"We'll Always Have Paris"

Just watched "Casablanca." Including the great line in this classic scene: "We'll always have Paris."

I've seen "Casablanca" quite a few times before this. Such a classic! Full of lines that people quote all the time. Of course the real line (maybe the most famous one of all) is just "Play it, Sam, play 'As Time Goes By.'" Not "Play it again, Sam." But also: "Round up the usual suspects." And: "I'm shocked, deeply shocked." Not to mention: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." Above all: "We'll always have Paris."

We just bought this Blu-Ray disc.

Paris haunts this film. I had forgotten how many Paris images there were in the flashbacks envisioned by Rick (Humphrey Bogart). It's painful to imagine how these scenes must have affected the audience at the time the film was released (1942), the moment when Paris was occupied, war was raging, and freedom was utterly threatened.

In the flashback, Rick recalls his few happy moments in Paris with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). Outside a cafe, newspaper headlines stated that Paris was an open city -- that is, undefended. From the room where Rick and Ilsa were meeting, they heard cannons -- the Germans were only 35 miles away, said Rick. Quickly tanks rolled into Paris, circling the Arc de Triomphe.

Ilsa agreed to meet Rick to escape on a train to Marsailles. He waited in a desperate crowd on the station platform in the rain. Sam (Dooley Wilson), the piano player, handed him a note: she wasn't going with him, would never see him again. And the flashback is over; the film returns to Rick's present life in Casablanca.

But almost at the end, when he gives her up so that she can stay with her husband the resistance fighter, Rick says "We'll always have Paris."