What Rick might have really seen in Casablanca.

Movie night on Volendam, Casablanca. I have seen it so many times that I “sang along,” quietly, with some of the greatest lines. The film was set in November 1941 and shaped many of my ideas of Casablanca. But was the reality of Casablanca what we remember from the movie or something different? What would Rick have seen if he were in Casablanca in December 1941?

The image of Casablanca portrayed in the movie was more like Casablanca in 1911, not what it was like 30 years later. In 1912 the city, and country, were occupied by the French. The walled Medina was not what the French considered appropriate for a colonial center. They set about building a new city outside the walls of the Medina. Two of the first buildings were the Hotel Excelsior, completed in 1916, and the building next store, Magasins Paris-Maroc, a department store. They were built outside the main gate of the Medina on the site of a slaughterhouse. They, along with a clock tower at the Medina gate defined the “Place de France,” now United Nations Square.

The Hotel Excelsior’s Brasserie was the place where, like the fictional “Rick’s Café American” deals went down. “Everyone goes to the Excelsior.” I am sure Major Strasser would have stayed in the Excelsior. But if the film were set in The Excelsior the film would have taken on a different cast.

And Louis Renault, if he were really the Prefect of Police for Casablanca, would have been in the Art Deco house of Justice. Although the police precinct near the port looks like it could have been in the movie. Here are some of the public buildings where the film would have played out if it were not shot in Hollywood and Arizona.

By 1941 Casablanca was an art deco city, its angular lines softened by the curves of the earlier Art Nouveau, and some of the tilework and decorative touches of the Moorish style. You can still see this in Casablanca today.

And if Rick wanted to go to Church, he could have gone to Sacre Coeur, the Art Deco Cathedral that tries to build on the Gothic. Now it is a concert hall and art gallery, but there were no exhibitions on hand when we visited this trip.

And what about the Medina? The minaret shown at the beginning of the film has a striking resemblance to the clock tower that stands at the entrance to the Medina on United Nations’s square, but certainly Rick would not have seen the geodesic dome that is in the square now.

The first time I came to Casablanca on a job assignment I went looking for the movie and found a different time capsule of early 20th century art deco that I love coming back to. “I’m Shocked, Shocked” when I think that this “Art Deco Moderne” is pushing and exceeding a century old.