Humphrey Bogart And Ingrid Bergman Said Goodbye At The Airport, But A ‘Casablanca’ Sequel Was Announced To Bring Them Back

The last time Rick Blaine sees Ilsa Lund on screen, she is climbing into a plane for Lisbon with her husband, Victor Laszlo. Rick walks off into the fog with Captain Renault. In the 1942 film, that is where their story stops.

Don’t they get together in the end, though?

So the short answer is no: Casablanca never shows Rick and Ilsa meeting again, and Warner Bros. never made a sequel. Studio writers tried more than once to continue the story, though, and one authorized novel gave fans the reunion the movie refused them.

Another question, who Ilsa really loved, is harder. Even Ingrid Bergman said she wasn’t sure while she was making it.

What Does The Ending Actually Say?

The night before the airport scene, Ilsa comes to Rick’s apartment for the letters of transit. “If you knew how much I loved you, how much I still love you,” she tells him. Moments later she adds, “I wish I didn’t love you so much.” Then she hands him the decision: “You have to think for both of us. For all of us.”

At the airport, Rick decides for her. “Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor,” he says. “If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” When she asks what happens to them, he answers, “We’ll always have Paris.”

Rick then tells Laszlo a story. Ilsa only “pretended” to still love him to get the letters, he says, “and I let her pretend.” Renault sees through it. “That fairy tale you invented to send Ilsa away with him,” he tells Rick. “She went, but she knew you were lying.”

Renault’s line is the film’s own answer to the love question. The ending itself was older than the film.

Where Did The Story Come From?

Warner Bros. bought Everybody Comes to Rick’s in January 1942 for $20,000. According to Wikipedia’s production history, that was the most anyone in Hollywood had paid for an unproduced play. In the play, the Ilsa character is an American named Lois Meredith. She meets Laszlo only after her affair with Rick is over, and the play ends with Rick sending Lois and Laszlo to the airport.

The film’s catalog entry at the American Film Institute notes that studio memos show the play ended the same way the movie does. The Production Code also made the other outcome close to impossible. It forbade showing a wife leaving her husband for another man. The writers’ problem was making Ilsa’s departure believable.

Screenwriter Casey Robinson, who worked on the script without credit, saw the payoff before cameras rolled. In a memo to producer Hal Wallis, he wrote that by sending her away, Rick “is forcing the girl to live up to the idealism of her nature.” Yet the actress playing Ilsa remembered a very different set.

Was Ingrid Bergman Really Kept In The Dark?

Filming ran from May 25 to August 3, 1942, and it was shot mostly in sequence because only the first half of the script was ready. Film historian Frank Miller, quoted by Cinephilia & Beyond, says Bergman “always said that she didn’t know until the last day of shooting which man she went with.” Miller adds that director Michael Curtiz kept telling her to play it “in-between.” Writer Søren Høy, writing in the Aarhus University journal P.O.V., gives Curtiz’s answer as “Play it between.”

Howard Koch remembered the question coming to him. “Which man should I love more?” Bergman asked, according to Koch, and he told her to “play them both evenly.” He also admitted the bigger problem: “We were making a movie and still didn’t have an ending.” Julius Epstein said the solution came to him and his twin brother on the road. “We were driving to the studio. It came to us while we were driving!” The line they thought of was Renault’s “Round up the usual suspects.”

Miller also undercuts part of the legend. He notes that Bergman shot two key scenes after she learned Rick would send her away. So the writers knew where Ilsa was going. They just didn’t know how to get her there, and Bergman wasn’t told until late. That left one question the studio kept trying to answer.

Who Did Ilsa Really Love?

The film never states it outright, and that is deliberate. On screen, Ilsa tells Rick she still loves him and leaves with Laszlo, the man she admires and is married to. Renault’s verdict that “she knew you were lying” suggests Ilsa got on the plane loving Rick.

Fans have argued for decades over whether she would have stayed if Rick had let her. That reading is a theory, not canon. Michael Walsh, who wrote the novel that continues the story, told the Associated Press the film is popular because it is ambiguous. “There are a number of unanswered questions that the movie raises,” he said.

Did Anyone Ever Bring Rick And Ilsa Back Together?

Warner tried first. According to the AFI catalog, a Hollywood Reporter item in early 1943 announced a sequel titled Brazzaville, named for the Free French city Renault suggests in the final scene. Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet were to return, with Geraldine Fitzgerald in the cast. Bergman was not part of the plan, and the film was never made.

Koch tried next. His 1980 treatment, Return to Casablanca, jumps ahead to 1961 and follows Ilsa’s grown son, Richard. In it, the boy’s father turns out to be Rick, and Laszlo raised him as his own. Producer Cass Warner is a granddaughter of studio co-founder Harry Warner. The studio turned her pitch down in 1989 and passed again when she revived it in 2012, according to Philadelphia magazine and The Playlist.

The only version Warner authorized is Walsh’s 1998 novel, As Time Goes By, from Warner Books. According to the Associated Press, the book makes Rick a former New York gangster and sends Rick, Ilsa and Laszlo into the 1942 plot to kill Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Laszlo dies carrying out the assassination. Rick and Ilsa marry, and the book ends with them back in Casablanca with Sam. Ilsa even gets to give Rick’s famous toast.

Not everyone wanted the answer. Critic Leonard Maltin told the AP that continuing the film was “risky, to say the least, to tamper with perfection.” Bogart and Bergman never saw any of it. Bogart died in 1957 at 57, and Bergman died on her 67th birthday in 1982. Bergman later admitted she barely knew her co-star, a story told in how different Bogart and Bergman’s relationship was off screen.