Casablanca film and Bertie Higgins song

by Felix P: Humphrey Bogart

Back in 1942, Michael Curtiz gave us a story that still lands with a quiet ache. Humphrey Bogart is Rick Blaine, running a café in wartime Morocco, all cynicism and guarded cool until Ingrid Bergman walks back in as Ilsa Lund. She brings Victor Laszlo with her, a resistance leader and her husband, and suddenly Rick’s whole fortress of detachment crumbles. He’s got every reason to hold a grudge after Paris, but the film never lets bitterness win. Rick ends up helping Laszlo escape, giving up his shot at getting Ilsa back. ‘We’ll always have Paris’ and ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ aren’t just famous lines; they’re the sound of someone choosing the bigger thing over his own heart. And woven through it all is ‘As Time Goes By,’ a song that insists the fundamental things apply as time goes by, a kiss remains a kiss, a sigh remains a sigh, and turns memory into something almost unbearable. Decades later, Bertie Higgins spins his own take with a 1982 song called ‘Casablanca.’ He’s never actually been to the real city, and his love story won’t ever flicker on a silver screen. Instead, it starts in the back row of a drive-in while Curtiz’s film plays, popcorn and Cokes and a summer night turning into something cinematic. Higgins borrows the movie’s imagery, candlelit cafés, Moroccan moonlight, stolen moments, and folds it into a ballad about a romance that only exists in that shared, flickering dark. The narrator admits the whole thing is built on borrowed glamour, yet the ache of watching someone leave is completely his own. Both works circle the same truth: time changes the shape of feeling but doesn’t erase it. The film tests love against history and moral choice; the song filters it through pop culture and private mythology. A kiss remains a kiss, a sigh remains a sigh, and whether you’re on a tarmac in Casablanca or in a parked car with the credits rolling, some stories just keep playing.