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One of my favorite films is “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, an American nightclub owner — and isolationist — in Morocco as the Nazis are goose-stepping across Europe and beyond. “I’m not fighting for anything anymore except myself,” he tells Ilsa, the elusive love of his life. “I’m the only cause I’m interested in.” When Major Strasser, an officer of the Third Reich, asks Rick what nationality he holds, Rick replies: “I’m a drunkard.” Rick tells Louis Renault, the corrupt French police prefect: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” “Casablanca” was written in 1941 during the months...

When Warner Brothers’ movie, “Casablanca,” was released nationally on Jan. 23, 1943, to coincide with a war-time meeting of President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the same city, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that “The Warners . . . have a picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” After 80 years, the iconic film remains a masterpiece and, in my totally subjective estimation, simply the greatest movie ever made. I can still remember when I was in law school the Vogue Theater in St. Matthews showing “Casablanca” like it...

Welcome to another presentation from our Serenade Radio series of Steyn's Song of the Week. On the eve of Valentine's Day we tell the story of one of the classic love songs, one that over the decades has itself become one of those fundamental things that apply as time goes by. To listen to the show, simply click above.

Archaeologists in Morocco have announced the discovery of North Africa’s oldest Stone Age hand-axe manufacturing site, dating back 1.3 million years, an international team reported on Wednesday. The find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years the start date in North Africa of the Acheulian stone tool industry associated with a key human ancestor, Homo erectus, researchers on the team told journalists in Rabat Before the find, the presence in Morocco of the Acheulian stone tool industry was thought to date back 700,000 years. New finds at the Thomas Quarry I site, first made famous in 1969 when a...

You'd think if you'd appeared in three movies considered among the greatest of all time, yours would be a household name. Yet the machinery of celebrity operates on inscrutable Laws, sometimes running counter-clockwise: Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, W.C. Fields — movie stars all, but how many can name three of their films? The average (or even above average) person likely wouldn't recognize Marcel Dalio's name, but odds are (no pun intended) they know his face – he's the most familiar croupier in cinema. And he gets the punchline in one of Casablanca's most famous scenes. However, there are underrated bits...

Let's stop arguing about Mitt Romney and argue about something else for a couple hours. I'm presently in a discussion with some friends about whether Isla Lund really wanted to end up with Rick Blaine or Victor Laszlo. If you need to Google these names, skip this post. I say she wanted to be with Rick. The explication here begins in the scene where she shows up at Rick's apartment holding a gun at him, and he says, "Go ahead and shoot; you'll be doing me a favor." Got it? Okay. When she got there, she demanded the letters of...

From what got censored to the film's Canadian connection, 13 things you may not know.... ===================================================================== Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman starred in the film, which is widely considered one of the greatest of all time. (Warner Brothers) ================================================================== Of all the classic Hollywood films, it's one of the best-known and most enduring — this week, Casablanca turns 75. Amazingly, the people involved thought it would be just another Hollywood flick, one of hundreds the studios would release every year. But the film shot Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman to a new level of stardom and their lines in the...

This is not a joke: George Raft himself supplied the reason why he turned down the starring role of Rick in "Casablanca." He said, "I don't want to star opposite an unknown Swedish broad."

The classic World War II film Casablanca premiered 75 years ago. It starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and it told a story of romance, intrigue and sacrifice. It was also passionately anti-Nazi — but not for the Germans who first got to see it. Casablanca was released in the U.S. in 1942, in the middle of World War II, but it wasn't released in Germany until 1952, after the war was over. For that German version, Warner Bros. deleted all scenes with Nazis in them, and almost all mention of the war. It became a completely different story —...

The removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored, says Tom Gross It is not surprising, given the sheer scale of the Holocaust and its sadism, that it has dominated contemporary discourse among Jews and others. But, while the extermination of European Jews has rightfully (though belatedly) generated a great deal of study and research, the removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored. This ignorance extends to policy-makers at the highest level. Some journalists and politicians I have spoken to have expressed surprise when I even mentioned that Jews...

The End of a Beautiful FriendshipWhy America fell for Casablanca, and why the classic film is losing its hold on movie lovers.In 1957, the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square kicked off its Humphrey Bogart series with the 1942 classic Casablanca.* Bogart himself had just died, and the response to the film was rapturous. By the fourth or fifth screening, “the audience began to chant the lines,” the theater’s then-manager told Noah Isenberg, author of We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie. It was the dawn of the art-house era, the moment when film...

This is the FIRST trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming starring Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr. and more, in theaters July 7th.

Casablanca: A four-storey building collapsed on Friday afternoon in the Sebata neighborhood in Casablanca, killing four people and injuring 19 others. Six people have been reported to be in critical condition. Research operations are underway to find survivors under the rubble of the building that collapsed at around 16:30, reported Arabic daily Al-Jazirah. Moroccan media said that the building included business outlets. Eyewitnesses posted video recordings showing the ongoing rescue operations and the extent of the damage.

The last surviving actress from the iconic movie Casablanca has died. Madeleine Lebeau played Yvonne, the jilted lover of Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, in the 1942 film. Lebeau's stepson told The Hollywood Reporter that she had died aged on May 1 in Estepona, Spain aged 92, after breaking her thigh bone. The French-born actress was preceded in death by all of her credited Casablanca co-stars, including leads Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Like father, like son, assert U.S., European and Arab intelligence agencies who believe one of Osama bin Laden's youngest children is beginning to call the shots at the Iranian branch of al-Qaida. Saad bin Laden is one of an estimated 400 operatives of the terror network recruited and protected by Tehran's hard-line clerics, according to the Washington Post. Tehran's elected government, headed by the reformist President Mohammed Khatami, does not appear to have control over this group, called the Jerusalem Force. The Post reports the 24-year-old bin Laden is computer savvy and fluent in English. His father groomed him for...

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A dozen Palestinian Muslim men gathered after midnight at an isolated farm house this week to indulge in a new delight. They were going to watch a soap opera about Jews. “Hush, hush. It’s starting!” someone said. The group settled down, sipped fresh lemonade, nibbled sweets, sucked on water pipes and then cranked up the volume for the opening credits of “Haret al-Yahud,” or “The Jewish Quarter.” The steamy Egyptian soap tells a Romeo and Juliet tale of a beautiful daughter of a well-to-do Jewish merchant and a dashing Muslim army commander falling in and out...

Hard-core Communists in Hollywood, and by that I mean those with party cards and whose allegiance was to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, not the United States, made a major effort to take over the movie industry and nearly succeeded. The much-maligned House Un-American Activities Committee, as even liberal Hollywood historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund acknowledge, uncovered over 200 party members in Hollywood. My dad, Morrie Ryskind, one of the few outspoken anti-Communist screenwriters in Hollywood, said the number was closer to 300. They were part of a broad conspiracy of subversives who had penetrated America’s most critical...

By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent. Reporting and research assistance was provided by Drew Crosby in Madrid MADRID -- The most sweeping criminal indictment to arise thus far from the Sept. 11 attacks reflects a quiet but dramatic change in understanding by investigators here and across Europe of the terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda, and the international Islamic radical-terrorist network of which, they now agree, it is merely a part. As laid out in the indictment, the defendants' alleged activities--from arranging travel and providing introductions to procuring false documents and, especially, moving money--provide the first detailed look at one...