In film history, certain movies have transcended their own iconic status to occupy a cinematic stratosphere. Of the glamorous, classic films of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the romantic drama Casablanca (1942)—starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman—reigns supreme as one of the best movies ever. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert said Casablanca is ‘probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title’, being ‘more loved’ than Citizen Kane. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1944, and to this day holds a 99% percent ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Bergman herself stated, of the film’s cultural legacy, ‘There is something mystical about it. It seems to have filled a need, a need that was there before the film, a need that the film filled.’ Beyond being a great movie, Casablanca is a film institution.

The affinity audiences have had for Casablanca, over time, begs the question of what chord the film strikes, and how. The Los Angeles Times reportedly called Casablanca's great strength ‘the purity of its Golden Age Hollywoodness [and] the enduring craftsmanship of its resonantly hokey dialogue’. The latter element refers to the film’s sentimental script, which boasts some of the most memorable and repeated lines in popular culture. As great lines tend to do, these phrases from Casablanca have echoed well beyond their origins in the film. All of them - fruits of the screenplay written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch - are either spoken by or attributed to Bogart as the film’s leading man, in his most iconic and quoted role as the cynical and enigmatic owner of Rick’s Café Americain, Rick Blaine.

‘Play it again, Sam.’
As interesting trivia, this line is one of the most misquoted in pop culture. At two points in the film, each of the lovers asks the café’s house musician, Sam (Dooley Wilson), to play ‘As Time Goes By’ - the memorable hit song, featuring the famous lines, ‘You must remember this, / A kiss is just a kiss.’ The song is ‘their song’, and while Ilsa Lund gently requests it - ‘Play it once, Sam. For old times’ sake’ - Rick demands it from Sam in a later moment of frustration - ‘If she can stand it, I can! Play it!’ How those directives were amalgamated into the oft-repeated phrase, 'Play it again, Sam’, is certainly due to the implication being made by both - but the contrived ‘again’ implies the desire for repetition, and softens the phrase with a tone of wistfulness. With four quick beats (play it again) and the syncopated fifth (Sam), the line’s rhythmic construction makes it roll easily off the tongue, making it both memorable and enjoyable to say.

‘Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.’
In drowning his sorrows over Ilsa, Rick pounds his fist on the table and utters this lament to Sam, who attempts to soothe him with soft piano playing. The line flows with the repetition of ‘all’ - ‘Of all’, ‘in all’, ‘in all’ - and its cumulative effect evokes both the numerousness of bars in the world, and the insignificance of any given one of them. Together these ideas suggest the unfathomable chance of one person just happening to encounter a significant other, when no meeting was intended. The term ‘gin joints’ is pleasing in its assonance and its endearing wartime references, to the spirit and the local - with that locality juxtaposing the vastness of the world and the grand scale of the universe as it mysteriously dictates all matters of fate.

‘We’ll always have Paris.’
The early days of Rick and Ilsa’s romance are spent in Paris, the City of Love. Their time in Paris is recalled in a flashback sequence - a montage of the happy couple driving, dancing and drinking champagne. Years later, upon reuniting in Casablanca, Rick realises they cannot be together again, as Ilsa is married, in good faith, to Victor Laszlo, an honourable key figure in the allied Resistance against the Nazis. Rick comforts Ilsa - who is torn between her love for two men - with the consoling phrase, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ The line has since become a saying - and Paris a metaphor - meaning, we’ll always have our memories. Evoking, at once, nostalgia and loss, it is a bittersweet reminder that joy can be preserved and still persist in remembrance.

‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’
This very famous line is spoken by Bogart in the Paris sequence, as Rick and Ilsa pop champagne and toast to each other. Bogart delivers it with a smile and affection uncharacteristic of the jaded Rick Blaine the audience comes to know, evincing the happiness he felt with Ilsa then. ‘Here’s looking at you’ suggests a close focus and high regard, and the term ‘kid’, as one of endearment, is jovial and familiarising, making the phrase easily transposable into any situation in which family and friends toast to each other in celebration.

‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’
The film’s famous closing line is the most compelling because it refers not to the film’s featured romance, but to its larger backdrop. Produced and set during WW2, the war raging at the time is central to the film’s plot and to its gravitas. In the early 1940s, the city of Casablanca, the site of the large American Nouasseur Air Base, served as a waiting place for refugees hoping to escape to America. The film’s plot revolves around a coveted set of ‘letters of transit’ - papers allowing holders to travel freely through German-occupied territories - which have been recently been stolen from two murdered German couriers.

In a storyline involving Vichy French and German officials - and Rick’s history as a gun-runner and soldier, now the owner of a club in which enemies commingle - Rick gains possession of the letters. In a noble act in the final scene, Rick uses them to put Laszlo and Ilsa on a flight to neutral Lisbon. He evades capture with the surprising help of the brazenly corrupt and self-serving prefect of police, Captain Louis Renault. When confronted by German Major Strasser at the base - tipped off by Renault - Rick shoots Strasser, and Renault protects him, telling the Germans to ‘round up the usual suspects’. The final shot tracks Rick and Renault walking off together, down the lit tarmac in the mist. Renault suggests they join the Free French forces, and Rick says poignantly, ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ The film ends with a dignified sense of the bigger picture. As Rick admits, ‘the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world’, and a new alliance - in the good fight - is born. A beautiful notion, after all.