Bogie, Bergman, and the Brattle
In November 1942, a timeless story of love, loss, and redemption first appeared on the silver screen. Along with the hearts of audiences, “Casablanca” won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best screenplay. Seventy-five years later, the film is no less moving for viewers young and old. Its lasting power, according to a number of Harvard scholars, is due to a range of factors, including wartime significance, an outstanding cast, screenwriting that produced some of the most quoted lines of all time, a memorable score, and an antihero perfectly suited to his era. For Robb Moss, “Casablanca” was “a seminal film for me when I was falling in love with films in college.” Today, as chair of Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), Moss often references the movie in class, in particular “the geometry of the last scene,” in which the three main characters, Humphrey Bogart as expatriate...