Casablanca sequel: here's looking at you, kid | Observer editorial

Casablanca's thwarted lovers, Ilsa Lund and bar owner Rick Blaine, were comforted, we know, by the thought they would "always have Paris". But now it seems their bittersweet union left more than the memory of a kiss.

According to a planned sequel to the 1942 classic, the couple, played by Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, had a child together who was brought up in America by Lund and her husband, the principled humanitarian Victor Laszlo.

The sequel, Return to Casablanca or As Time Goes By, is being developed in Hollywood by Warner Bros and will see Lund's illegitimate son return to North Africa to seek out his real father's past.

But do we need to hear how Rick drank himself to death beside that piano? It is like finding out, 70 years after It's a Wonderful Life, that the town of Bedford Falls is now as seedy and criminalised as the cautionary vision offered to Jimmy Stewart by his angel, Clarence.

Or like learning in Citizen Kane II that Rosebud was also the name of the dying newspaper mogul's bookie.