Filmed and set during World War II , it focuses on an American expatriate Bogart who must choose between his love for a woman Bergman and helping her husband Henreid , a Czechoslovak resistance leader, escape from the Vichy -controlled city of Casablanca to continue his fight against the Germans. Warner Bros. Wallis to purchase the film rights to the play in January Brothers Julius and Philip G. Epstein were initially assigned to write the script.
However, despite studio resistance, they left to work on Frank Capra 's Why We Fight series early in Howard Koch was assigned to the screenplay until the Epsteins returned a month later.
Principal photography began on May 25, , ending on August 3; the film was shot entirely at Warner Bros. Although Casablanca was an A-list film with established stars and first-rate writers, no one involved with its production expected it to stand out among the many pictures produced by Hollywood yearly.
The film was a solid if unspectacular success in its initial run. Its reputation has gradually grown, to the point that its lead characters, [9] memorable lines, [10] and pervasive theme song [11] have all become iconic, and it consistently ranks near the top of lists of the greatest films in history. In , the United States Library of Congress selected the film as one of the first for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, he ran guns to Ethiopia in and fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Petty crook Ugarte boasts to Rick of letters of transit obtained by murdering two German couriers. The papers allow the bearers to travel freely around German-occupied Europe and to neutral Portugal.
