Casablanca

The first time I saw Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, I saw it on a double bill with another Bogart movie, To Have Or Have Not, which I was also seeing for the first time.  I actually preferred To Have or Have Not!  It's based on a Hemingway novel, but it's basically about nothing but the sexual chemistry between Bogart and his co-star (soon to be his wife) Lauren Bacall. Yet darnit, that's enough!  It's sort of like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was really just about the friction between stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

On the subject of Casablanca, Roger Ebert pointed out that at the end Bogart could have got on the plane with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, because he'd just shot the Nazis who would have stopped him.  Sort of like in The Wizard of Oz when the Good Witch could have told Dorothy at the start of the movie instead of the end, that she could get home just by clicking her heels!  Every movie has some point you don't want to think about...

I once saw the movie Hideous Kinky with Kate Winslet as a British divorcee raising her kids in Casablanca or somewhere in Morocco in the '60s. (The kids had a habit of yelling out, "Bugger, bastard and bum!" They looked fun.) She was into Islamic mysticism, and really wanted to meet this big Sufi leader so he could reveal to her some big secret about life.  When she finally met him, he said, "Go home and raise your children."

There's also the poem "Casabianca":

The boy stood on the burning deck,

Then he got the hell out!