Who Is Creatively Responsible For Casablanca's Success?

Many people pinpoint Casablanca's iconic fame to one name; Warner Brothers. However, a large amount of multitalented individuals inside of the intuition brought Casablanca together and made it the iconic trailblazer it is 80 years later.

Some would say that Casablanca's fame was based off of elements of luck and well they are right! Days after Pearl Harbor, Warner Brothers received a play called " Everybody comes to Rick's" which was the  base line narrative for Casablanca. Even though the film was based off of the play, there was not a set ending until the last day of filming.

Casablanca was a very highly collaborative film with over 50 different roles involved. Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca and over 173 other films, brought iconic elements to the film such as empathy. Being a refugee of the war himself, he brought knowledge and experience and placed it into the set, dialogue and style of the film. 

Throughout the film, the director of photography; Arthur Edeson , portrays the emotion of each scene through the lighting and miss-en-scene. A lot of dark lighting and shadow was used to represent the intimate and intensity of the narrative. Casablanca didn't mind looking artificial as they wanted to place the audience into a fantasy that they could relate to and recognize why certain objects or lighting was put there (mise-en-scene) and to tell the narrative alongside the dialogue, this disobeyed the classical style and made Casablanca stand out from other films at the time.

Orry-Kelly, Costume designer for Casablanca, used the costumes to set a mood but to also portray the multitude of different classes and ethnicity's. Hats were a key factor in setting the mood, especially in the penultimate scene where the hats cast shadows over different parts of different characters to set an ambiguous tone. Orry-Kelly also set a specific colour palette for each character, for example the "Heroic" characters had a soft palette and the "Villain" characters had a darker, more harsh palette.

Casablanca wouldn't be Casablanca without the famous editing and music. Owen Marks used invisible editing to show the different perspectives of each character and to convey the different emotions though out the narrative. The glue to the film was really the music, Max Steiner reinforced the narrative by using iconic sounds and the infamous song "As time goes by" which is featured throughout the film as an anchor to the 2 protagonist and their love; Ingrid Birdman, Ilsa and Humphrey Bogart, Rick.

Ironically, as the filming for Casablanca was coming to an end, allies landed in Casablanca to fight against the Nazi's in World War 2. This gained Casablanca a lot of publicity and the majority off the audience went to view the film to feel patriotic and show support to the troops fighting. The film touched people’s emotions and gave them something to relate to (Uses and Gratification Theory).