The Casablanca file

Television and magazine advertisements; films and television plays; the names of night clubs, bars and restaurants; the routines of stage and television comedians; titles of books; sub-editors' headlines; even the exchanges of personal conversations: the film "Casablanca" figures in all of them and in a great deal else. "Casablanca" is perhaps the most prolific generator of secondary texts in the field of popular culture. In the language of semiotics, "Casablanca" is profoundly intertextual. Tracing "Casablanca"'s rich intertextuality from the mid-1950s to the present day, this book is concerned that the process of quoting, mis-quoting and re-quoting from "Casablanca" takes place within a very narrow range of meanings mostly concerned with the cult of Bogart and the related theme of romantic nostalgia. As well as documenting the sometimes delirious intertextuality of "Casablanca', the book describes the archaeological task of recovering the most important meaning that the hegemony of romantic nostalgia suppresses - "Casablanca"'s demand that the moral choices be made in the face of fascism.