Casablanca is a favorite movie for fans of classic Hollywood—and a favorite among a general public hard pressed to name more than a handful of films produced before 1960. Unlike its carefully composed contemporary, Citizen King, which usually outranks it among film historians, Casablanca resulted from a series of happy accidents. It was written on the run as events unfolded in real time.
By pure coincidence, Casablanca opened in theaters just as Allied forces secured the city, working at first in an uneasy dance with the sort of Vichy officials seen in the film. In her history of the Moroccan city in the war years, Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II, Meredith Hindley paints a picture that will be familiar to fans of the film. The cosmopolitan Franco-Islamic city was filled with refugees fro Hitler’s Europe. Many of them were “waiting, waiting”—as the movie’s voiceover had it—for visas to the New World, sometimes via Lisbon just like the movie’s storyline.
Alas, there was no real-life prototype for Bogart’s character, Rick. His presence “would have been unusual,” Hindley writes, because there were scarcely a hundred Americans in all of French Morocco, most of them diplomats or representatives of American companies. But the one known African American, the night watchman at the U.S. consulate in Casablanca, was named Sam.
“Even with the discrepancies” between fact and cinema, “the core of the film’s story holds true,” the author concludes. Destination Casablanca is a fascinating look into the reality of a complicated political situation that inspired a classic.
