Film Forum

(1942) “I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “What waters? We’re in the desert.” “I was misinformed.” Die Wacht am Rhein vs. La Marseillaise. “Round up the usual suspects.” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” “Here’s looking at you, kid.” From unproduced play, to just another Warner B melodrama with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan, to Bogart/Bergman star vehicle, to multiple Oscar winner, to cultural icon. The dialogue, which fans can now reel off by the yard, was often handed to the cast minutes before shooting, as re-writes proliferated, with the question of whether Bergman ended up with Bogart or Paul Henreid left to the final day of production. The Allied landing in North Africa, just before the premiere, made it a prequel to history. Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director made it the hit of 1942. Seventy-five years later, its allure is greater than ever. “Play it, Sam…Play ‘As Time Goes By.’” 35mm. Approx. 102 mins.

Advance copies of Noah Isenberg’s We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie will be available at our concession from December 28 to January 3 only – months ahead of the official publication date. You can read an excerpt of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’ here.

A WARNER BROS. RELEASE

Reviews

“Has been viewed as a glamorous love story, a quotable relic of Hollywood's heyday, and a gateway drug for classic-film addicts. But against the current rise of nationalism and xenophobia, the political climate that generations have taken as a backdrop for the romance of Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) and Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) crashes to the forefront… Casablanca was filmed in the safety of the Warner Bros. lot, but the cast of immigrants and exiles who had fled the Third Reich conveyed their visceral fear. While the future was uncertain, the resolute characters of this exquisite wartime drama found peace through love and resistance.”
- Serena Donadoni, The Village Voice 

“The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed… Casablanca is about striving for something meaningful. It's also a tale of sacrifice in the name of greater good, set in a mysterious world of shadows, booze, cigarette smoke, and memories. The love story at the center of the film allows its heroes to tap into something special within their selves, and if they lost it in Paris, somehow they got it back in Casablanca. The film is all of those things at once, but it's also about these people, these faces, and all the little moments between them. It reminds me that when we're in relationships, we learn more about who we are reflected in other people, and when we go to the movies, the great ones can do the same thing.”
– Jeremiah Kipp, Slant

“ONE OF THE MOST GLORIOUSLY ROMANTIC MOVIES EVER MADE.” 
– Time Out

“Nothing shines quite like the golden age of Hollywood. Here is a melodrama that never gets old.”
– Heather Baysa, The Village Voice

“With the striking faces and personalities of Humphrey Bogart as Blaine and Ingrid Bergman as his beloved, Ilsa Lund, Curtiz’s film burgeoned from a play of no importance to the embodiment of romance in cinema. Casablanca is timelessly arresting thanks to a remarkable supporting cast (Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and Dooley Wilson, notably) and a bevy of pungent witticisms carried by Bogart’s languishing mystery man."
– Samantha Vacca, Brooklyn Magazine

“When CASABLANCA premiered in 1942, in the middle of the war and just two weeks after the city of Casablanca itself had surrendered to General Patton’s troops, even the most optimistic of Tinseltown dreamers could hardly have predicted that it would go on to become perhaps the most beloved of all Hollywood movies. And yet this ‘picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap,’ as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it at the time, would go on not only to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but to enjoy more revival screenings than any other film in the history of cinema. Seventy years after the film’s release, the Academy of Motion Pictures selected Casablanca to inaugurate its ‘Oscar Outdoors’ series at it new open-air theater in the heart of Hollywood. As Umberto Eco once said, Casablanca is ‘not one movie; it is movies.’”
– Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie

“Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it.”
– Roger Ebert

“In the entire history of American cinema only a few other movies—Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather—have been loved as much and as well as Casablanca…The most familiar movie in the world is still fresh…The universal adoration has been produced by an unrepeatable combination of impudent wit and doomed romanticism, all of it held together by voluptuously emotional anti-fascist sentiment…The general level of craftsmanship and Burbank Orientalism is superb… what André Bazin called ‘the genius of the system.’”
– David Denby, The New Yorker

“Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader