At first the German connection for the classic film Casablanca may seem obvious. Aren't there Germans all over the place in the movie? Nazi villains like Major Strasser and all that? Wasn't it released during World War II?

	The airport arrival scene with Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser was the only scene in Casablanca shot outside the studio—at the Van Nuys airport. The famous foggy departure scene when Bergman (Ilsa) leaves Bogart (Rick) was shot indoors.

However, as is usually the case in Hollywood, appearances deceive. Much of the script of Casablanca is a fairy tale worthy of the brothers Grimm! Little of it is based in reality—a fact that the creators of the script never denied. There actually were very few Germans in Casablanca. But there were many in Casablanca. And quite a few Austrians and Austro-Hungarians too. This imported talent worked both in front of and behind the camera.

Most movie fans are more familiar with his music for Gone With the Wind, but the Austrian Max Steiner is one of the "invisible stars of Casablanca." Although he received three Oscars as a film music composer, Steiner's marvelous score for Casablanca was unjustly ignored for an Academy Award.

Director Michael Curtiz was Hungarian, but most of his early film work took place in Austria between 1919 and 1926, before he came to the US. He has not always received the credit due him for his work in Europe or on Casablanca and many other films he made for Warner Brothers.

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It is unfortunate that the German Conrad Veidt died within a year of completing Casablanca, as we shall never know what “Major Strasser” might have done later—having perhaps shed his Nazi-officer typecasting. His early work in Germany showed the wonderful things he could do with different kinds of roles.

Hollywood also shortchanged the Austrian Peter Lorre. His Ugarte in Casablanca is one of his very best characterizations—if also the shortest. But most of his later roles could not match his work in Casablanca or the earlier Maltese Falcon and the classic M in Germany. (See movie posters for Peter Lorre's films in our Poster Shop.)

Here you can find out more about these people and other Germanic cast and crew members who helped make Casablanca the classic it has become.

“...I can't explain why Casablanca succeeded. First, there wasn't a word of truth in the picture. There were no Germans in Casablanca, certainly not in uniform, no letters of transit, there was nothing. And it was slapped together.”
   - Julius Epstein, co-author of the “Casablanca” screenplay, in Casablanca: Behind the Scenes by Harlan Lebo

The Studio

Julius Epstein's evaluation (above) is neither accurate nor objective. He claimed to hate the film that he and his brother Phillip helped create: “Casablanca is one of my least favorite pictures. I'm tired of talking about it after thirty years.” Some of his disdain may be a result of later arguments about who wrote what, and who should get credit for particular script elements. Howard Koch, another member of the writing team that involved no less than six screenwriters over time—credited and uncredited—offended everyone, including the authors of the original play upon which Casablanca was based, when he wrote an article for New York magazine in 1973 taking sole credit for most of the Casablanca script, and that the original play, “Everybody Comes to Rick's,” offered “but little in the way of a story adaptable to the screen.” He later retracted his claim and apologized for most of what he had written in the article.

Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser CASABLANCA CAST and CREW from Austria/Germany    • Curt Bois    • Michael Curtiz    • Helmut Dantine    • Paul Henreid    • Peter Lorre 1    • Peter Lorre 2    • S.Z. Sakall    • Max Steiner    • Ludwig Stossel    • Conrad Veidt    • Wolfgang Zilzer CASABLANCA DVDs • Casablanca (1942)   Special Edition DVD • Casablanca (1942)   Regular DVD • Collector's Edition DVD

Epstein could have pointed out other, more significant holes in the Casablanca plot. Many critics (including Umberto Eco) certainly have done so. Just one minor example concerns the rousing patriotic musical playoff scene between the “Marseillaise” and “Die Wacht am Rhein.” The studio had been made aware that the German song “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“Watch on the Rhine”) was actually not a Nazi-approved song. The “Horst Wessel Lied” was in reality the true Nazi anthem, but Warners did not have the rights to use it and did not want to risk being cut off from neutral countries—a large market for their new film, particularly in South America. So authenticity gave way to practicality, not an uncommon occurrence at the studio well known for being stingy. For some reason a logical suggestion to use “Deutschland über alles”—the only other Nazi-sanctioned song—as an alternate was ignored and “Die Wacht am Rhein” stayed.

Director Michael Curtiz, though a wonderful technician, was seldom concerned with historical accuracy or genuine facts. If it came down to accurate or dramatic, he would always choose the latter. He once remarked, “Don't worry what's logical. I make it go so fast no one notices.”

But do such flaws really matter? Few filmgoers know or care about the factual differences to this day, and there is hardly a Hollywood film out there that doesn't play fast and loose with the facts. (See Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.) And Epstein is definitely in the minority when it comes to appreciating this film classic. Most people would agree with the British Film Institute, which rated Casablanca “the best film ever made.”

The credit for Casablanca's success must go to many people—the writers, the set designers, director Curtiz, cameraman Arthur Edeson, musical director Max Steiner, the actors, studio head Jack Warner (who wanted to take all the credit!), and especially producer Hal B. Wallis. But the classic Casablanca is a classic example of the Austro-Germanic impact on Hollywood. It is an American film made largely by Europeans with European acting talent.

Of the 14 performers whose names appear in the opening credits of the film, only three were born in America (Bogart, Wilson, Page). Of the film's crew and bit players, many were refugees from Europe, and most—like technical advisor Robert Aisner—had fled from the spread of Nazism. Ironically, Aisner had even taken the very trail outlined in the film's opening sequence: “Paris to Marseilles. Across the Mediterranean to Oran. Then by train or auto or on foot across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.” And then on to Lisbon and America.

