Here’s looking at you, kid: Why Casablanca has stood the test of time

As the classic 1942 film starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart turns 80, Geoffrey Macnab looks at why it remains relevant as time goes by. Beyond its nostalgia value and the instant, reassuring familiarity of so many of its lines, he says, it portrays a world of displaced people just like our own

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in ‘Casablanca’ in 1942 (Warner Bros)

At least Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart didn’t have to self-isolate, take PCR or lateral flow tests and fill in passenger locator forms. Casablanca, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, is set in the middle of a war, not a pandemic. Nonetheless, one reason why this classic black and white Warner Bros movie still exercises such fascination today is that it portrays a world just like our own, in which everything is out of joint. All of its main characters are in transit or a very long way from home. Bureaucracy dominates their lives. To get anywhere, they need exit visas or letters of transit but borders are closed. They’re forced to wait and wait and wait.

“Perhaps tomorrow, we’ll be on the plane,” a young couple sigh plaintively at the start of the movie. “I’ll never get out of here. I’ll die in Casablanca,” another displaced soul says forlornly as he sips at a drink he can ill afford in Rick’s bar.

Film critics and cultural historians have spent decades trying to work out why Casablanca turned out so well. Academic treatises have been written on the subject, rounding up all the usual arguments. Was it the onscreen chemistry between Bergman and Bogart, the barbed wit in the dialogue, or the doomed romanticism encapsulated in Dooley Wilson’s performance at the piano of the torch song “As Time Goes By”?