Allied Filming Locations: A Casablanca Built on a Stage

In Robert Zemeckis’s 2016 spy film, Max Vatan and Marianne Beauséjour meet across a crowded room at the Rivoli, and the scene works because the room looks expensive down to the last surface. If that room sent you looking for the Allied filming locations, most travel pages will send you to Casablanca. Allied’s Casablanca was not filmed in Casablanca: the city’s 1942 streets were built on London soundstages and in the Canary Islands, with only a visual-effects crew visiting Casablanca to scan rooftops.

Here is where the film was really made, and what of wartime Casablanca you can still walk today.

The Rivoli Scene - A Nightclub Built on a London Soundstage

The Rivoli is where the two leads first speak, and the set decorator dressed it with a fourteen-foot chandelier in Murano glass and Venetian crystal, custom banquettes and 1930s deco metallics. On screen it reads as a room with a history: a band, smoke in the light, uniforms at the bar.

The Rivoli was a nightclub built for the camera on a London soundstage, then dressed and lit until it convinced. Casablanca in the film is a Vichy port of refugees, black-market papers and men in uniform at the door.

The war stays off-screen in that room. The set has to carry a decade the audience already recognises from photographs, and it gets there with glass, low light and a bar.

Where Was Allied Filmed? Casablanca Was Played by the Canary Islands

Where was Allied filmed? Principal photography began in London in early 2016, and the Casablanca-set scenes were shot that May in Gran Canaria. Around eighty sets were built for the production. The Allied 2016 Casablanca you see on screen was assembled rather than borrowed.

Production designer Gary Freeman gave a plain reason for skipping Morocco: Casablanca and Tangier have changed enough that neither reads as the 1940s. The souk and the street outside Marianne’s apartment were shot in the Canaries, aged down with cables, pipes and hand-painted signs.

Casablanca’s own contribution was technical. A visual-effects crew laser-scanned suitable rooftops, later used as plates behind the actors. Plenty of travel pages still list Allied as a Morocco shoot; the claim has been copied from one list to the next for years.

What the production built or borrowed:

• The Rivoli: a nightclub interior on a London stage, chandelier included.
• Souk and apartment street: Canary Islands locations dressed back to the period.
• Rivoli exterior: the film’s location listing gives Plaza de Cairasco in Las Palmas.
• Rooftops: scanned in Casablanca, then reused as background.

The Rivoli Question - and Casablanca’s Real Art Deco Cinema

Search Rivoli cinema Casablanca and the trail goes cold: no cinema of that name exists in the city. The Rivoli is the film’s nightclub, a set with a London address. Casablanca’s real picture palace from the same era is the Rialto, and it is still standing.

The Rialto opened in the late 1920s to a design by Pierre Jabin, with 1,350 seats and an art deco frontage on Mohammed El Qori Street in the Quartier Horloge. Piaf, Aznavour and Dizzy Gillespie played its stage, and Josephine Baker sang there for American soldiers after the North African landings.

It stopped operating as a regular cinema some years ago, so the visit happens on the pavement: the curved facade, the lettering, the width of the entrance. The building still stands and the frontage has survived intact. Stand there at dusk when the street lights come on and the 1940s is easier to picture than any set.

Walking 1942 Casablanca Today

The city the film needed is gone, and the city that replaced it rewards a walk. Start on Boulevard Mohammed V, where the arcades run unbroken and the facades above them belong to the same decades the film was dressing.

The route, roughly in order:

• Boulevard Mohammed V: arcades and deco facades, best in low morning light.
• Quartier Horloge: the clock tower, the market streets, the Rialto corner.
• The old medina: lanes of stalls, liveliest as the light goes.
• Rooftops: the layer the film borrowed without ever shooting here.

Here the layers sit close together: a protectorate-era boulevard, a working port, a medina that never stopped trading, and new towers on the skyline behind them. The street plan and the facades survived; the wartime crowd that filled them did not.

Traffic is heavy and the pavements are uneven in places. Cross where the crowd crosses, keep a bag in front of you, and the morning stays easy.

Planning the Casablanca Stop

Casablanca is the arrival city for most Morocco routes, and it carries a single day well before Rabat, Fes or Marrakech. Four hours covers the Hassan II Mosque, the boulevard and the Rialto corner. A full day adds the medina in the evening and time to sit still.

A private guide gets you into the stairwells and courtyard entrances a coach group cannot manage, and hand-picked riads put you inside the old city instead of on its edge. Drivers who know the one-way system save an hour of circling.

For the spy-thriller version of these streets, our guide to the Body of Lies filming locations covers Casablanca and Rabat. For the rest of the city, the Casablanca highlights guide picks up where this walk ends.

Travellers who want the whole loop can take our 8-Day Tour from Casablanca to the Imperial Cities or the longer 12-Day Morocco Experience Tour from Casablanca.

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