Casablanca (1943)

Casablanca is a 1943 American romantic drama directed by Michael Curtiz, widely regarded as one of the greatest and most quoted films in cinema history. Humphrey Bogart stars as Rick Blaine, a cynical, world-weary American expatriate who runs a nightclub in Casablanca, French Morocco during World War II. Rick's carefully maintained neutrality is shattered when Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman, walks into his club with her husband Victor Laszlo, a Czech resistance leader fleeing the Nazis.

Rick and Ilsa had a passionate affair in Paris before the German occupation, and their reunion forces Rick to choose between his love for Ilsa and his dormant idealism. Casablanca was produced quickly as a routine wartime melodrama — the screenplay was famously being rewritten during shooting, with the cast never knowing how the story would end — yet every element converged into perfection: Bogart and Bergman's chemistry, Claude Rains's urbane Captain Renault, Dooley Wilson's performance of "As Time Goes By," and a final act that contains perhaps the most famous dialogue in cinema. Casablanca won three Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and its lines — "Here's looking at you, kid," "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine," "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" — remain the most quoted in film history.