Play this movie again, Sam

Film critic Roger Ebert said he regarded Citizen Kane as the best movie ever made but that Casablanca was the movie he liked best. Yet if Casablanca is the favorite of so many people over so many generations since its release in 1942, perhaps an argument can be made that it is the best movie ever made. After all, how many people call Citizen Kane their favorite? Popularity and art are hardly the same thing, yet film is a popular medium, an entertainment medium. It's all about selling tickets and engaging viewers.  This is something Casablanca does best and has done best for a long time.

Noah Isenberg's We'll Always Have Casablanca (2017) fully explores the Casablanca phenomenon, from its origins as an unsuccessful Broadway play, Everybody Comes to Rick's, to the making of the film and finally to its enduring afterlife.

The reasons for the film's success are many, and Isenberg considers them all. It was a movie than came out at just the right time, soon after America's entry into World War II, and the themes of standing up to oppression and making sacrifices for that cause rang true then, and still do.

The cast was perfection itself. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan or George Raft in the role that went to Humphrey Bogart or Ann Sheridan or Hedy Lamar, not Ingrid Berman, playing Ilsa? Isenberg notes that most of those in the cast were born outside the United States, and many cast members were in fact refugees — ideal for a movie about refugees trying to get to the United States.

The film's screenwriters had much to do with the movie's enduring popularity. Consider how even people who have never even seen Casablanca know many of its classic lines. Yet many people had a hand in working on the script, and for years afterward there were conflicts about who deserved credit for what.

Casablanca has been shown on Turner Classic Movies more than any other film, both a sign of its lasting popularity and a reason for it. Countless movies and television shows have made reference to it, including The Simpsons on numerous occasions and Saturday Night Live. There must be few people in the English-speaking world who have never laughed at another's or attempted their own witty remark based on such lines as "we'll always have Paris" or 'here's looking at you, kid" or 'this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or "play it again, Sam" (even if that exact line isn't even in the movie).

Casablanca lives on in everyone who has ever seen it and many of those who have not. Can that be said of Citizen Kane?