https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/201 ... asablanca/
“I admired Casablanca very much,” (Welles) admits. “I thought it was a very well put-together piece of schwarmerei (excessive sentimentality), with just the right measure of every ingredient and all that crap, and of course, tremendous luck, because they were making it up as they went along.” The credit for this, in his eyes, lay not with the actors—or even the writers, for that matter—but with director Michael Curtiz, whom Welles admired for his visual sensibility and whose German apprenticeship with theater impresario Max Reinhardt, a childhood hero of Welles’s, put him in an altogether different category.
“The war flattened everybody’s taste in a very curious way,” Welles remarks. “The best thing they could do in the movies was some delirious piece of fabrication like Casablanca. That was the great work of art, during the whole period of the war. Nothing else.”
As it turns out, Welles credits his belated appreciation for the film to another German in Hollywood. “The person who loved it when it opened,” he recounts, “who persuaded me to take it more seriously, was Marlene [Dietrich].”...“They’ll be showing that thirty years from now,” she predicted of the movie. “You listen to me.” Hard as it may have been for Welles to stomach, he had to grant Dietrich final authority on this one. “I guess you’re right” are the last words Biskind transcribed from that seating at Ma Maison.