When Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) was originally released, round about Christmas 1942, no one was in any doubt about its meaning. Warner Brothers, in a magazine advertisement late in 1942, explicitly linked the film to the Allied landings in North Africa on 11 November of that year and spoke of Casablanca as a ‘symbol of the American way of living’, that is, as a film committed to democracy. A film trade magazine of the time wrote that:

In 1942–43 it was impossible to view Casablanca as other than inseparably locked into the Second World War and the film's central meaning as other than the moral choice of the individual to be passive in the face of or actively resist fascism. In certain respects, the composite figure of Rick/Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) became the emblematic anti-fascist hero of the time, initially reluctant to make a commitment but driven by human decency into an active stance against fascism. Indeed, this is the kind of role Bogart would also play in Across the Pacific (Vincent Sherman and John Huston, 1942), Action in the North Atlantic (Lloyd Bacon, 1943), Passage to Marseille (Michael Curtiz, 1944) and, perhaps most famously of all, To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944).

In 1992, Casablanca was re-released. To mark its half-centenary, a special commemorative poster was issued with the figure of Rick/Bogart at the centre of the composition as the forward point of a triangle which unites him with Ilse/Ingrid Bergman (1915–82) and Sam/Dooley Wilson (1886–1953), the black singer/piano player. The meaning is clear – Casablanca is a film about a love affair between Rick and Ilse, with Sam tying them together through the playing of ‘As Time Goes By’.