MADELEINE LE BEAU: YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

 It is one of the most beautiful, and most moving, close-ups in film: Madeleine LeBeau, as Yvonne, tears streaming down her face, shouts 'Vive La France' after joining the patrons of Rick's Cafe Americain in singing 'La Marseillaise' to drown out the Nazis singing 'Die Wacht Am Rhein'. The news was released this weekend that LeBeau had died on 1 May, at the age of 92; she was the last surviving cast member from Casablanca. Her's is one of the best scenes in a movie filled with memorable scenes, and Yvonne's tears are what gives a moment that might seem absurd, a battle of songs between the Nazis and the melange of refugees and Vichy French in French Morocco, dramatic credence. It's enough to make me want to be French every time I see it.

The back-story makes it work. We first see Yvonne sitting at the bar, attended by the drooling baman Sascha (Leonid Kinskey). Rick (Bogart, of course) has just dumped her, and he deals with her pleading with a harsh existentialism: "Where were you last night?" "That's so long ago, I don't remember." "Will I see you tonight?" "I never make plans that far ahead.” The dialogue helps us understand that Rick's unwillingness to commit to anything—it's a metaphor for wartime neutrality, which is what, on the grander scale, the film is nominally about. Rick has already refused to help Ugarte (Peter Lorre) who has robbed and killed the couriers carrying prized letters of transit, which he has given to Rick to hide. After a police have shot Ugarte trying to escape, one patron says 'I hope you'll do more when they come for me,', to which Rick replies, 'I stick my neck out for nobody'.

Yvonne returns to Rick's on the arm of a young German officer (Hans Twardowski), as if to flaunt him in Rick's face. LeBeau's acting is perfect, part pouting child, part femme fatale, and she gets a couple of sour glances as she's seated. But Rick is upstairs with Victor Laszlo (Paul Henried) who's trying to get stolen letters of transit from him, so he and his wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) can leave Casablanca. Rick has refused to sell at any price, telling Laszlo to 'ask his wife' why, when the sound of the Germans singing reaches his office.

In a series of cuts we see the Germans singing, Laszlo in frozen anger on the stairs with Rick, police prefect Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) looking discomforted, and Yvonne staring with shame into her drink. Then Laszlo marches to the bandstand and orders the band to play La Marseillaise. They look up to Rick, who nods his approval. The singing begins, and Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) tries to get his Nazis to sing louder before they sit down in defeat. In another close-up, Yvonne sings with barely disguised shame and rage, as the tears begin; by the time the song ends her face is swimming in tears as she shouts 'Vive La France'. I usually post that clip on social media each Bastille Day, and each time I feel a lump in my throat.

But for LeBeau the film must have had extra resonance. Exile, and fleeing the Nazis was real. She and her husband, Marcel Dalio, had fled Paris ahead of the Germans. Like Victor and Ilsa, they obtained letters of transit from Spain to Lisbon, whence they boarded a Portugese ship, carrying Chilean visas which turned out to be forgeries. They were stopped in Vera Cruz, Mexico, but managed somehow to get temporary visas for Canada, and on their way north stopped in Los Angeles where they stayed looking for work in Hollywood.

Dalio was a major actor in France; a comic star who played major roles in two of Renoir's classics, La Regle du Jeu and La Grande Illusion, where his comic skill belies the seriousness of the parts. They had met when she was a teenaged stage actress, and married in 1939, the year she landed her first small file role, in Pabst's Young Girls in Trouble. Dalio was some 20 years older; a prefiguring of Bogart's romance with Lauren Bacall that began on the set of To Have And Have Not, in which Dalio would have one of his best Hollywood roles. Dalio was Jewish; born Israel Moshe Blauschild to Romanian Jewish parents; the Germans actually used his face on posters to illustrate their warnings against the typical Jew. Dalio's parents would die in concentration camps.

Both of them landed work. Dalio got character roles and LeBeau worked her way up with smaller parts in better films at Warner Bros: Hold Back The Dawn, with fellow French expat Charles Boyer, and in Raoul Walsh's boxing drama Gentleman Jim. But by the time they made Casablanca, the marriage had already failed to survive Hollywood; Dalio sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion. One senses he was an older professional; she was younger and beautiful and may have had her head turned.

Dalio, of course, plays Emil the croupier in Casablanca; he's the one who hands Capt. Renault his winnings an instant after Renault has closed Rick's under Strasser's orders, because he is 'shocked, shocked, to find gambling is going on in here'. Renault's initial response to Strasser's order, 'but everyone's having such a good time,' is one of Rains' many marvels.

