“Vultures, vultures everywhere!”

Eighty-three years of Casablanca.

This morning I got in the car, turned on the radio, and as I was preparing to switch it over to my phone’s output so I could listen to a podcast, the announcer on WNED indicated that they were about to play a suite of Max Steiner’s wonderful music for Casablanca, because the film opened eighty-three years ago today.

That movie has been a part of my world my entire life. I didn’t watch it myself until sometime during, or immediately after, my freshman year of college, but I was always aware of it, and my parents always spoke very highly of it. I remember when I watched it the first time I thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty damned good, I don’t know if it’s quite as good as everyone makes it out to be, but that’s a damned good movie.”

A while later I watched it again, though…and I discovered something that Roger Ebert would later write about: the fact that Casablanca is, somehow, always better the second time. There’s just something about it that makes it a “pretty good” watch the first time and makes it utterly engrossing the second time around…and each and every time thereafter.

Eighty-three years.

When I was a kid, Casablanca was my benchmark for “an old movie”. Since it was only 29 years old when I was born, I guess I kind of set “twenty-nine years old” as my thought for what constituted an “old movie”. So, using that metric, here in the Year of Our Lord 2025, new “old movies” include Independence Day, Scream, Jerry Maguire, and the first Mission: Impossible movie.

Anyway, here’s the Max Steiner suite I listened to this morning on my ride to work. This is music to put you in the mood to be a big inconvenience to Nazis…which honestly, is saddeningly needed right now, innit?

Share This Post