People who weren't even alive in 1967, the year "Cool Hand Luke" was released, are apt to sum up any common misunderstanding with: "What we have here is a failure to communicate." (It wasn't Paul Newman who said it, by the way; Strother Martin, playing the sadistic chain gang boss, did.) Nowadays, used car salesmen, out of habit, make you an offer you can't refuse. And the last person I heard say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" wasn't reacting to the state of the world but to the ineptitude of a supermarket bagger. Questioned afterwards, she said she had not only never seen "Network," the 1976 film whence the line originated, but had never heard of Peter Finch, the great British actor who delivered it and then died before he could collect an Academy Award for his performance.

A Hill of Beans

But the undisputed champ, the film that has scattered more verbal detritus over the American idiom than any other, is "Casablanca," the 1942 wartime heartstring-tugger about a seemingly cynical cafe owner, a brave resistance fighter and the beautiful woman who loved them both (I could write ads!) -- three little people whose problems, we are told at the climax of the film, "don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." The winner of Academy Awards for best picture, best director (Michael Curtiz) and best screenplay (by Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch), "Casablanca" is, of course, a great American film, starring (does anyone not know?) Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, Dooley Wilson and Sidney Greenstreet. Among other things, it gave us more famous lines than are easily counted, including one, "Play it again, Sam," that no one ever said.

As a reminder, here's a sampler: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns all over the world, she walks into mine." "Go ahead and shoot; you'll be doing me a favor." "Tell me, who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo, or were there others in between? Or aren't you the kind that tells?" "If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life." "You'll have to do the thinking for both of us." And "Here's looking at you, kid." When Dooley Wilson, playing Sam, sang "You must remember this," he might as well have been talking about the script.

Or the song itself. To wit: In 1992, 50 years after the film's release, Buildings magazine, a trade journal, found it fit to begin an article this way: "You must remember this: A roof isn't just a roof."

The very lameness of the reference is what makes it impressive. It's remarkable that any non-Shakespearean phrase has lasted in the memory for so long, but to have survived half a century for this?