Critic Pauline Kael has pointed out that Casablanca would have been a completely different movie without this European influence. “If you think of...all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn't have had anything like the color and tone it had.” Yet Casablanca could not have been made anywhere but in America and in the Hollywood studio system that existed at the time.

In particular, the studio known as Warner Brothers—one of many Germanic connections for Casablanca—and run chiefly by Jack Warner (1892-1978) had bought the rights to the script of an unproduced play entitled “Everybody Comes to Rick's” for $20,000 in December 1941. (Despite some important plot and character changes made by Warners' team of writers, almost every key element and much of the dialogue in Casablanca can be seen in the original play, written by high school English teacher Murray Burnett and his friend Joan Alison after Burnett had made a “frightening” 1938 trip to Nazi-occupied Vienna.) Warner producer Hal Wallis (Harold Brent Wallis, 1899-1986) put his considerable influence behind the new project and, just as 1941 ended and only weeks after Pearl Harbor, he announced his new title for the motion picture: “Casablanca.” In selling his project Wallis compared it to the 1938 United Artists romantic thriller Algiers starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr: “This could indeed be another Algiers—a romantic story in an exotic setting.”

The brothers Warner came from a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family originally from Krasnashiltz, Poland. Their father, Benjamin Warner (the name may originally have been Varna but this is uncertain), had married Pearl Leah Eichelbaum (German for "oak tree") in 1876. Two of the Warner children, Hirsch (later Harry) and Anna, were born in Europe before the family took a ship from Hamburg to America in 1883. The rest of the children were born in the US except for Jack, who was born Jacob Warner in London, Ontario, Canada. (Warner producer Hal Wallis was also the son of Jewish immigrants—in Chicago.)

Warner Bros. had a reputation as the studio that produced unadorned, spare action and entertainment features on a tight budget—rather than the more lavish, sophisticated, big-budget films by studios such as Paramount and MGM. The studio was also know for its “biopics”—biographies of historic figures (most directed by William Dieterle). In the early 1940s, before and after Casablanca, the studio turned out a number of anti-Nazi war movies. The Jewish Warner bothers had every reason to detest Hitler's Germany, and neither Harry nor Jack Warner was ever reluctant to express disgust with the Nazis—at a time when it still was not fashionable to do so. (We tend to forget that even after Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland, most Americans were opposed to US involvement until Pearl Harbor.) Warners shut down their German operations in July 1934, years before most of the other US studios. Fox, MGM, and Paramount were all still active in Germany into 1939. (Ironically, the fledgling studio's first big hit had been My Four Years in Germany back in the silent-movie days of 1917.) The interesting story of Warner Brothers' early anti-Nazi stance is detailed in the book Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.'s Campaign Against Nazism
by Micael Birdwell.

Over the years, seldom-loved, oft-hated Jack Warner's tight-fisted leadership made the studio one of Hollywood's biggest and allowed it to survive the hard times of the depression. (Warner is reputed to have once sent a memo to director Howard Hawks: “Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop.”)

Casablanca was no exception to Warners' penny-pinching ways. Some stars stayed in or were cut from the picture based solely on their asking salary. German Conrad Veidt won out over Austrian Otto Preminger in the role of Major Strasser primarily because Veidt commanded $2,000 per week less than Preminger. Some minor Casablanca roles went to a different actor because of much smaller wage discrepancies. Many Casablanca sets, including the French Street and the Paris train station, were recycled from previous Warner productions. Wartime restrictions limited on location shooting, and the only scene in the entire movie that was shot outside the studio was the airport arrival scene. The Van Nuys airport, decked out with a few extra palms, doubled as the Casablanca field where Major Strasser arrives to be welcomed by Captain Renault (Claude Rains).

Casablanca won three Academy Awards (best screenplay, best director, best picture) in 1943. (The picture was released at the end of 1942, but the Academy rules were different than they are today.) But when it came time for Casablanca to receive its well-deserved Oscar for best picture, there was an embarrassing incident. As Casablanca producer Hal B. Wallis rightfully arose to accept the Academy Award for Warners, he was dumbfounded to see Jack Warner rush ahead of him, dash to the stage, and accept the statuette for Casablanca! Everyone in Graumann's Chinese Theater that night and all the Hollywood trade journals and newspapers were equally astounded. The incident made headlines for some time. Although Wallis publicly declared that it was no big deal, he was privately angry and it was not long before he left Warners to become a successful independent producer. His achievement in producing a great picture and a box-office hit resulted—oddly enough—in his departure from the studio where it had been filmed. Casablanca was one of his last pictures for Warner Brothers.

For more about the studio that produced Casablanca, see our Warner Brothers page.

On the next page - Casablanca's director, Michael Curtiz.

CASABLANCA FINANCIAL FACTS Total estimated cost to film Casablanca: $1,039,000 Total cost of ALL acting talent for Casablanca: $217,603 Director's (Curtiz) salary: $73,400 Producer's (Wallis) salary charged to Casablanca: $53,000 Screenwriters' salaries (total): $47,000 Humphrey Bogart's salary: $36,667 Salaries for Bergman, Henreid, and Veidt: $75,000 ($25,000 each) Claude Rains' salary: $22,000 Sidney Greenstreet's salary: $7,500 Peter Lorre's salary: $2,333 (he was killed off early in the film) MORE > Vincent's 'Casablanca' Page - BUDGET Cast and crew salaries as well as the film's total budget

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