I glanced around the theater, surprised at what a large proportion of the audience looked familiar to me. I don’t know that there were many diehards like us who never missed a night, but a lot of people came more than once. I guess if you saw one Bogart picture you saw them all, or as many as you could.

If we ran to type, I couldn’t tell you what the type was. There were quite a few college kids, some with the serious look of film students, others just out for a good time. There were older West Siders, the intellectual-political-artsy crowd you see at the free afternoon concerts at Juilliard, and some of them had probably seen many of these films during their initial run. There were singles, gay and straight, and young marrieds, gay and straight, and people who looked rich enough to buy the theater, and people who looked as though they must have raised the price of admission by begging on the subway. It was a wonderfully varied crowd, drawn together by the enduring appeal of an actor who’d died more than thirty-five years ago, and I was happy to be a part of it.

But not as happy as I would have been if Ilona were sharing my popcorn.

The thought made the popcorn stick in my throat, but sometimes it tends to do that anyway. I told myself it was a little early to start wallowing in self-pity, that she’d be slipping into the seat beside me any minute now.

The seat was still empty when they brought the house lights down. I wasn’t surprised, not really. I fed myself another handful of popcorn and let myself get lost in the movie.

That’s what it was there for.

The first feature, Passage to Marseille, was made in 1944, not long after Casablanca and obviously inspired by it, although the credits said it was based on a book by Nordhoff and Hall. (You remember them, they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty.) Bogart plays a French journalist named Matrac who’s on Devil’s Island when the movie opens, framed for murder and serving a life sentence.