For over a month now a shamal has been blowing out of Iraq and dumping dust on Saudi and neighbouring Gulf states. I can't think of a worse climatic condition. A sand storm is not only all-encompassing, it is entirely unhealthy: if you venture out you breathe in vast quantities of almost microscopic dust, which used to be sand, which is made into glass, which not even a medical mask can prevent entering your insides. Get my drift? I close all my windows and doors but the stuff still creeps in, proven by running a finger through dust deposits on my coffee table, which I have converted into a gym bench. Even when the storm is over the dust takes days to float back down to earth.
Rick's Bar has to be the world's best bar ever and I continue my quest to find its modern day equal. Though not in Saudi, a country that is bone-dry in more ways than one, unless you have a wife under whose black sack you can smuggle booze in from Bahrain.
Despite the exotic location, the movie was shot entirely at Burbank studios in California.
Almost everybody smokes - a golden age.
The stand-offish co-operation between the French and the Germans symbolises the conflict of Europe (pertinently reprised today in the form of the European Union) whereas America is portrayed as the beacon of freedom, the holy grail, and just about the only place on earth worth escaping to. I wonder if that is still true ...
The French are portrayed as duplicitous cowards; the Germans as Nazis (has there ever been a more perfect enemy? Al-Qaida?); the British as upper-class twits; the Italians unimportant; and the Americans, via Rick, are coolly arrogant, above-all capitalist, and weary of Europe's endless struggle to get on with each other.
Then, of course, there is the romantic aspect. Rick, on the cusp of alcoholism, has had his heart broken by Ilsa, who believing her dashing Czech resistance-fighter husband to be dead, had turned to the rugged American for consolation. "We'll always have Paris," Rick says with immortality when Ilsa unexpectedly turns up in his bar one evening and smashes his heart all over again.
In the end, Rick, not giving a damn about much, simply shoots the Nazi to allow the resistance fighter to escape with Rick's dream girl on his arm.
Reinault, the corrupt French chief of police, witnessing the murder, but not wanting Rick to be the culprit, ends the movie with the perfect line, "Round up the usual suspects."
Pure genius. But as the credits roll the dust still swirls outside and a guy with a scarf wrapped round his head sweeps the street, perhaps pondering how he is going to spend his $50 monthly salary.