<p><em>Casablanca </em>is a film that Sean and I have wanted to cover for a long time, but there was a little bit of a struggle to find a good film to pair it with. Not because there were so few, but because there were so MANY. </p><p>Finally we came up with focusing on Humphrey Bogart himself rather than on the overall theme of the film. And then there was the realization that Bogart had a couple of films where he was a reluctant hero in a World War Two setting, with the key word being &quot;reluctant.&quot; </p><p>So we open with <em>Casablanca</em>, from 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz. Hal Wallis got the rights to the play just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, so it wound up having a much bigger impact than it might have had before we entered the war. </p><p>In Part Two, we see how Howard Hawks would handle a reluctant hero. </p>