Casablanca (1942) on Netflix
Rick Blaine runs a nightclub in Casablanca. A petty crook leaves him letters of transit, then the police arrest the crook. Ilsa Lund, his former lover, arrives with her husband, Victor Laszlo.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb8.5/10661,092 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Casablanca, Rick Blaine runs a nightclub and gambling den whose tables draw refugees hoping to reach America, along with Vichy French and German officials. A petty crook called Ugarte has letters of transit, taken from two murdered German couriers, that let the bearer pass through German-held Europe to neutral Portugal. He asks Rick to keep them, and is arrested that night by the police of Captain Louis Renault. Then Ilsa Lund comes into the club with her husband, Victor Laszlo, a Czechoslovak Resistance leader who escaped a Nazi camp. The letters are their only route out, and Major Heinrich Strasser has arrived in the city to stop him.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Casablanca (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The final scene's Lockheed Electra airplane was a cardboard cutout, and the people around it were little-person extras; fog was used to hide how unconvincing the model looked.
- Max Steiner wanted to replace "As Time Goes By" with his own song, but Ingrid Bergman had already cut her hair short for her next role, so the scenes could not be reshot; he built the whole score on the song instead.
- Producer Hal Wallis was humiliated when Jack L. Warner rushed the stage to accept the Best Picture Oscar for Casablanca, a film Wallis had created and Warner had nothing to do with; the incident led Wallis to leave Warner Bros. in April.
- Warner Bros. paid $20,000 for the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's, the most anyone in Hollywood had ever paid for an unproduced play at that time.
- The film was shot in order, which was not common then, mostly since just the first half of the script was finished when shooting started.
- The piano from the Paris flashback scenes sold at Sotheby's in 2012 for more than $600,000, and the piano Sam "plays" in Rick's café sold at Bonhams in 2014 for $3.4 million.
- The film was banned in Ireland in 1943 for portraying Vichy France and Nazi Germany in a "sinister light" and violating wartime neutrality; it passed with cuts in 1945, and a version with only one scene cut was passed in 1974.
- The 1952 West German release removed all scenes with Nazis and most World War II references; in the dubbed dialogue Victor Laszlo became a Norwegian atomic physicist pursued by Interpol, and the version ran 25 minutes shorter. A German version with the original plot was not released until 1975.
