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    LIFE Casablanca: The Most Beloved Movie of All Time
    LIFE Casablanca: The Most Beloved Movie of All Time
    LIFE Casablanca: The Most Beloved Movie of All Time
    Ebook146 pages51 minutes

    LIFE Casablanca: The Most Beloved Movie of All Time

    By The Editors of LIFE

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    About this ebook

    This beautiful LIFE Special Edition, commemorating the 75th anniversary of Casablanca, is filled with timeless photos of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Dooley Wilson, and other stars of the iconic wartime romance. Go on set and behind the scenes with these memorable images and with compelling, insightful text. Learn about the making of the film that changed the industry, and discover the stories of the actors and creators of the movie-many of whom were refugees from Hitler's oppression, lending authenticity to the film. By delving into enduring moments and lines like "Play it, Sam" and "We'll always have Paris" and "As Time Goes By" and "Here's looking at you, kid," LIFE: Casablanca provides an intimate and inspiring look at one of Hollywood's greatest achievements. Plus: a special look at Casablanca's cultural impact today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLife
    Release dateFeb 2, 2018
    ISBN9781547841578
    LIFE Casablanca: The Most Beloved Movie of All Time

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      LIFE Casablanca - The Editors of LIFE

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      Introduction

      Love, Always

      In the truest, most affecting love stories there are no happy endings. Romeo could not have Juliet. Scarlett could not end up with Rhett. Antony could not live with Cleopatra—nor Richard Burton with Elizabeth Taylor. Likewise, although Casablanca’s screenwriters struggled with the details of the film’s last moments, they ultimately knew that Rick and Ilsa would have to give each other up. The film at its core is about self-sacrifice and honor. Rick had to do the noble thing, the right thing. That is why audiences loved it in 1943 and why on its 75th anniversary, we continue to love it today. Casablanca represented and represents our best selves, our ideal world.

      There are of course plenty of other contributing factors to Casablanca’s popularity and endurance: murder, heroism, intrigue, spies, double crosses, and black-marketeers, all in an exotic locale. The acting was superb. Humphrey Bogart, in a role that turned him into an international sex symbol, mesmerized audiences as the emotionally wounded cynic who transforms into a self-sacrificing idealist. Ingrid Bergman as his true love, radiated purity and principles. Bit players and extras, many of them European immigrants who had escaped Hitler, infused the film with a verisimilitude that central casting could never have duplicated. The dialog sparkled, the moral code was clear.

      "I feel about Casablanca that it has a life of its own, Bergman said toward the end of her life. There is something mystical about it. It seems to have filled a need, a need that was there before the film."

      Yet from the beginning, the film’s success defied reason. Some early readers at Warner Bros. discouraged producer Hal Wallis from acquiring the play that inspired the movie, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, because it was melodramatic hokum. This guy Rick is two-parts Hemingway, one-part Scott Fitzgerald, and a dash of café Christ, commented writer Robert Buckner. For all of Bogart and Bergman’s on-screen chemistry, off-screen they never clicked. An early showing of the final cut, in Warner’s Huntington Park theater, got a lukewarm reception. Even screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, who were responsible for most of the script, wrote to Wallis saying they thought the film was going to be a big flop. Wallis kept the note, Julius told Aljean Harmetz, author of Round Up the Usual Suspects. Whenever we had an argument with him about anything, he would open his desk, take out the memo and give it to us.

      Fate seemed to intervene in Casablanca’s favor at each juncture. Everybody Comes to Rick’s landed with Wallis five days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and was rushed into production to take advantage of an expected demand for war films. Wallis wanted William Wyler to direct, but Warner’s Michael Curtiz was available, so he got the job. In a deal to secure Cary Grant for Arsenic and Old Lace, Warner almost lent Bogart to Columbia, Grant’s studio, but the swap got called off because of Columbia’s scheduling issues. The biggest bit of luck for Casablanca was Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa by Allied troops, many of whom came ashore at Casablanca, the port city in northern Morocco, prompting Warner to move up the release date by more than half a year.

      Audiences connected immediately and Casablanca became the sixth top-grossing movie for 1943 and, the following year, the winner of three Academy Awards—for Best Picture, Best Writing, and Best Direction. But it was really Bogart’s death in January 1957 that resurrected the actor as a renegade hero, and with him, the reputation of Casablanca. An arts theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began screening Casablanca for Harvard students, who started showing up in snap-brim hats and trench coats, able to quote sections of the film by heart. Bogie fever spread. To bogart became a verb for the 1960s counterculture, meaning to hang on to a shared marijuana cigarette, after the actor’s penchant for smoking. Bogart’s ghost turned up in a Woody Allen play and movie, Play It Again, Sam, offering romantic advice to its nebbishy hero.

      Today, there is hardly a list of best films of all time that doesn’t include Casablanca in its top five. Some even have it at No. 1. The movie is densely plotted. There are no chase scenes or special effects (unless you count the spinning globe used just after the opening credits). Its characters are ambiguous, complex. The story is sentimental. It celebrates sacrifice and idealism. In short, Casablanca possesses none of the features of a 2018 box office hit. And yet the film is as beloved as ever, its themes and ideals serving as a lingua franca connecting disparate generations. As Senator Elizabeth Warren has written, "Each time I watch it, Casablanca gives me hope."

      Here’s looking at you, Casablanca.

      HERITAGE AUCTIONS

      EXOTIC LOOK This poster was produced in Italy in 1946, the year the film opened in that country, and sold for a record-breaking $478,000 in the United States in 2017.

      MARC WANAMAKER/BISON ARCHIVES

      Paul Henreid, Ingrid Bergman, and Humphrey

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