Casablanca sequel to play it all again ...
ONE of cinema’s most famous lines — “Here’s looking at you, kid” — might be due for a rebirth 70 years after Casablanca was released. After many failed attempts to make a sequel to the classic 1943 Oscar-winner, what happened to Rick and Ilsa, played by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, after she reluctantly fled the advancing Nazis in the arms of a man she didn’t love, might be revealed.
Cass Warner, granddaughter of the legendary Hollywood producer, Jack Warner, is the driving force behind the new film. Provisionally entitled As Time Goes By, the script was written in the 1980s by Howard Koch, one of the trio of screenwriters who won an Oscar for Casablanca, and revolves around Richard Blaine — the illegitimate son of the ill-fated lovers. Set 20 years after that night when Rick ‘did the right thing’ by helping the love of his life escape with her husband, Victor, their son returns to Casablanca to find out what became of his real father, only to become involved with freedom fighters battling Nazi sympathisers intent on establishing another Third Reich. Like father, like son. Warner says the story “will have flashbacks, but is really about the next generation — a son going back to find what happened to his parents.” Casablanca fans are against tampering with such a legacy, but Hollywood thinks box office. Bogart’s son, Stephen, said: “There are certain films, like The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Casablanca, that need to stay as pristine and perfect as they are.”
