incompatible archetypes at once: fatal adventurer, tough guy from gangster cinema, cynic, Hemingway hero — and "Bogart's face withstands this unbearable quantity of contradictions." The lecture's finale is the most precise formula of the film ever written: "Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion." And then — the very admission for which it was worth excavating this entire story: no one could have achieved such a result deliberately. Here nature spoke instead of people. An assembly-line studio, three screenwriters without an ending, real refugees as extras — all this is that "nature": a text written not by authors but by texts themselves.
The scale of the legacy is easier to measure with American Film Institute lists. In the ranking "100 Years...100 Quotes" (2005), "Casablanca" has six lines out of a hundred — more than any other film in history: from "Here's looking at you, kid" (5th place) to "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine" (67th). In the list of best films — second place. Even the song "As Time Goes By," pulled by the screenwriters straight from the play (it was Burnett-the-student's favorite tune), ranks second among songs of the century.
The genealogy of the cynic stretches further — into a galaxy the film's authors couldn't have dreamed of. The collection of direct correspondences that film lovers assembled decades ago reads like a family tree: Sam Spade — Rick Blaine — Han Solo; fat man Gutman — Ferrari — Jabba the Hutt; fidgety Cairo — Ugarte — Greedo. When artist Phil Tippett asked George Lucas who would have played Jabba as a live actor, he answered without hesitation: "Sydney Greenstreet" — the man who played opposite Bogart in "The Maltese Falcon." "Star Wars" is a direct descendant of 1941 noir, filtered through "Casablanca."
A separate paragraph is deserved for late justice. In 1973, Koch disparaged the play in an interview — "a location, a bartender Rick, and almost no story" — Burnett sued, demanding $6.5 million, and lost. In 1983 the studio launched a wretched TV series based on the film — a lawsuit for $60 million. In 1986 the New York appellate court stated: the authors had once signed away everything that could be signed away. But copyright had a property of returning: in 1997 the rights were supposed to revert to the play's creators, and Warner preferred to buy them out — $100,000 each and the right to finally stage the play.
In February 1991, "Everybody Comes to Rick's" played through to its theatrical debut — first in suburban Bromley, then six weeks in London's West End, 49 years after the sale. That same 1991, 89-year-old Koch wrote a letter to a newspaper: having reread the play, he acknowledged that it gave the film its "backbone." Ingrid Bergman in 1974, asked about the source, answered: "Based on a play? 'Casablanca'? I don't think so." Even the film's star didn't know it had a backbone.
First and foremost: "Casablanca" is the best argument against the cult of the brilliant concept. Not a single person in this story wanted to make a masterpiece: the teacher wrote anti-Nazi agitprop, the studio bought "sophisticated hokum," the screenwriters fulfilled a routine assignment, there was no ending until the last day. The masterpiece emerged as a byproduct of the system — the assembly line, deadlines, real refugees as extras, and catastrophe moving through the world at the right tempo. Eco is right: nature spoke instead of people, and that nature was a factory.
Second: the play that nobody staged was literally saved for history by the film — and there's symmetry in that. The screen became the world premiere of material that the stage rejected; and the industry, having once appropriated all the glory, half a century later paid the authors their due — through court, through the non-return of copyright, through old man Koch's letter about the "backbone." History knows how to wait longer than lawyers.
Third — why the film doesn't age. It wasn't "new" even in 1942: it was an assembly of old plots, and therefore it's impossible for it to age — a dictionary can't become dated. A viewer who sees "Casablanca" for the first time today sees not a museum but a source: every cliché that irritates them was here in embryonic form. This is a rare case where cliché is not a diagnosis but a birthplace.