There reason was that that you didn't save screen into the global variable.
You probably had a line in your SDL_Initialisation
similar to this:
SDL_Surface *screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(640, 480, 8, SDL_SWSURFACE);
This creates a new local variable called screen. Since you wanted to save this into the global one, you should change it to:
screen = SDL_SetVideoMode(640, 480, 8, SDL_SWSURFACE);