We'll Always Have Casablanca

If you saw the movie Shakespeare in Love you might have been struck by how popular "the theatre" was to the commoners back in the late 1500s. Similarly, if you saw Amadeus you might have reflected on how important the opera was to the hoi polloi in Europe back in the late 1700s. The theater in Shakespeare's era, and the opera in Mozart's, were the popular art forms of their day. And as you were watching Joseph Feines, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tom Hulce up on the big screen, you might have reflected on the fact that you were enjoying the popular art form of our day: the movies.

And tonight, of course, is Movie Night. The Academy Awards.

I have my own favorites -- for Best Picture (The Hurt Locker), Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker), Best Actor (Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart) and Best Actress (Carey Mulligan in An Education) -- but I suspect the Motion Picture Academy will think differently about at least some of these choices. It doesn’t matter. It’ll be a good show and we’ll all be talking about it tomorrow morning.

Thinking about the movies got me to dusting off a list of Favorite Films that I’ve kept on my computer for years. It’s too long to reprint here (more than 90 films), and it contains a lot of titles that would probably appear on almost everyone’s Top 100 (The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan, Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.). But it also contains some quirky films and some smaller films that I consider gems, like The Great Santini (with a tour de force performance by Robert Duvall), and Nightmare Alley (maybe Tyrone Power’s best work). My list includes what my wife and daughters call “guy films,” like Gladiator, The Right Stuff, Tombstone and Braveheart, but it also contains movies we all enjoy, like Top Hat, Jerry McGuire, Father of the Bride and Little Miss Sunshine.

My list of favorite films includes a few that you might have to go to an art-house theater to see, like Fellini’s La Strada, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, but most of the titles are shamelessly middlebrow and mainstream. The movies are the people’s art form, after all.

As I’m looking down my list I realize that it includes some movies that were undeniably great, but that I’ll probably never watch again (The Deer Hunter and Gangs of New York come to mind), as well as a few films I’ll watch almost anytime they pop up on one of the movie channels, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cinderella Man, and Get Shorty.

But there’s one film I know I’ve seen more than any other, and that’s Casablanca. I first saw it when I was a sophomore in college and I’ve probably seen it twenty times since then. I remember that I was hooked on it from frame one. As the film opens, a globe spins in the mist and an announcer’s voice intones…

“With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up… Paris to Marseille… across the Mediterranean to Oran… then by train, or auto, or foot, across the rim of Africa… to Casablanca…”

Casablanca is a great war movie, a terrific love story and (by the end, at least) a classic buddy picture. Bogart’s Rick is a character right out of Hemingway, and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa is one of the most beautiful leading ladies ever to appear on the silver screen (and it was silver back then). Sure the movie is corny and clichéd, but that’s part of its charm. Millions and millions of people have seen Casablanca, and millions of us have seen it more than once. It won Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Best Screenplay in 1943, and in my view it might be the best picture of all time.

Every Casablanca lover knows that neither Rick nor Ilsa ever actually said, “Play it again, Sam.” But even dedicated fans might not know that the film's writers, Philip and Julius Epstein, are the only twins to ever win an Academy Award. (I had to look that one up).

So for all of you who think you know all there is to know about Casablanca, here’s a not-ridiculously-difficult trivia quiz to test your knowledge. If you’ve seen the film ten or more times, you should get all of these right. If you’ve seen it fewer than ten times, well, then I guess you’ve got some catching up to do…

1. Rick’s last name

2. The bartender’s name at Rick’s Café Americain

3. Maiden name of Ilsa

4. Ilsa’s home town

5. Amount Louis bets Rick that Victor Laszlo will not leave Casablanca

6. Color dress Ilsa was wearing when the German’s marched into Paris

7. Name of Signor Ferrari’s bar

8. Name of Rick’s bar in Paris

9. City where Victor Laszlo was arrested by the Germans and put in a concentration camp

10. The kind of water Louis drinks

11. The winning roulette number for the lucky Bulgarian refugee

12. Name of the town Louis suggests he and Rick retire to at the end of the film

Answers will be posted in my next column. No prizes will be awarded, but everyone who answers all twelve questions correctly is entitled to a smug and well-deserved sense of self-satisfaction.

Final note: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman never made another movie together. But as every Casablanca lover knows, they always had Paris. And we’ll always have Casablanca.