Los Angeles: City of Film Noir (Wichita Films, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

tAfter Hitler Lives I watched a rather odd presentation on YouTube: a 53-minute documentary originally made in France by filmmakers Clare and Julia Kuperberg called Los Angeles: City of Film Noir. There are three main interviewees in the movie: neo-noir novelist James Ellroy, Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, and The Film Noir Encyclopedia co-editor Alain Silver. Ellroy’s interview segments were particularly interesting since he’s an L.A. native and when he was a boy of nine his dad would drive him out to motels and tell him to wait outside while Daddy went into a motel room for “business.” It didn’t take Ellroy long, even at age nine, to figure out that the sort of “business” his dad was transacting in those motel rooms involved women other than his mother. Ellroy became a peeping Tom and found the sight of women in rooms who didn’t know they were being watched exciting. He seemed to be suggesting that this oddball upbringing was what first led him to investigate the sordid side of Los Angeles as a writer. Ellroy is best known for his cycle of four novels based on the so-called “Biack Dahlia” murder of Elizabeth Short in Hollywood in 1947 – the case’s nickname came from a mistaken reference to The Blue Dahlia, a 1946 film noir that was Raymond Cnandler’s only original screenplay that was actually filmed. Ellroy’s books in the “Black Dahlia” cycle were The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. and the first and third books in the cycle were filmed: The Black Dahlia acceptably and L.A. Confidential brilliantly (and Ellroy gives points to the makers of L.A., Confidential for having taken his sprawling novel and made a coherent story out of it that worked as a film). I

t’ve only read two of Ellroy’s books, The Big Nowhere and an earlier one called Because the Night (whose central character is a psychiatrist who starts a religious cult to manipulate his patients into committing crimes for him), and I suspect the reason The Big Nowhere was not filmed even though the books on either side of it in Ellroy’s cycle have been was it’s about homosexuality and the main character is an L.A. cop who’s assigned to investigate a series of Gay-related murders and in the process realizes he’s Gay himself. (the book ends with him committing suicide, which if it were filmed that way would piss off Queer-friendly and Queer-hating audiences equally.) The L.A.-centric interviewees make a good case for Los Angeles as the noir city, even though many of the classic noirs were filmed there simply because that’s where the major studios were based. The interviewees make an interesting comparison between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, pointing out via clips from The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep (actually from the trailers to both films,since the Kuperbergs used the old Arts & Entertainment Biography dodge of u sing clips from trailers, which were generally not copyrighted during the classic age of Hollywood, rather than having to pay the license fees for use of the fims themselves) that Chandler’s concept of the private investigator was considerably more romantic than Hammett’s. The reason is well known: Hammett had worked as a private detective himself for the Pinkertons, and he knew first-hand how little the job had in common with the way other pulp writers had depicted it. Chandler was a failed oil executive who lost his career in the Great Depression and figured he could make a living writing the sorts of stories he’d enjoyed reading in the pulps, and all he knew about being a detective was what he’d read in pulp fiction.

tPerhaps the most interesting aspect of this documentary is the discussion of sexuality and how the directors of classic noirs fought a running battle with the Production Code enforcers in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Among the most interesting aspects of his discussion was the depiction of the hit men played by Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman in Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo (1955, and a movie I’ve always thought of as more of a gangster film than a noir) as a Gay couple. Ellroy remembered discussing the film with Earl Holliman, who gave him points for having figured that out – though, if anything, an even more explicit depiction of a Gay male relationship in a film noir is between Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Coiok, Jr. in the 1947 film Born to Kill, in which the two are shown in bed together and Cook’s character is trying to tell Tierney’s, “You shouldn’t kill so many people. It’s not practical.” Eddie Muller recalled watching the film Gilda, with Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford and George Macready in what looks an awful lot like a Bisexual love triangle, with Evelyn Keyes, who had been married to its director, Charles Vidor. Based on her relationship with Vidor, Keyes told Muller about every sexual innuendo Vidor had inserted into the film. (Keyes was also married to an even more seminal noir director, John Huston.)

tFilm scholars have had a hard time defining film noir as a genre, even though its origins are obvious: the noir style was rooted in the films made in Germany during the Weimar Republic by directors and writers like Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder, and one can trace the style of film noir from pre-Nazi Germanmy to France to the U.S. as its creators fled Nazism as it moved across Europe. Film noir was essentially the union of German expressionist filmmaking with the American crime dramas published in Black Mask and other pulp magazines. There’s a school of thought that the term film noir came about because the French publisher who had the rights to the works of major hard-boiled crime writers like Hammett, Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich issued them in books with black covers and called them the série noir – and French film critics adopted the term film noir to indicate movies based on books from the série noir. One of the questions this movie asks about the original noir cycle is why this series of cynical films came out at a time when the mood of America was optimism – we had just won World War II and were headed for a future of unprecedented prosperity . The makers of this film suggested that these were really pent-up feelings left over from the Great Depression, when many of the novels the great films noir were based on had been written, and the filmmakers were expressing cynical feelings they hadn’t been allowed to use during the war because most of Hollywood’s output in the early 1940’s was upbeat and patriotic.