It's still the same old story. The Lisbon plane always descends like a kid's toy landing on the living-room rug. Stick-figure Nazis in animal faces (Strasser a wolf, his aide a fat little pig in glasses) come strutting off. That night at Rick's they chorus Die Wacht am Rhein, the stein-swinging bully song that is the Nazis' idea of a good time in a nightclub. The defiantly answering Marseillaise stirs the soul and raises its Pavlovian goose bumps for the 15th time. They still pronounce "exit visa" weirdly: "exit vee-zay."
Casablanca is exactly 40 years old. It opened in New York in late fall, 1942. At the time, the real Germans were locked around Stalingrad, and the French scuttled their fleet in Toulon Harbor rather than surrender it to the Reich. In Hollywood's version, civilization was dressed in an off-white suit: Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid. Henreid is still alive. So, for that matter, is Ronald Reagan, whom Jack Warner originally wanted for the part of Victor. (All wrong, too American, as wholesome as a quart of milk.) But Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains and Conrad Veidt are all dead. The movie they made has achieved a peculiar state of permanence. It has become something more than a classic. It is practically embedded in the collective American unconscious.
What accounts for the movie's enduring charm? Casablanca is, of course, a masterpiece of casting. Not only the leads but the lesser players as well are perfect, each one a small, vivid miracle of type. Fetching up their names is an old game for the trivialist: Sam (Dooley Wilson), the bartender Sascha (Leonid Kinskey), the waiter Carl (S.Z. Sakall), the jilted Yvonne (Madeleine LeBeau), the Bulgarian couple (Joy Page and Helmut Dantine), the pickpocket (Curt Bois), the croupier (Marcel Dalio).
More people know more lines from Casablanca, possibly, than from any other movie. They recite the best ones. They splash around in the sentimentality. They sing along in the way that Churchill used to rumble the lines of Hamlet from his seat in the audience at the Old Vic. They stooge around: imagine Howard Cosell in the part of Rick Blaine and recite the lines in Cosellian cadence: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
The movie is a procession of perfect moments. Its dialogue is an exquisite fusion of the hard-boiled and a shameless, high-cholesterol sentimentality. The lines inspire a laughing, capitulating kind of affection. One cherishes them: What waters? We're in the desert . . . I was misinformed . . . Was that cannonfire? Or was it my heart pounding? . . . Kiss me! Kiss me as though it were the last time! . . . Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By ... I saved my first drink to have with you. . . Round up the usual suspects . . . We'll always have Paris. It has inspired bits of business: Sydney Greenstreet bowing graciously to Ingrid Bergman in the Blue Parrot and then with brutal abstraction swatting a fly, which for the instant becomes the moral equivalent of any refugee in Casablanca. Or the alltime triumphant moment of literal-minded symbol-banging exposition: Claude Rains dropping the bottle of Vichy Water into a wastebasket and giving it a kick, the charming collaborator virtuous at last.