Casablanca opened in theaters in 1942. At the time, the real Nazis occupied Casablanca along with most of Europe and Northern Africa. In Hollywood's version, the white suit Paul Henreid wore in playing Victor Lazlo represented civilization. Although Henreid, along with Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Ingrid Bergman, have all passed away, the film they made decades ago has achieved a peculiar state of permanence: It has transcended its classic status to become practically embedded in the collective unconscious of America.

Its allure possibly lies in a marvelous cast, rapid pacing and masterful orchestration by Max Steiner. Besides the chemistry between Bogart and Bergman playing star-crossed lovers, the rest of the cast is just as perfect. Sam (Dooley Wilson), the bartender Sascha ( Leonid Kinskey); the waiter Carl ( S.Z. Sakall); the jilted Yvonne (Madeline Lebeau); the Bulgarian couple (Joy Page and Helmut Dantine), the pickpocket (Curt Bois); the croupier (Marcel Dalio) and, of course, the unflappable police chief ( Claude Rains) are each a miracle of casting.

More people can recall more lines from Julius and Philip Epstein's screenplay than any other movie. The dialogue is an exquisite fusion of the hard-boiled and shameless, high cholesterol sentimentality. The lines inspire a laughing, capitulating kind of affection: What waters? We're in the desert...I was misinformed.... Was that cannonfire? Or was it my heart pounding.... Play it, Sam. Play as time goes by...Round up the usual suspects...We'll always have Paris.

Casablanca is, among other things, a fable of citizenship and idealism, the duties of the private citizen finding values worth making sacrifices. It is a thoroughly escapist myth about getting politically involved: Claude Rains dropping a bottle of Vichy Water into a trash can and giving it a kick, the charming collaborator virtuous at last.

One can concoct mock-academic theories about the movie, laying it on a stainless-steel lab table and dissecting it with instruments Freudian or anthropological (Here's looking at you, Mom!). Others might examine Casablanca as the ultimate rationalization for adultery: One woman, two men. Woman has affair with man not her husband. But wait - It is all right, she thought her husband dead. After all, these are desperate times. A woman can get confused, or at least make us believe she is.

Zealots who study the significance of signs and symbols can have a field day with the film's theme of lost love and redemption. The hard nosed yet sensitive Rick Blaine has been cast out of the promised land (America), for some original sin that is as obscure as the one that cost Adam and Eve their Eden. He flees to Europe which is the fallen world where Evil is loose. He beds the widow of idealism. Idealism (meaning Victor Lazlo) is dead, but then rises from the grave. Rick loses Ilsa and falls into despair and
selfishness: "I stick my neck out for nobody." He becomes an idiot in the original Greek sense of the word, meaning someone indifferent to his duties as a citizen.

Ego eventually rises above mere self. It is reborn in sacrifice and community. "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Idealism and its bride ascend into heaven on the Lisbon plane. Rick and Louis walk off into the fog, men without women, to do mortal work in the world for a higher cause.

About Casablanca there clings a quality of lovely, urgent innocence. Those who cherish the movie may be nostalgic for moral clarity, for a war in which good and evil are obvious and tangible. In reality, Casablanca was released three years before the destruction of the then modern world on August 6, 1945. That year, the side of good dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities to "shorten the war." Over sixty years later America is involved in another war, this time to "liberate Iraq." Moral clarity remains elusive.