'Casablanca' back on the big screen

"It's still the same old story ... "

And time has not diminished it one bit. Sixty-five years of sitting at or near the top of almost everyone's all-time favorites list has only embellished the reputation and allure of "Casablanca," as close to a perfect movie as ever has been made.

Thank you, Michael Curtiz. And the powers of serendipity.

Rick and Ilsa, Louis and Sam, Ugarte and Victor are back on the big screen courtesy of the Terrace Theater, whose reprise of one of the great cinema classics opens a two-week run Friday. (See next Thursday's Preview for showtimes.)

You must remember this

"Casablanca" was designed as a modest romantic spy thriller, not at all unusual or particularly ambitious. It was set-bound and lacking in movement. But it had a tense and savvy script (Howard Koch and Philip and Julius Epstein), skilled direction (Curtiz) and the happy accident of one of the most impeccably assembled casts that ever graced a motion picture.

The film was given a trial release in New York on Thanksgiving Day 1942. Legend has it that day was chosen to capitalize on the publicity value of U.S. troops' recent landing in North Africa. It was also a very lucky movie. First in the extraordinary pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and second in the moment of its debut, shortly before the famed Casablanca conference. Yet the film competed (in 1944) for the 1943 Oscars, of which it captured three: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

It deserved them. Today, it is deeply enshrined in filmgoers' affections, here and abroad, both as the most memorable love story of the American canon and as our finest, most durable war-time melodrama. Have any star-crossed lovers ever gazed into each other's eyes with the same liquid intensity as Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund?

Like "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Philadelphia Story," a pair of immortal pictures released within a year or two of it, "Casablanca" could not have been more perfectly cast. Forget that old saw about Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan first being considered for the roles of Rick and Ilsa, or that George Raft was first in line to play Blaine. Didn't happen. The role was written with Bogart in mind. Reagan, already in the Army, was headed overseas. Hedy Lamarr was the first choice for Lund but was unavailable. Sheridan, a terrific comic actress, did indeed audition, though she lost out to an unforgettably luminous Bergman.

Rogues gallery

The supporting playbill of suave scene-stealer Claude Rains (as Capt. Louis Renault), Paul Henreid (nobler-than-thou Victor Laszlo), Dooley Wilson (Sam the pianist), Peter Lorre (the weaselly Ugarte), one-time matinee idol Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser), S.Z. Sakall (Carl the waiter) and Sydney Greenstreet (Senor Ferrari) was inspired, and so, at least, were Rains' and Wilson's performances. Thanks be to the old studio system and its contract players.

Only Henreid was hesitant. "I saw the script, and I turned it down," he said in 1991. "I thought it was a ridiculous fairy tale."

And so it was. Like most romances. You gotta problem with that, pal?

In a way, "Casablanca" anticipated the films noir that poured from the cameras of post-war filmmakers. But it also summed up the 1940s in one indelible package.

As Aljean Harmetz observed in "Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca" (Hyperion, 1992), the film was "a unique moment in our cultural history: There may be better movies than 'Casablanca,' but no other movie better demonstrates America's mythological vision of itself, tough on the outside and moral within, capable of sacrifice and romance without sacrificing the individualism that conquered a continent, sticking its neck out for everybody when circumstances demand heroism. No other movie has so reflected the moment when it was made, the early days of World War II, and the psychological needs of audiences decades later."

Play it, Sam. And play it again.

Reach Bill Thompson at bthompson@postandcourier.com or 937-5707.