Andrew Sarris has called Casablanca “the happiest of happy accidents and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.” Three different sets of writers and a producer worked on different elements of the script. Each had completely different approaches to the final product. Ingrid Bergman wanted the role of Maria, a brutalized partisan fighter in For Whom the Bell Tolls, was sick of playing docile women like Ilsa, and grudgingly accepted her role in Casablanca when another actress was selected for the role she really wanted. When circumstances made it possible for her to play Maria after all, she was so happy that she immediately cut her hair for the new role. Max Steiner, the composer of the score, hated As Time Goes By and had gotten permission to replace it with a song he had written. They were unable to make the substitution because Bergman’s changed appearance made it impossible for them to re-shoot.
What is left out, however, is that the same tale of reversals and collaborations could be told about many studio films from that era. The truth is that the producer Hal Wallis, the director Michael Curtiz, and their talented writers knew how to craft a great film and did not stop until they had a workable final product. There was no accident in having great performers, or a great composer like Max Steiner working on the score. They were all under contract because they were very good at what they did. Aljean Harmetz, who wrote a thorough gossipy book about the film, interviewed Howard Koch, one of the principal writers involved. Koch noted: “I’ve got almost a mystical feeling about Casablanca … That it made itself somehow. That it needed to be made and that we were all conveyors on the belt, taking it there.”
Harmetz notes that after WWII “when things got ugly,” the studio asked Julius and Philip Epstein, the film-writing team otherwise known as the twins or the brothers, “to fill out a two-page questionnaire attesting to their loyalty to America, the twins only answered the first two questions. (1) ‘Have you ever belonged to a subversive organization?’ ‘Yes.’ (2) ‘Name the organization.’ ‘Warner Bros.’” Where Howard Koch was reverential and loved the ideals in the film, the Epsteins filled the script with wisecracks and dubbed the final concoction “slick shit.” If there was an artistic signature, it was this scrappy wisecracking studio ethic. If it had been made at another studio, the film probably would have gone the way of many other well meaning but heavy-handed war movies. The twins at Warner Bros. gave it a cynical and lighthearted toughness that mix the idealism and sentimentality into something uniquely American.
Critics have damned Michael Curtiz because he has no identifiable style as a director. For most of his long and distinguished career as an A-List director, Curtiz thought of his work as a craft not an art. He was extremely combative on the set and used his cameramen like interchangeable pawns rather than as creative allies. There was, however, no one better at seeing and maximizing the visual possibilities of a scene. He is as much responsible for the atmosphere, visual symbolism and unforgettable moments in this film as any of the writers and performers. While Casablanca is easy to pick apart into elements of failure, Curtiz and others fought through numerous edits and revisions for the integrity of the whole. The perfected expression they developed together will live forever.