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“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine…”

Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca” (1942), driving the tormented Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) to distraction.

If the last scene at the airport doesn’t ‘get you,’ then you just haven’t lived…….

And it’s not just the last five minutes that count. Apparently, a film’s popularity depends on how many references are made to it in future movies, according to a 2015 study. An analysis of nearly 15,500 films found that it was possible to predict which ones would be considered among the greatest ever made by looking at how often its themes, images or overall message are picked up by other directors many years later. The films that have produced some of the most long-lived influences are ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Psycho,’ ‘Gone with the Wind,’ and ‘Casablanca.’

The 1942 ‘weepie’ has been named the most romantic movie of all time, due in no small part to the fact that Rick and Ilsa part at the end of the movie, never to meet again. Conditioned as we are, by a plethora of films in which the tortuous path to coupledom is successfully negotiated despite obstacles galore, the idea – by way of contrast – of doing something ‘noble’ is intoxicatingly romantic. When Ilsa flies off with her husband, Rick is no longer the embittered man who had fled Paris on the day the Germans marched in. He can reconcile his love for a woman, who believed her husband was dead at the time they first met.