Synopsis

In wartime Casablanca, cynical cafe owner Rick Blaine is unexpectedly reunited with Ilsa Lund, the woman who once left him in Paris. Ilsa has arrived with her husband, resistance leader Victor Laszlo, who needs Rick's help to escape the Nazis. As police pressure intensifies, Rick must choose between personal resentment and a larger moral duty.

Factoids & Trivia

• Warner Bros. bought the rights to the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's for $20,000, an unusually large sum for a play that had never been staged.

• Production ran from May 25 to August 3, 1942. The film was shot entirely on Warner Bros. studio sets rather than in Morocco.

• The New York premiere took place on November 26, 1942, shortly after Allied forces landed in North Africa and captured Casablanca. The national release followed on January 23, 1943, allowing the studio to benefit from the location's sudden prominence in wartime news.

• The screenplay was still being revised during production, and some performers received dialogue only shortly before scenes were filmed. The uncertainty surrounding the ending became part of the production's history.

• Casablanca won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. It received eight nominations in total.

• The film was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1989, one of the first 25 titles selected for preservation.

• The American Film Institute ranked it No. 2 on its 1997 list of the greatest American films and No. 3 on the 2007 anniversary edition. AFI also placed it first among American movie love stories.

• Wartime shortages influenced the production. A nightclub scene reportedly retained an accidental glimpse of comedian Jack Benny because reshooting the footage would have wasted scarce film stock.

• The two pianos seen in the film later became collectors' items. The piano used in the Paris scenes sold at auction in 1988 for $154,000.