Casablanca

They can afford to kill off Peter Lorre in the first fifteen minutes of Casablanca. That's how good it is. Ten years of flashier and more expensive movies leave this picture still on top. It is tough, cynical, sentimental, and maudlin, a slick movie about refugees and black marketers that somehow is better for its slickness. It has one day to go at the RKO. See it.

Casablanca has Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains and Sidney Greenstreet and a silly and improbably story about a tough guy saloon keeper who helps the girl he loves--and her husband--to get out from under some polite, choke-collared Nazis.

It has "As Time Goes By"--and Sam the piano player who plays it. It has fog and narrow streets, and agents grinding around those narrow streets in battered open cars. It has Bogart, still remarkable when he palms a cigarette, and Bergman, equally remarkable when she does nothing at all. It is the granddaddy of a long line of similar coat-collar-up in the rain movies, many with the same people, many with better plots. It can still hold its head up with its offspring.