Weird...

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Bogart hardly ever played anyone except Bogart. Most major film stars of the studio era almost always played themselves, or the character that the audience loved for them to play. (Think Eastwood, Wayne, Cagney, Flynn -- no great shakes as actors, but very big at the box office in their time.) Once Bogart established his character as Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon," he seldom played anyone else. (Major exception: Fred C. Dobbs in "The Treasure of Sierra Madre," terrific job.) He began to mellow a little as he got into his 50s, but he still played the same self-reliant tough guy who seldom took any fecal matter off of anyone. Little wonder that the success of "The Maltese Falcon," and the creation of Bogart's stardom in that film, would lead Warner Brothers to team the same director and stars in another film ASAP.

Also keep in mind that the character of Rick Blaine in "Casablanca" was a creation, not of Warners' screenwriters, but of playwrights Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, who wrote a play called "Everybody Comes to Rick's" in the summer of 1940. They sold the screen rights to the WB about 18 months later, and while Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers greatly enhanced the original script in their retitled screenplay, they kept the original character names created by Burnett and Alison (long before "Across the Pacific" was written for the screen).