The first time I saw this movie was in a nasty old movie theater in Madrid where the customers smoked in the theater while drinking cans of beer that they bought out of plastic tubs in the lobby from a guy who looked a hundred and six, but was really forty-five. The year was 1980, and the last vestiges of the old regime were still lurking around in dark corners like wild dogs. The print of the movie was horrendous–scratched, patched and worn out. There were subtitles in Spanish that only proved that the person translating the dialogue didn’t know English, and he didn’t want to learn English, either. So I sat there in the dark with my three cans of beer and watched Rick and Ilsa fall in love in Paris, I watched her walk into his gin-joint in Casablanca, I watched Rick tell Ilsa to get on that plane and support her husband because “I’m no good at being noble, but 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.” He’s in tears, she’s in tears, and you know they will probably never, ever see each other again. She walks with her husband to the plane knowing that that part of her life is over. I know the film was made on cardboard sets in Hollywood. The movie theater stunk, the film was worn out, the beer was warm, but none of that mattered. I was enthralled by what I consider to be one of the top ten movies of all time. Ilsa is beautiful, erotic, passionate, and crazy-in-love with two very similar guys. Rick is cynical and tough, believes in nothing, trusts no one, but he’s a romantic and a sentimentalist. The rest of the ensemble is brilliant as they orbit the stars. The entire film is bathed gently in a thousand tones of gray that wrap the characters gently in their soft shadows. Gray is so pervasive in this film that the entire final scene is played out against a thick fog which completely erases any need for scenery at all. Finally, the bad guys have been thwarted, the good guys have flown away on a plane, and the hero and his plucky sidekick walk off into the foggy night. The ending is not neat, a million threads are left hanging, but the cynic has conquered his cynicism just a bit and perhaps has even found a little bit of himself again. Anyone claiming their nationality to be “Drunkard” can’t have too many ideals or dreams left. I left the theater smelling of stale cigarette smoke, rancid beer, and old sweat, but I knew I had witnessed something very special, and every time I see Casablanca now, I admire it that much more. As Rick would say, “I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”