OPINION

PAUL GREENBERG: Play it, Sam

Where to begin, and where to end, when an inky wretch tries to describe why a movie made three-quarters of a century ago should still exert so sure a grip on the American imagination.

Maybe it's because, like any masterpiece, it rises from period piece to set a new standard that becomes an unsurpassable old one.

Maybe it's because it recognizes the existence of good and evil in the world, just as the world had to in the closing days of 1942, but seems to have forgotten today.

Maybe it's because Casablanca has an involved plot but simply yet mysteriously told.

Maybe because it combines elements of both tragedy and comedy in its simple but somehow not simplistic plot.

Maybe it's because, when the movie begins, the viewer cannot be sure of how it will end, and when it does. He still isn't sure how it did.

Maybe it's because there is something both satisfying and unsatisfying about its newsreel-like start and its curious ending, as if it were always to be continued--and indeed it is, as history still moves individuals around the international chessboard to suit her own purposes.

Maybe it's because the dialogue is so good that its lines have become part of American lore and folklore. For yes, there was a time when characters in movies spoke with wit and precision yet without being obvious.

Maybe it's because the whole cast of usual suspects in the movie is both stereotypical and yet still able to fascinate us all this time since it was made. For here in the considerable flesh was the waiter Carl played by S.Z. Sakall; the not-so-mad Russian bartender Sasha; and the portly, all-knowing Signor Ferrari too wise in the ways of the world to know they can be changed by idealistic banalities. It is he, played by corpulent Sydney Greenstreet, who explains: "As leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca, I am an influential and respected man."

Maybe it's because the movie has outlasted its more sophisticated critics. Pauline Kael, the professional movie critic rather than simple moviegoer, dismissed its "appealingly schlocky romanticism." She seems to have spent her career weighing the virtues and vices of movies without actually enjoying them.

Maybe it's because Casablanca was made at a time when Americans didn't see immigrants as some kind of clear and present danger but a welcome addition. Indeed, nobody had to fake a foreign accent in order to make this film, for it's full of characters whose accents were real, and whose life stories consisted of a desperate scramble to get to this land of the free and home of the brave, one step ahead of the Gestapo.

Maybe it's because all of us still dream of a sanctuary like Rick's Cafe Americain that is both international yet intensely American.

Maybe it's because the movie is so full of paradoxes that its singular truth--that this is still a land worth fighting for--stands out.

Maybe it's because there is no Maybe about the way so many of us feel about this classic film. Or our country. In the end, like any other masterpiece, like The Great Gatsby, it just is.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 11/29/2017

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