Yvonne disappears from the movie at that point; LeBeau played in two more films, with one good role alongside Dalio, George Sanders and Brenda Marshall in Paris After Dark (1943), then disappeared from Hollywood after the war. Her postwar career in France was peripatetic, with few starring parts or memorable roles. The most notable is probably her title role in (ironically) The Sins of Madeleine (1951) playing a prostitute who scams her clients with a pregnancy scare. She also gathered some epic bad reviews playing a singer in a British film, Cage Of Gold (1950, see photo left) alongside Jean Simmons.

Dalio worked consistently on both sides of the Atlantic; he even took the Capt. Renault role in a short-lived American TV series of Casablanca in 1955. You can see him in Sam Fuller's China Gate, John Ford's Donovan's Reef, and even in Mike Nichols' Catch-22, but his biggest role was one of his last, as an American rabbi returning to the France where he was born, in Gerard Oury's The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, which was followed by a key part in Walerian Borowczk's soft-core classic La Bete.

LeBeau made little impact again until she played a tempermental French actress, again called Madeleine, in Fellini's 8 ½ at which point she stayed in Italy with one of the film's writers, Tullio Pinelli; they married in 1988. You can see some of her character reflected Valentina Cortese's character, Severine, in Truffaut's Day For Night. She retired from films in 1965, and lived quietly. Pinelli died in 2009 at the age of 100. She died in Barcelona, after breaking a hip in a fall.

As it happens, I often write obituaries, and they often drive home changes in my own world, changes that rarely seem for the best. I can't say how many times I have watched Casablanca in my lifetime; often enough to have most of the film's key lines down by rote. I've probably watched Madeleine LeBeau sing La Marseillaise five times as many times, and as I said, I will continue to replay it on July 14 for years to come. Vive La France! Vive LeBeau!

BOSCH: THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES

It's not often one's highest hopes are rewarded. Watching the Bosch TV series through to the end on Amazon hasn't changed my opinion of it (see my interview with Michael Connelly and Titus Welliver and essay on the first four episodes here) but it has widened my perspective. I rejoined the series with episode five, Mama's Boy, which again was directed by Ernest Dickerson in the most stunning fashion for the small screen. Dickerson has always been good in darker, shadowy locations, and the way he blends that darker sense with the bright light of Los Angeles is a perfect visual metaphor for what Connelly's books and the series itself try to do.

What's most interesting about the complete series is the way it winds up aligning with that vision in so many ways. It's light on the shootouts and car chases, and it is very heavy on the grind of police work, the slow process of unglamorous detection. Although Harry's relationships, with his daughter, his ex, and with his colleagues are inevitably the focus, the story lines, intertwined admirably (presumably by Eric Overmyer) from a number of Connelly's books, reflect issues that mirror Bosch the person and Bosch the detective, not least those of parenthood. The two major plot threads are connected, with the discovery of the body of a teenager murdered 20 years earlier ( City Of Bones) linking to the serial killer Reynard Waits (Echo Park). Bosch himself is introduced by a smaller storyline taken from The Concrete Blonde. It's a fascinating bit of adaptation, and what stands out is the way they have been combined to reinforce each other. Even Shawn Hatosy as Stokes and Jason Gedrick as Waits seem to reinforce each other.

The ensemble cast is not new to police drama (think especially of Hill Street Blues) and it is very much of a part of modern Scandinavian crime -- like Martin Beck, Bosch's essential isolation plays off the group he works with. But the persistent and upfront conflict with authority is an essential part of Bosch's work ethic. It is helped in this case by another parallel story, detailing the bartering between District Attorney Rick O'Shea (Stephen Culp), who wants to be mayor, and Deputy Chief Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick, in a role that seems an outgrowth of his part in The Wire) who wants to be chief and holds a copy of the video O'Shea thought he'd destroyed, which shows his own, rather than Bosch's culpability in Waits' escape from custody. It's a tremendous cast, with Jamie Hector as Bosch's partner Jerry Edgar and Mark Derwin as his nemesis Harvey Pounds standing out, and the seemingly requisite lesbian kiss signaled by Rose Rollins (fresh from The L Word) as Kiz Ryder. Annie Wersching does an excellent job of mercurial changes in her relationship with Bosch, while Sarah Clarke, as Eleanor Wish (it's not just villains whose names signify things) signals both why she was attracted to Bosch and why the relationship couldn't work. Pat Skipper, as the father of the murdered boy, has some devastating scenes, as does Veronica Cartwright as Waits' mother.

