Here's looking at you, kid...

It's Casablanca night! Wow! I am in love with this film! I can't believe I've never seen it before. I especially can't believe that I've never seen it given how many famous lines come from it, plus the main song - As Time Goes By. "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine." "Here's looking at you, kid." "Play it, Sam." "We'll always have Paris." "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" Oh my goodness! And Humphrey Bogart. And Ingrid Bergman. Seriously, such beautiful people! And that moment, when Ilsa knows that Rick of Rick's Cafe Americain is Rick from Paris, and his reaction to the song and then his face when he realises she's there, and her face when she sees his...wow. I LOVE this film! It seemed unusual as well to have the character who is a victim to love be the man, I'm sure it's usually the woman who is left abandoned by her man, hurt and crying, but here it's Rick who has been left without an explanation, deeply in love. And despite how much his love has affected him and he won't have Sam play the song, and he loves Ilsa, he still believes in something more than his love - be it Laszlo's love, Ilsa's marriage, the greater cause: the resistance and the fight against the Nazis - there is something more important than the thing that has consumed him and made him him. "The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." And according to the little documentary on the dvd the studio released 50 films a year, one a week, and they obviously knew this could be something special given how much they paid for the script, but it was still just one of their 50 films a year. I want to watch it again already! But there will be nothing just the same as my first time, I'll know the characters a bit before discovering them - I thought that Rick was a bit cold, a bit of a manly man with something to hide but not hiding so much love, now I'll know that love, or lost love, has made him this way, I doubted Ilsa thinking that she had no intention of leaving Paris with Rick, that she didn't love him like he loved her, I doubted Rick thinking that maybe, just maybe, he really would leave for Lisbon with Ilsa, I knew the French police officer was contemptible but I didn't quite believe that he would betray Laszlo and Rick, after all it was part of Free France not Occupied France, and now I'll know these things when I watch it again and I'll be looking for signs, but then that's the joy of the first watch and the later watches. Ah, Casablanca, we'll always have Paris.