THERE are love stories, and then there is one of the greatest romantic movies of all time.

Despite not usually being given to such blatant displays of rank sentimentality, it seems hard to believe that any right-thinking male would take his beloved to see P.S I Love You or Definitely, Maybe when, for one night only, Casablanca returns to the big screen.

Digitally restored, the story of the cynical drunkard Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart won three Oscars upon its release, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

Set during World War Two, Rick's gin joint is a gathering place for everyone from the French Resistance to the nazi occupiers. Rick sticks his neck out for no-one, but when an old lover (Ingrid Bergman) resurfaces in Casablanca with her husband, a leader of the Resistance, Rick finds himself in the middle of both a romantic and a political intrigue.

But why has the film had such a lasting impression on audiences, even six decades after it was originally released?

The combination of Bogart and Bergman is pretty irresistible for a start. The two characters create such on-screen chemistry that Bogart's wife at the time, Mayo Methot, accused him of having an affair with his co-star. Subsequently the two actors did not speak much when they were not on set together, but in front of the cameras their attraction still burned brightly.

The supporting cast are also world class, with Peter Lorre, Claude Raines, Sydney Greenstreet and Dooley Wilson all appearing in the film. And the dialogue is knife-sharp, for example when Captain Renault questions Rick's assertion that he came to Casablanca for health reasons, saying he cannot have come "for the waters" as the city is in the middle of the desert, Bogart dryly replies, "I was misinformed." The film has more quotations in the American Film Institute's Top 100 movie quotes than any other - six, including "here's looking at you, kid", "play it, Sam" and "we'll always have Paris."

And the ending - so at odds with how our contemporary romantic comedies work - is perhaps all the more powerful and moving for its refusal to bow to anything as inconsequential as a love affair. After all, as Rick says himself, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Of course he is wrong, which is why the film has endured when others of its ilk, 1938's Algiers starring Hedy Lamarr for example, have not.

Unlike Gone With The Wind or even It's A Wonderful Life, there is no sense that Casablanca has aged. Watching it tonight for the first time or the twentieth is to experience a masterclass in film-making that very few modern movies can stand up to.

Casablanca is showing at Cineworld, Bolton, today only