CASABLANCA

On one of the coldest days of the winter of 1993, about six months before I said goodbye to the east coast forever, I put on my best party outfit, including a new embroidered shirt I’d bought just for the occasion, picked up a very attractive date, and headed over to the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, to celebrate the night, exactly fifty years earlier, that Casablanca first flickered onto movie screens from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, and won the hearts of Americans whose husbands and children were away at war in Europe and Japan. There was a terrific party – we all did our best to look like we’d stepped out of the elegant, urban side of the 1940s, but however good we looked, we didn’t look nearly as good as the beautiful images on the big screen, newly restored and freshly minted from the original Warner Brothers negative. That’s the copy you’ll see tonight.

For the first time, we could see Casablanca come alive clearly outside the windows of Rick’s café. See into each shadowy corner of the room. And even feel how completely different the vibration of the air was when Rick and Ilsa were in Paris together: peacetime looked different. And then there were those closeups of Ingrid Bergman, photographed so beautifully by Arthur Edeson, you must remember this . . . but this was like we were remembering for the first time. And when Bogie said “We’ll always have Paris,” everyone in the audience said it with him, like a mantra.

You must see Casablanca on the big screen, and you must see it with an audience, because what will happen is that your emotions will ambush you, and that’s a very nice thing indeed. I remember, a few years ago, being at the prop department at the Warner lot, and going into “the chandelier room” (yup, that’s right) and someone pointing up at the ceiling and saying to me, “That one was in Rick’s café,” and my thinking immediately yes, that’s the one all right, I know the scene, I know the camera angle, I wish that chandelier could talk, what stories it could tell.

So go. Imagine America is at war once again, and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Imagine our sons and daughters and husbands and wives are halfway around the world, in harm’s way and then just for fun imagine that Hollywood is trying to keep our spirits up – not by producing films full of malice and explosions and formulaic garbage – but by telling us good, compelling stories about interesting and heroic people, beautifully photographed. Memorable pieces of art that will resonate through time, films that we will celebrate fifty, sixty, seventy years hence. Now, come, and bring someone you love, someone who loves you, or someone you want to love you, and pretend neither of you have seen this before, that it’s brand new, because, believe me, it is. It’s going to take you by surprise, take you to places you haven’t been before, and then it’s going to set you down gently when it’s done, and bring a tear to your eye.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

By Kenn Rabin

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