The Great American Movie - historical context

Rating: 10/10 (11 September 2016)

I don't know how many times I've seen this movie. A lot, because every time it's on TV and I start to watch it, I can't stop. It is, indeed, the great American movie.
Other reviewers have offered reasons why it's so great. There's no point in my going over all that.
What I thought I would add here is the historical context.
Rick makes it clear, in his scene with Sam, that the movie takes place in December, 1941. At that point the U.S. had not yet entered the war, though of course it would on the seventh of that month when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
By the time the movie was released in November, 1942, however, the U.S. had not only entered the war but invaded North Africa, successfully. Whereas the prefect, Louis Renault (Claude Rains), still acknowledges the Germans in December, 1941, as a good employee of Pétain's far-right dictatorship, by the time the movie opened, at the end of 1942, the French in North Africa were quickly siding with the Allies. Curtiz foreshadows this brilliantly at the end in one of the many famous scenes when Renault, rather than turning Rick in for killing the German Major Strasser, diverts the police and throws a bottle of Vichy water (Vichy was the capital of the Pétainist government) in the trash.
American audiences therefore had the advantage of seeing this story with the hindsight of current events, a knowledge that the Renaults of Northern Africa would, indeed, ignore the Germans and side with the Americans.
But they also knew that the outcome of the war was still undecided. D-Day, the June, 1944 invasion, was still far in the future. In November, 1942, the Germans would not have looked at all funny to them, but very real and very dangerous.