Why we’ll always have Casablanca

Half a script, a quantum physics song – and Nazis? The 80-year-old mystery of cinema’s least likely hit

On November 11 1942, dramatic war news reached America from London. Radio operators had picked up reports that three columns of American tanks were roaring towards a strategically significant port in French Morocco – territory administered by the Vichy government. The city had a Nazi presence, though by the time General George S Patton’s forces rolled up, it was slightly depleted: two nights previously, the German Consul General and 12 of his officials had been machinegunned to death by the Resistance as they left the Hotel Plaza.

The fighting was intense. Parachutists seized the aerodrome. US planes bombed a French battleship in the harbour. It was an operation, reflected Patton, “that would be worth a million in Hollywood”.

He was right. Six thousand miles away in California, Jack Warner, head of the film company that still bears his name, could hardly contain his pleasure. A movie on the shelf, a modest, mainly studiobound melodrama, planned for release the following year, had become suddenly topical – all thanks to the battle of Casablanca. He brought the opening night forward to Thanksgiving 1942.

Casablanca is 80 years old today, but, like the conflict it depicts, it has never faded in the cultural memory. It’s a story about love, war and morality. Its protagonist, Rick Blaine, played (as if anyone needs telling) by hard-edged, hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart, is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who has given up the struggle against Fascism. By December 1941, he is running a bar, where he serves Nazis and asylum-seekers and the seedy figures who exploit them, regarding the scene with a cynical carelessness that does not extend to the crisp white state of his cocktail jacket. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he declares, early in the movie. “Wise foreign policy,” trills Claude Rains’s Captain Louis Renault, the local chief of police.

And then, in walks his two-person Pearl Harbor. Rick’s old flame, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and her Czech husband, Victor (Paul Henreid), refugees who need documents to reach safety in America. Rick still wants Isla; she still wants him. But the personal turns out to be political. Their rekindled love hurts Rick’s heart but cures him of his nihilism, and as Ilsa and Victor’s plane lifts off from the aerodrome, he knows which side he is on.

Casablanca is an immovable part of the Hollywood canon. Most of us can quote or misquote it. The song in the picture, As Time Goes By, is part of the Warner Brothers ident. (You will hear it if you go this weekend to see Black Adam or Bones and All.) But the film is also a fragile historical accident. It started life as Everybody Comes to Rick’s, an unproduced play written in 1940 by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Warner Brothers bought the rights, rewrote it, rewrote it again, and – in a departure from studio custom – put it into production with the script half-finished. You can hear the ghosts of earlier drafts on the soundtrack. Lines, for instance, that made it clear that Renault is exchanging passports for sex were lost – but they are the reason why, when a teenage Bulgarian refugee tells Rick that she and her husband are on a night out with the Captain, Rick remarks that “Louis must be getting broadminded.” He is imagining a bisexual ménage-à-trois.

The mutable state of the script obliged the director, Michael Curtiz, to shoot in chronological order, and the cast to await new pages like dispatches from the front line. Though it seems impossible to imagine the story without its tearjerking and anti-isolationist ending, there was some debate about how it should conclude.

Another celebrated element was far from fixed: Max Steiner, the film’s composer, wanted to remove the song he inherited from the play – a half-forgotten Herman Hupfeld number that Burnett had loved in his university years – and replace it with a new number of his own. But the piano scenes were already in the can and couldn’t be reshot because Bergman had by then cropped her hair for her next role: Maria, the anti-fascist guerilla fighter heroine of For Whom the Bell

Tolls. So Steiner swallowed his pride and made As Time Goes By the musical key to his score.

The film is now hard to conceive without it, not least because it supports its themes at a head-spinningly deep level. You only hear half the lyrics on the soundtrack of Casablanca. The rest reveal something quite unexpected – that As Time Goes By is a romantic protest against Einstein’s theory of relativity. Hupfeld’s first verse expresses his “apprehension” about “things like [the] fourth dimension”. (“We get a trifle weary,” he says, “with Mr Einstein’s theory.”) Once you know that, you can go back to the film and see that when Bergman and Dooley Wilson’s bar pianist, Sam, assert that the fundamental things apply, they’re talking about more than love, glory and the decision to do or die – they are discussing the structure of space and time.

And this, I think, is a delicious example of how Casablanca, only partly by design, became a work of such inexhaustible depth. One of the last adjustments to the script was the addition of the flashback sequence, in which we see the early days of Rick and Isla’s romance in occupied Paris. (“I remember every detail: the Germans wore grey, you wore blue.”) We know that they will sacrifice their desire for each other for the sake of the war effort, but that memory – sealed up in a bright and unassailable sequence of the film – will sustain them. The screenwriting guru Robert McKee, who has probably thought more deeply about Casablanca than any person alive, ends his course by telling his students that the film is “a meditation on time itself and what time means”. That famous line – “We’ll always have Paris” – may be more literal than it sounds.

That’s the physics. You can’t rely on Casablanca for accurate history and geography. Its Moroccan flags are wrong. There’s no such thing as a “letter of transit” – the crucial document its refugees need to escape the city. Rick’s assertion that he was “misinformed” about the attractions of Casablanca’s waters suggests that the screenwriters did not bother to check the coastal city’s position on a map. (Perhaps this blunder, as well as political sensitivities, explain why the US Office of War Information refused to clear the movie for viewing in North Africa.)

The universe, however, does seem to have been on the film’s side. At the New York premiere at the Hollywood Theater on November 26 1942, members of De Gaulle’s Free French forces paraded down Fifth Avenue. After the screening, they recreated one of the most spine-tingling scenes in the picture by taking the stage and singing the Marseillaise. The man from the Hollywood Reporter felt like he was attending a political rally.

When the film went on general release at the end of January 1943, it coincided with Casablanca’s return to the international headlines – as the place where Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were meeting to plan the next phase of the conflict. The publicity department seized its moment. It printed ads that pictured a stopwatch above the slogan: “The Army’s Got Casablanca! So Have Warner Bros!”

Comparatively little was made of the film’s more concrete connections with the war – the presence of European refugees in the cast. Rick’s head waiter, Carl, is played by Szőke Szakáll, a Hungarian who would lose three sisters and a niece in the Holocaust. The film’s villain, Major Strasser, is played Conrad Veidt, who fled Germany in 1933 after defiantly declaring himself Jewish on Nazi paperwork. (He wasn’t: it was an act of solidarity with his wife.) Veidt was one of cinema’s most vigorous anti-Nazis – “women fight for Veidt” was a tagline cooked up by a British film studio.

Five months later, with Casablanca soaring into profit, the studio made a 500,000-franc donation to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, on the understanding that the money be sent to Hélène Cazes-Benatar, a lawyer who ran an organisation aiding refugees and asylum seekers in Casablanca. Nobody could doubt which side Jack Warner was on.

Eight decades later, Casablanca seems fixed in a paradoxical position in space and time. The one expressed by its song. The film is a zeitgeisty artefact of a particular moment in the Second World War. But it has never stopped speaking to us. We’ll always have it, like we’ll always have the choice between right and wrong.

The cast awaited fresh pages of the script like dispatches from the front line