in which they found death while still be- ing alive, they said was reminiscent of the grinning of a cheerful corpse”- skipping the hit with the first ball.“What is your na- tionality? I’m a drunkard!”And although it supposedly wasn’t known what the epi- logue would be (probably why Rick says the line: Maybe a finish will come to you as you go along), the choice made remains for the future. “Play it again, Sam,” says Milan Rakovac. “And then Sam would play and sing, and we would emit howling voices in the Balkan cinema, with a‘shush’from the packed auditorium, and I’d just trained my whole life to be Bogie – frowning eyebrows looking dangerous, slumped shoulders, the cool guy’s grin, with nothing lacking!” And what about the film seventy-five summers later?“Three-quarters of a centu- ry later,”replies Rakovac,“when Sam begins to play the piano, everything is the same. And worse than back then! Because again
it’s a case of do or die. We are again losers like the bunch from Casablanca. There is one slight but horrible difference: then the right and the left, the church and the un- godly, conservatives and communists, dem- ocrats and autocrats, tutti insieme, began to eradicate the evil of Nazi fascism. Today I bleat about‘totalitarianism’– a nice spring- board for the return to power of those who the world defeated in 1945. When – then come the same calls, you understand me, brother, in us, with us, above us. And we, kusch und platz! We daren’t even comment anymore, come, Sam, for God’s sake, play that fine tune As Time Goes By. And back then in 1942 Bogart served the formula to us, don’t kneel, because‘they can’t do any- thing to us, not even god’. Only now do I ac- ceptYezhov’s motto of the time: proletarians of all countries, get serious. Well, we didn’t, not even then. Nor today. Shall we have another rendition of As Time Goes By?”
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