Casablanca at the Café Italien

After the screening, we walked down the rue Dauphine, then into the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. It’s one of the charms of Paris that a street could be given such a name. In London – which you might have thought would be able to compete when it came to such things – there isn’t even an Old Vic Road.

We stopped at the Procope.

“Voltaire used to come here,” Eve said as we entered the restaurant. “Not only Voltaire, but Beaumarchais and Diderot. And during the French Revolution, Robespierre, Danton, Marat. Somewhere you can even find Napoleon’s hat. It’s the oldest restaurant in Paris.”

The plaque outside made the even grander claim that the Procope was “the oldest café in the world”. Its founder, Procopio dei Coltelli, opened the restaurant in 1686, when France was under the grip of the Absolute Monarchy of Louis XIV.

It would take a good hundred years for the French revolutionaries to show up, but still I found myself imagining Signor dei Coltelli as a sort of proto-Rick, with his food, entertainment and possibly a gambling table, fomenting the spirit of freedom.

When I went up to the “Citoyens”, I saw a banner that declared, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” It reminded me of the stirring performance of the Marseillaise in the Café Américain, which, at Rick’s say-so, drowns out the Nazi soldiers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein”. Another piece of amusing serendipity was that the cinema where we saw the film – the Christine at 4 rue Christine in the 6th arrondissement – had once been the home of Louis XIV’s doctor.

In its appeal to subsequent generations, Casablanca has turned out, in its own way, to be as enduring as the Revolution. “I’ve seen it hundreds of times,” said Eve, “but whenever it plays, I see it again.

“It is so wonderful that each time I see it, I notice some new detail that I hadn’t noticed

before. Like last time, I noticed how very tall Ingrid Bergman was. Taller than Bogart.

Yet so beautiful, so feminine, with such grace and elegance that you wouldn’t normally

notice how tall she was.

“When she appears in the film for the first time, she’s wearing a marvellous white suit jacket and a long, white skirt, with a beautiful, large brooch and matching ear-rings. That is all. So simple and natural. Hardly any make-up. She appears magnificent. She lights up the scene. All the actors are extraordinary, and the music is so wonderful. And the piano player who sings the song. They are all wonderful. Dooley Wilson, Bogart, Bergman, Heinreid...

“And the history too is so interesting. It was made in 1942, the year that America finally began to play its part in the world. Bogart, the American, who realizes he can no longer stand aside, he was a symbol of the time. It meant a lot then to tell a story like that. It captured the struggle between good and evil. It was Hollywood, but it touched something real.

“Victor Laszlo, the Paul Heinreid character, in the Czech resistance, who has escaped from a concentration camp. He reminds me of Milena Jesenká, who was also Czech. Her father supported the Czech fascists, and she was completely opposed to him. He tried to lock her up, but she ran away to Vienna, where she became a journalist. She was beautiful, but incredibly brave too. When Czechoslovakia was partitioned, she was editing a magazine in Prague. She wrote articles against the Nazis and when they invaded, joined the Resistance. She helped many, many Jews to escape. Eventually, of course, she was arrested, but it wasn’t the Nazis who arrested her. It was the Czechs.

“It is the same everywhere, you see. Look at this country. During the Occupation, do you think it was the Nazis who rounded up the Jews? No. It was our own policemen! Evil is not a country. Good is not a country. They’re individuals like you and me. Milena and her father. Rick and Ilsa! Individuals who make the wrong or the right choices. That is why I like Casablanca.

“It even has a happy ending. No, it’s true Rick and Ilsa cannot live together

happily ever afterwards, but what mattered between them survived. They did not let each

other down.”

She talked so well about the film that there was nothing that I wanted to add. “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick tells Ilsa before he puts her on the plane at the end of the film. I knew what he meant.