I Morocco, where he encounters a former lover (Bergman) - now married to a French Resistance leader.
             The Hollywood fairy-tale was actually filmed during a time of US ties with Vichy France when President Roosevelt equivocated and vacillated between pro-Vichy or pro-Gaullist support. And it was rushed into general release almost three weeks after the Allied landing at the Axis-occupied, North African city of Casablanca. It played first on Thanksgiving Day, 1942 at the Hollywood Theater in New York. [On the last day of 1942, Roosevelt actually screened the film at the White House.] Its strategic timing was further enhanced at the time of its general release in early 1943 by the January 1943 Casablanca Conference (a summit meeting) in the Moroccan city with Churchill, DeGaulle (the charismatic Free French leader) and General Henri Giraud (supportive of Marshal Petain), when Roosevelt broke US-Vichy relations.
             The film was considered for eight Academy Awards for the year 1943, including Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Best Supporting Actor (Claude Rains), Best B/W Cinematography, Best Score, and Best Film Editing. It won three awards (presented in March of 1944): Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.
             At the film's beginning, the credits are displayed over a political map of Africa. In the first five minutes of footage, the introductory details are succinctly communicated. Over a crude, slowly-spinning globe and a zoom-in shot toward Western Europe, a doom-laden, ominous voice-over, similar to the March of Time newsreel narrations [by Westbrook Pegler], explains the turbulent Nazi takeover of Europe, the coming of World War II, and the frenetic stream of refugees (superimposed over the globe) from persecution out of Hitler's besieged Europe to Vichy France and North Africa. With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully or desperately toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon be...