Trailer for "Casablanca"

One of the most popular black-and-white movies of all time was filmed over the course of a week on a studio backlot in the 1940s, using contract actors who were churning out movies faster than most television actors now turn out episodes.

Everything about the city of Casablanca in the movie was fake. Rick's Cafe Americana was just a set and not based on anything in the real city of Casablanca (although a restaurant bearing that name opened in 2004 -- see Rick's Cafe Americana).

Some of the "facts" in the movie were complete fiction. For example, there was no such thing as "letters of transit", the documents at the heart of the movie's intricate negotiations and various shootouts. I doubt the Nazis would have honored any papers signed by Charles de Gaulle anyway.

Besides Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, this movie has some of the best character actors of the 1940s and 1950s -- including Claude Rains (who was an "A"-list actor in his own right), Paul Henreid (who had many roles in film and television, but starred as Jean Lafitte in "Last of the Buccaneers"), Sydney Greenstreet (maybe best known as Kaspar Gutman in "The Maltese Falcon"), and Peter Lorre (who also appeared in movies like "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" amid a long career).

In the 1980s Turner Networks arranged for the release of a colorized version of this movie. Despite the fact that many critics poo-pooed the colorization process, the colorized version of the movie looked fantastic. People who complained about the colorization were just being idiotic. One of my close friends, whose opinion on many things I respected, complained to me that the colorization ruined the sense of nostalgia he had for the movie.

Never mind the fact he was born 20 years after the movie was made. How can you feel nostalgic for something 20 years older than you?

I always hated black-and-white movies and television shows anyway. They just don't look natural. I wish I had the colorized version of "Casablanca". Oh well. Maybe one day it will come out on DvD or Blu-Ray (not that I am yet ready to invest in Blu-Ray).

If you have never seen "Casablanca", here is a glimpse of what you have been missing. To be honest, no trailer really does the film justice.



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