by Steve Rockwell
In 1940 Murray Burnett, co-wrote Everybody Comes to Rick’s with Joan Alison. The play, though not produced, served as a model for Rick’s Café in the story that became Casablanca. Rick’s Café had not been a complete screenwriter invention. A few years prior, Burnett and his wife had stumbled on a café in the south of France. The experience stayed with them. Its mixture of refugees, expatriates, and assorted adventurers, mingling in the shadow of an impending war, had made the moment unforgettable.
When released in 1942, Casablanca became one of the most influential films in Hollywood history. Somehow, popular entertainment, political drama, and romance, molded into something durable that withstood the test of time. Casablanca became art without announcing itself as “art.”
La Belle Aurore, the café that Burnett experienced in 1938 in the south of France, may have been just one of many potential models for Rick’s Café. It has been suggested that the American Bar at Hotel Eggers in Gothenburg, Sweden, might also have fit the bill. The hotel itself was built in 1859, making it one of the oldest continuously-operating hotels in Europe. Their American Bar was completed in 1884, predating the fictional Rick’s Café Américain of Casablanca by nearly 60 years.
In 1942, Hotel Eggers hosted a similar cast of wartime characters. Already, by the 1890s, besides its American Bar and restaurant, they had the Moriska Café – Moorish, Moroccan atmosphere of their own.
(to be continued)