History of Casablanca control of Casablanca was not formalised until 1910. It was especially during the years of military governor Hubert Lyautey that Casablanca became Morocco's economic center and Africa's biggest harbour. The famous 1942 film "Casablanca" underlined the city's colonial status at the time—depicting it as the scene of a power struggle between competing European powers, carried out without any reference to the local population, and with the film's vast cosmoplitan cast of characters (American, French, German, Czech and some other nationalities) including not a single Arab. During the 1940s and 1950s, Casablanca was a major centre of anti-French rioting. A terrorist
Casablanca (film) thirty-eight rejected it outright, thirty-three generally recognized it (but only eight specifically as "Casablanca"), three declared it commercially viable, and one suggested turning it into a novel. Many subsequent films have drawn on elements of "Casablanca". "Passage to Marseille" (1944) reunited actors Bogart, Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre and director Curtiz in 1944, and there are similarities between "Casablanca" and another later Bogart film, "To Have and Have Not" (also 1944). Parodies have included the Marx Brothers' "A Night in Casablanca" (1946), Neil Simon's "The Cheap Detective" (1978), and "Out Cold" (2001). Indirectly, it provided the title for the 1995 neo-noir film