Casablanca Trivia Quiz: Here's Looking at You, Kid

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Refugees arriving in Casablanca in the winter of 1941 had already spent months on a route that ran from Paris down to Marseille, across the Mediterranean to Oran, and then west by rail, and the city was where that route stalled. Morocco answered to Vichy France, the German presence was official rather than occupying, and exit visas for Lisbon were the only currency worth holding. Rick Blaine's cafe sits in the middle of the stall, a gambling room and nightclub where a French police captain collects bribes at one table while a black market in travel papers runs at the next. Rick serves everyone and commits to nobody. That arrangement lasts until Ilsa Lund walks in with the resistance organiser she married.

Warner Bros. bought the story in early 1942 from an unproduced stage play titled Everybody Comes to Rick's, written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, at a price reported at the time as a record for a property that had never been staged. The script was then rewritten while the cameras ran. Twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein handled much of the dialogue, Howard Koch worked the political material, and pages reached the set late enough that, by Ingrid Bergman's own later account, she asked director Michael Curtiz which man her character loved and was told to play the scenes without settling it. Max Steiner, who wrote the score, wanted As Time Goes By removed and replaced with a song of his own, and could not have the scenes reshot because Bergman had already cropped her hair for For Whom the Bell Tolls. Dooley Wilson, who plays Sam, was a drummer by trade, and the piano heard in the film is somebody else's hands.

The supporting cast carried its own history into the film. Conrad Veidt, who plays Major Strasser, had been a star of Weimar cinema in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and left Germany in 1933, then spent his Hollywood years playing the officers he had fled. Peter Lorre turns up as Ugarte, the small time dealer who hands Rick the letters of transit, and Sydney Greenstreet presides over a rival club as Signor Ferrari. Claude Rains gives Captain Renault the film's driest lines and its most cynical arithmetic. Curtiz himself was Hungarian, and a large share of the players filling the cafe were emigres from the same continent the plot is trying to get people out of.

The scene that gathers all of it happens at the bar. German officers start into Die Wacht am Rhein, Victor Laszlo crosses the floor and tells the house band to play La Marseillaise, and the room sings the Germans down. Madeleine Lebeau, playing Yvonne, is in tears through the shot, and she had left occupied France herself two years earlier. She was the last credited member of the cast to die, in 2016.

The film opened in New York in late November 1942, weeks after Allied landings in North Africa put the city's name in the headlines, and went into general release that January while Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Casablanca. It took three Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Its most quoted line, the request to play the song again, is never spoken in the form everybody repeats. The answer key waits below the quiz.