Here’s Looking at You, ‘Casablanca’ : Movies: Fifty years after the classic film was released, the legend lives on in this Moroccan port.

From the looks of the dim bar in Casablanca, you’d expect to find Humphrey Bogart serving drinks under the gaze of Ingrid Bergman.

Fifty years after Warner Bros. released “Casablanca,” among the most enduring and popular films in cinema history, the legend lives on in this watering hole on Morocco’s western coast.

Much like Rick’s Cafe Americain of the film, beggars and pickpockets thrive outside the Casablanca Bar in a corner of the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Casablanca.

But inside it’s not Sam who croons “As Time Goes By” but a Lebanese piano player named Hratch who sings in 14 languages--including Japanese.

Movie posters of Bogart as hard-boiled but sentimental cafe owner Rick, Bergman as his ex-lover Ilsa and Paul Henreid as stoic but dedicated resistance leader Victor Laszlo cover the walls.

The waiters and bartenders are dressed as Bogart in the film’s celebrated final scene, in trench coats and fedoras, or as French police captain Louis Renault.

“It’s kind of fun, with all the people dressed up,” said John Shanahan, an attorney from Roseland, N.J. “It’s in character--the waiter’s a seriously unfriendly Frenchman.”

Casablanca isn’t quite the den of espionage, intrigue and gambling the film evokes but a dusty port city of 3 million people, home to Morocco’s textile, car parts and construction industries.

“There’s no similarity; the movie was filmed entirely in a studio,” says Abderrahim Daoudi, Casablanca’s director of tourism. “But it had an enormous impact. Every day, somewhere in the world, it’s shown.”

The cynical mystique of Bogart and the beauty and heartbreak of Bergman torn between two lovers has added to the enduring appeal of the film, which premiered on Thanksgiving Day, 1942, after being shot in about nine weeks.

It’s also a favorite subject for cinema trivia buffs and the source of some of Hollywood’s most memorable lines.

Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid” comes out as anything from “Good luck to you” in the Brazilian version to “Here’s to the pupils of your eyes” in Japanese.

Piano player Hratch is besieged by requests to play “As Time Goes By,” up to five times a night. “Sometimes they don’t even know the name of the song, they just say, ‘Play it again, Sam,’ ” (which is not what Bogart actually said), he says in his obligingly raspy voice. “The Japanese ask me to play ‘The Humphrey Bogart song.’ ”