Details

Release year: 1942

Storyline

A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.

Top credits

Directors

Michael Curtiz

Writers

Cast

Humphrey Bogart — Rick Blaine
Ingrid Bergman — Ilsa Lund
Paul Henreid — Victor Laszlo
Claude Rains — Captain Louis Renault

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Awards

3 wins & 5 nominations

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Did you know

• Many of the actors who played the Nazis were in fact European Jews who had fled Nazi occupation.

• Rick's Cafe was one of the few original sets built for the film, the rest were all recycled from other Warner Bros. productions due to wartime restrictions on building supplies.

• During the scene in which the "La Marseillaise" is sung over the German song "Die Wacht am Rhein" ("The Watch on the Rhine"), many of the extras had real tears in their eyes as a large number were actual refugees from Nazi persecution in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and were overcome by the emotions the scene brought out. The scene was inspired by Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937), in which French soldiers in a German POW camp sing the song as a similar gesture of defiance. Marcel Dalio, who played Emil the croupier, had also appeared in The Grand Illusion (as Lieutenant Rosenthal). "La Marseillaise" was written in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in Strasbourg after the declaration of war by France against Austria and was originally titled "Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin" ("War Song for the Rhine Army").