I was a little surprised a few nights ago to read on the IFC Center marquee that it was reviving Casablanca for a 75th anniversary run. One wonders, how much longer can World War II still keep the moral imagination of cinema-goers penned in like it has?

The fact that I was walking to the train from a revival screening of A Matter of Life and Death only made the length of time seem longer. The characters who fought in the war – and many of the soldiers filing into heaven in the film – were just kids, after all.

“There’s no Technicolor in heaven.”

Kim Hunter was 26 when the film got made, David Niven a full ten years older, though smoking cigarettes and fighting world wars seemed to age men’s faces faster back then, making this one of those hard-to-get-your-head-around age gaps, watching it now.

Gorgeous film, written by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It’s a good example of a film getting lost in history because it was too topical, too of its time: When Niven’s British pilot falls to earth and falls in love with an American before the bureaucracy in heaven can track him down, it goes to an administrative trial that, you’d expect, is about love, but turns into an amusing but way beside-the-point argument about British-American relations. Brits apparently know it much better than we do – the BFI once ranked it the 20th best British film of all time – but if it hadn’t gone so out of its way to make a point about diplomacy and politics, it could have been one of the most celebrated love stories ever.

It’s just marvelous how it turns the Wizard of Oz dichotomy on its head. Heaven is bland and bureaucratic – and black and white. Earth is Technicolor. There is no place like home.