Edited sentence: A second irony emerges because of Bogart.Casablanca made Bogart a star, and later generations looked to Bogart as the anti-star, with his character actor histronics, less-than-stellar looks and mumbling, staccato speeches (indeed, Leonard Maltin once said that Bogart becoming a big-screen icon and lover is equivalent to Joe Pesci becoming a hearthrob today).Casablanca was just one more film to Bogart and meant nothing; it was only after critical and financial success came that Bogart began to promote it above his other films.It had no overriding artistic hand or vision: scripts were constantly rewritten, dialogue was improvised, and up until the last day, no one knew how the picture would end.It was mass produced: it was one of many pictures Bogart and company were making that year, and was shot relatively quickly.Its inspiration was a minor screenplay by unknowns.Much is made in film writing about a director's vision of a picture, but Casablanca remains a stitched-together film with little vision.One of enduring ironies of Casablanca and the cult of Humphrey Bogart is that, while held up as a paragon of American movie making (rated #1 on the AFI all time movies), it was a basic factory-line, studio picture.The irony comes about because many film fans feel that a great film needs an overriding hand and artistic vision, generally taking the form of a strong director/star: John Ford's The Searchers, Howard Hawks' Bringing up Baby, or Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.The treacly plot, seen from a detached point of view, makes little sense, and is filled with many points designed merely to show off the idealized love Bogart and Bergman have for one another.Yet Bogart, far from being the anti-star, was a consummate studio worker: he worked on several pictures at once; he often took roles that other, greater stars dropped to assist the studios; his acting style was plain, unadorned, and uninvolved; and he never bad-mouthed the studio or broke contract.Yet it remains on most directors' and stars' shortlists of the greatest movies of all time