A Studio Film With Real Refugees In It

Warner Brothers bought an unproduced play, put three writers on it and started filming before the script was finished, which should have produced a disaster. What it produced instead is a film whose plot is a series of transit documents and whose subject is neutrality running out. Rick's cafe is staged as a place where every nationality in Europe is waiting for paperwork, and the casting is not a metaphor: a large part of the supporting cast had genuinely fled the continent, including Conrad Veidt, who plays the Nazi major and had left Germany with his Jewish wife in 1933. The film was rushed into release to coincide with the Allied landings in North Africa, so its audience watched it while the place names were in the newspapers.