But the essence of good character acting is having good characters, and it is a tribute to the writing of the show that they have so much to work with. It's also writing that takes chances. The main story arc actually resolves itself in the ninth of the ten episodes, and I found it significant that Connelly himself co-scripted the final episode, which is where the series comes full circle back to its focus on Bosch while tying the other story lines together.

And of course Bosch is the centre. I started off admiring what Welliver brought to the part: a fierce internal drive which is the essence of Bosch. As the series went on, I realised he matched by pre-conception of Bosch less and less: he a bit too ectomorphic, too lean, sharp-angled, and hard. He dresses too well, wears too showy a watch, and a bracelet that seemed disconcerting. But then I realised that this is a bit of keeping with the times, and the anachronism is wound up in the turntable, and the jazz LPs that Bosch plays, and the way his daughter marvels at them (and doesn't even have CDs). Times have changed.

Then it occurred to me that my image of Bosch is very close to my image of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, an un-preposessing slightly soft around the edges detective, but that this does not have to be what Bosch should be, and what Welliver brought to the character was very much in keeping with where he was going in this show. Moreover, it occured to me that if you were casting for Hammett's Sam Spade (not that the world needs a remake of The Maltese Falcon) Titus Welliver would be the perfect choice for the Bogart part, and that Bogart might have made a decent Harry Bosch in his own time. Welliver as Bogart; I can't think of a much higher compliment. And Bosch: The Series has left me already anticipating the second season.

PAUL THOMAS' DEATH ON DEMAND

I have to confess; I pulled Paul Thomas' novel off the 'to read' shelf as soon as I returned from a too-short trip to New Zealand, and tore through it. It may be the most Chandlerian detective novel I've read in a long time. This is a compliment, but not in the way you might think.

What Death on Demand is not is descriptive of Aotearoa, neither the land nor the cities in which the action takes place. Neighbourhoods are barely sketched in, there's little of the background life, and even individual locations have none of the detail which Chandler uses to give clues about the nature of his characters and the character and the nature of Los Angeles. Nor is it written in the kind of wise-cracking first-person prose, full of evocative similies and wry commentary that translated so well into the mouths of actors like Bogart, or closer to Marlowe himself, Dick Powell or James Garner.

Tito Ihaka shares with Marlowe is a healthy disrespect for authority—though unlike Chandler's idealist, he is a realist who has stayed in his job in the police, because, as one character puts it, what else would he do? Plus, Tito is a Maori, and as such has a healthy outsider's scepticism about the pakeha who run New Zealand. Scepticism, in Marlowe's case, is idealism smashed on the shores of reality, but Ihaka was never an idealist. This seems to appeal to women; like Marlowe he sometimes has them throwing themselves at him, but where Marlowe, ever the schoolboyish knight of Chandler's imagination, usually keeps them at arm's length, always aware of the potential for ulterior motives, Ihaka again is more realistic.

But what made me think of Chandler was the depth of the story, the way it works back in time, through layers of society, through people who are not the people they seem, and through intense corruption, personal and institutional, at every layer. Thomas' picture of New Zealand society is drawn through the aspirations and limitations of the characters, through the goals of success they've been set within their society, and the brilliant way every personal conversation can have many layers. This works best when Ihaka is involved, and as I write this, it strikes me that he bears more relation to Hammett's Continental Op than to Chandler's Marlowe, but Ihaka is, in effect, a sounding-board for all sections of the society he protects.

Not least in the police department itself. I'm partial to tales of the infighting within the police, the way the bureaucracy often works against crime-solving, especially as one moves up the social strata. In that sense New Zealand is a small town, and you very much get the sense that to some cops, 'it's Chinatown', that, as in the best hard-boiled fictions, many crimes cannot be solved, or if solved, cannot be punished.

Ihaka is brought back to Auckland from exile in Greytown (both places I know) because a well-connected man Ihaka was convinced had staged his wife's accidental death wants to speak to him. Ihaka's refusal to leave the man alone was what had hime shipped to the Wairapa in the first place, that and knocking out his police nemesis in a men's room and pissing, literally, all over him. Now he's back, and he's looking for an anonymous hitman who did commit that murder, and others besides. The story is as compicated as the best of Chandler, with as many twists; I thought of The Little Sister, Farewell My Lovely, and The Lady In The Lake at various times, and that is high praise indeed. As I said, it's told in the third person, with the narration jumping times and characters, but the prose works best when Ihaka's on stage, and he's drawn well enough to get the reader identifying with him, and making it almost like the first-person when you see through Marlowe's eyes. The first three Ihaka novels appeared in the mid-1990s; is so good I'd lobby for Bitter Lemon to bring them all back into print in this country.

Death On Demand

Death On Demand by Paul Thomas

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, ISBN 9781908524171

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)