Of all the films Hollywood has given us, few have escaped the screen quite like Casablanca.
More than eighty years later, we still know Rick’s Café. We still hear Sam at the piano. We still remember Paris. And even people who have never seen the movie can quote lines from it—although sometimes they’re lines nobody actually said.
In this Chesterton Radio Common Room Deep Dive, we return to Casablanca not simply to celebrate a great movie, but to ask a larger question:
Why does Casablanca still work?
We explore Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa, Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo, Claude Rains’ unforgettable Captain Renault, and Dooley Wilson’s Sam—and the remarkable refugee and émigré actors whose own experiences gave the wartime world of Rick’s Café an unexpected authenticity.
At the center is Rick himself: the man who insists he sticks his neck out for nobody, yet ultimately discovers that there are things worth sacrificing for.
It is one of cinema’s great paradoxes. Rick proves his love not by possessing the woman he loves, but by letting her go.
We also follow Casablanca from the movie screen to the radio microphone. Bogart, Bergman and Henreid recreated their roles for radio, while other stars offered their own versions of the story. We ask what happens when one of the most visually iconic movies ever made becomes a drama entirely for the imagination.
And then Jack Benny arrives in Casablanca.
The film had become such a phenomenon that it was already being parodied in 1943—with Jack as Rick and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson taking his place at the piano for “As Time Goes By.”
But the story didn’t quite end at the airport.
We explore the proposed Casablanca movie sequel Brazzaville and Michael Walsh’s authorized novel As Time Goes By: A Novel of Casablanca, which dared to answer the question generations of viewers have wondered about:
What happened next?
And that raises an even better question.
Do we really want to know?
Perhaps the reason Casablanca remains so powerful is that Rick and Renault are still walking away into that fog, beginning a friendship whose future belongs partly to our imagination.
Pull up a chair in the Common Room.
Stories • Ideas • Wonder.
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