'Casablanca' celebrates its 70th with 500 theater showings

When you commute for enough years on a train or bus, you inevitably have an occasional random thought about some totally uncharacteristic thing you’d like to see happen, just once.

Call it a commuter bucket list.

Mine involves the film “Casablanca,” which comes to mind because on March 21, “Casablanca” is returning for a one-night stand in several hundred movie theaters.

More on that in a second. Meanwhile, back to me.

I am not objective on the subject of “Casablanca.” I’m obnoxious. You can ask my wife, who refuses to watch it with me anymore because I involuntarily say all the lines a second before the actors.

I’m the guy at the party who randomly says things like, “That is my least vulnerable spot” or “She’s coming back. I know she’s coming back.”

That may explain why I don’t get invited to many parties.

Anyhow, my iPod includes a six-minute excerpt from “Casablanca.”

It starts with Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) approaching Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Rick’s Cafe and asking, “Monsieur Blaine, may I have a minute?” It ends with Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) telling Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), “Mademoiselle, you may have observed that in Casablanca, human life is cheap.”

In between, Victor has heard Major Strasser and his German officers singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“Watch on the Rhine”) and ordered Rick’s house orchestra to drown them out by playing “La Marseillaise.”

Even though Rick knows this incendiary act will infuriate Major Strasser, he nods approval. Against the backdrop of a world where the Germans have conquered France and occupied Paris, this defiant anthem becomes so stirring the whole cafe joins in.

Call it a cheap setup if you like. Me, tears well up in my eyes every time I see or hear it, including when I hear it on my iPod on the 6:24.

That’s where the commuter fantasy kicks in.

As I’m riding along I imagine “La Marseillaise” blasting through the whole car, echoing off expensive shoulder bags and forcing every head to look up from their smartphones and Kindles.

I envision one person, then two, then everyone starting to sing “La Marseillaise,” swelling to a finale that rattles the steel wheels and dissolves into shouts of “Vive La France!”

Okay, I know that’s less likely on the 6:24 in 2012 than it was in Casablanca in 1942.

So what, I say. You deal with commuting in your way and I deal with it in mine.

This much, however, should not be in dispute: No one has ever made a more justifiably beloved movie than “Casablanca.”

News Update

Eddie Palmieri celebrates his 75th at The Blue Note

Grammy-winning pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri is a marvelous storyteller.

And that should come as no surprise considering the Latin jazz great is about to launch a six-night gig at the Blue Note Tuesday to celebrate his 75th birthday.

Of course, ask him about that milestone and he may try to convince you that somehow it just can’t be.

“The math doesn’t add up. I’ve been on the bandstand 55 years,” Palmieri says. “The great Cuban trumpet player Alfredo (Chocolate) Armenteros taught me that after 50, you starting counting from one again. So, at 25, I feel great!”

The nine-time Grammy Award winner was born in Spanish Harlem to parents who moved to New York from Puerto Rico. His family, including his older brother Charlie, another renowned Latin piano giant, grew up in the Bronx.

Palmieri talks of those days with historical anecdotes filled with passion and fond memory.

“For me, everything was the Latin dance music, which started with the great Machito Orchestra in 1939. And when the great arranger and pianist, René Hernandez, was brought in from Cuba in approximately 1946, he took the Machito Orchestra to another level. He was truly a genius and I considered him a musical godfather.

“And by 1949, Tito Puente had started his conjunto,” continues Palmieri. “He and my brother Charlie were friends already and remained so until Charlie's death, at the age of 60, in 1988. Tito’s conjunto brought the rhythm section upfront and put the trumpets in the back.”

His name-dropping is head-spinning, weaving in tales of Tito Rodriguez, Mario Bauza, Noro Morales, Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie, a father of the bebop style in jazz, and a further bridge between black American jazz and Latin American music.

The musical matrimony that became known as Latin Jazz was consummated at halls of legend such as the Palladium Ballroom, located on 53rd and Broadway from 1948 to 1966.

“Birdland, the club named after Charlie Parker, was right down the block from the Palladium,” he recalls as the site of the “interchange of the Latin listening to the jazz and the jazz listening to the Latin. By 1949, the Palladium was the greatest ballroom dance hall you've ever seen. Four nights a week, different crowds every night, on Sundays a black audience.”

Those who view the interaction of the dancers and the dance bands as solely a romantic story are in for a surprise.

“The dancers were the real enemy to me,” Palmieri says, seriously. “The question was who was going to knock who out, the band or the dancers. Eventually I recorded ‘Azúcar Pa Ti.’”

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