fpb | What do you know?

Only a few days ago I filled a meme about my favourite movies, mentioning CASABLANCA. Tonight I found it, purely by chance, on a cable channel -- one of the few that I can afford. And, as with every time I have the good luck to watch it, it looks better. If you do not get tears in your eyes at the Marseillaise scene, you have no tear ducts; and to use it to lead into the humiliating closure of Rick's saloon is pure genius. What a wonderful movie. And the strange thing is, we are used to associate genius with a single person, but this is a movie in which none of the contributors - except perhaps for the actors - were of the absolute first rank, and yet the collaboration of scriptwriters, director and producer produced something immortal.