“Here’s looking at you, kid”: The story behind the most iconic line in ‘Casablanca’
Screen dialogue can be a tricky customer. Thankfully, Casablanca didn’t suffer such a fate. At its best, it sings from the page and hits the viewer in a profound, mysterious way that gets stuck in the heart and lodged in the brain. But bad dialogue can make your toes curl. You become aware of your surroundings and realise you are just a human being in a movie theatre watching charlatans on screen pretending to be something they’re not. With that, the entire facade of cinema comes crashing down with it.
Master filmmakers, such as John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, and Robert Altman, seek to convey something as close to the truth as possible. They create the sense that you are eavesdropping when watching their pictures, reinforcing the magic of the cinematic experience.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the likes of Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Aaron Sorkin – filmmakers who relish the art of cultivating beautifully crafted dialogue. The way their characters talk is poetic, rhythmic, funny, shocking, and beguiling, concocted from a potent mix of source material from older movies, pop culture, and their own razor-sharp dialect.
Over the long lifespan of cinema, movies have gifted us some wonderful lines and dialogue that have almost transcended the pictures themselves. Like Clint Eastwood pointing his .44 Magnum revolver at a man’s head and saying, “Go ahead, make my day”, or Arnold Schwarzenegger as the time-travelling cyborg from the future saying, “I’ll be back”, or the famous line from Sunset Boulevard, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” said by Gloria Swanson. The list could go on and on.
Another film with some iconic lines that could easily be added to that list is Casablanca. However, the backstory to how one of its classic lines came about is not what you might imagine.
Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, is a World War II-set comedy-romance that follows Rick Blaine, the owner of a nightclub who helps an old love interest of his and her husband escape from the Nazis. As the couple plans their dangerous escape, they begin to fall in love. Though Casablanca exists as a timeless classic, at the time it was being made, the studio, actors, and director expected it to be another throwaway romance flick that had become commonplace during the era.
You may remember the famous line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Bogart uttered during the movie. But another equally iconic line was birthed not from the script but from Bogart improvising and joking on set.
The line “Here’s looking at you, kid” was actually something Bogart would say to Bergman off-camera when he was teaching her how to play poker, and not in any of the draft scripts. Bogart feeds the words into the film a number of times throughout the movie. The exact words were also said by Bogart eight years before Casablanca in his 1934 film Midnight.
It’s an interesting footnote on cinema history, proving that some of the most cherished and adored lines from the silver screen come from the brilliant minds of great writers but simply real-life moments. Casablanca wasn’t a huge success at the box office, even though Bogart offered one of his best performances, displaying he offers more than being just a leading man. But with time, the film has transcended into the realm of being one of Hollywood’s greatest romance pictures that is praised by critics and audiences across the world.
