"Gangster Squad" - LAPD Noir Encore

The pulp fiction hard boiled writing style that translated so easily to the screen as film noir has a long and continuing influence on our culture in general and movie making in particular.  
      
Los Angeles has been used as a setting almost from the beginning, in the literature, and translated to films: authors James M. Cain (“Double Indemnity"); Horace McCoy (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”); Nathaniel West (“Day Of the Locust”); Raymond Chandler (“The Big Sleep” et. al.); John Fante (“Ask The Dust”) all have inspired movie makers for generations.  Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the script for “Double Indemnity” (1944), the film many historians credit as the first Hollywood film of the genre, followed up with the noir classic, “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), from a script credited to his longtime collaborator, Charles Brackett. 

Robert Towne, who wrote and directed the movie adaptation of Fante’s novel, is most famous for the Oscar winning screenplay of “Chinatown” (1974).  There followed “True Confessions” (1981) directed by Ulu Grosbard from a novel by John Gregory Dunne and an adaptation by he and his wife, Joan Didion, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, is an overlooked classic.
  
Towne wrote the screenplay for a “Chinatown” sequel, “The Two Jakes” (1990) directed by Jack Nicholson. “Devil With The Blue Dress” (1995) adapted Walter Moseley’s “Easy Rollins noir series of books starring Denzel Washington, set in post World War II south central L.A. .

The latest variant of the genre will be “Gangster Squad,” based on a book by L. A. Times staffer Paul Lieberman (“Tales of The Gangster Squad) about a team of L.A.P.D. detectives who were tasked by their chief, the legendary William Parker, to secretly terrorize Mickey Cohen and other mobsters who were threatening to rule their world and endanger the emerging prosperity of post World War II Los Angeles.  

Local lore has it that the LAPD had a history of corruption until Chief Parker took over and professionalized the organization, eliminating corruption, incompetence, passivity toward the evils of crime.  He relied on a new breed of lawmen, returning vets toughened by their war experience, inured to escalating violence, and unwilling to accede to the tyranny of arrogant criminals, especially the flamboyant mobsters who had migrated west from rotten eastern cities. They had no more tolerance for those invaders with Italian or Jewish names than they did for their own resident underclass of Mexicans, Japanese and African Americans.   

The subject has been handled before in movies. “L. A. Confidential" (1997) exploits the essential elements of LA noir — crooked cops, the seedy fringes of the movie business, racial prejudice. A key plot element of the movie is the character of Bud White (Russell Crowe) who is assigned to muscle mobsters to encourage them to leave town.  

All were there in James Ellroy’s novel.  Ellroy, a self-proclaimed keeper of the flame of LA noir (his own mother was murdered when he was a child, a life altering event which sparked his continuing fascination with crime). Curtis Hansen directed the brilliant script by Brian Helgeland. 

The year before, “Mulholland Falls” (1996) failed with critics and box office. The story was based on “The Hat Squad,” a group of LAPD officers who, in the 1950's, were assigned by reform chief Parker to dispose of mobsters. 

Lieberman in a recent interview observed that The Gangster Squad preceded The Hats by a few years and were more secretive about their work, but basically they had the same goal, to convince visiting mobsters that L.A. was not welcoming them with open arms, but rather was showing them the exit. 

While the original noir era was the 1940's, its revival is known by some as neo-noir, which tries to re-create the flavor of the genre with post modern sensibility. 

In 2006, Brian De Palma’s movie of James Ellroy’s novel “The Black Dahlia” was released (or rather escaped). Based on the legendary unsolved sensational 1947 murder of starlet Elizabeth Short, the novel and movie rework themes involving femme fatales, the perverse and untouchable rich, and corrupt cops.  Unfortunately the movie is a mess and was a critical and commercial flop.

The same year, “Lonely Hearts” written by Todd Robinson, recycled the sensational “lonely hearts killers” story from the 1940's.  (It had been previously mined twice: in 1970's “The Honeymoon Killers”; and 1996, “Deep Crimson”.) Now it was John Travolta and James Gandolfini as the cops with Jared Leto and Salma Hayek as the twisted con artist killers.
It also failed with critics and box office. 

I should also mention the other tangential though obvious influences: 

The Coens’ (1990) “Miller’s Crossing” is based on elements from two Hammett novels, “Red Harvest” and “The Glass Key”. “Blood Simple”, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Fargo” and “No Country For Old Men,” all owe enormous debts to the noir originators.

Tarantino’s work (obviously “Pulp Fiction” “Reservoir Dogs” and “Jackie Brown”) inherited the hard-boiled attitude toward greed, sex, and violence. 

Graphic novelists Max Collins (“The Road To Perdition” and his “Nathan Heller” novels), and Frank Miller (“Sin City”) are inheritors of the Dashiell Hammett / John Huston / Humphrey Bogart genetic code.  The video game, “L. A. Noire,” pays violent homage to the era via role play as an L. A. P. D. officer.  

The soon to be released “Gangster Squad” was directed by Ruben Fleischer from a screenplay by Will Beall (a former cop).  It departs from Lieberman’s nonfiction book in many respects, eliminating key people of the true story, and “fictionalizing” other characters and events. That is fine, it is, after all, “just a movie” and not a documentary.  

However, the screenplay goes much further, leaves any resemblance to real life in the bloody dust, tearing up the facts or even most of the “true story” on which it is barely based. It dials up the violence to a deafening roar. 

Crime movies crossed a threshold long ago, with the remake of “Scarface” in 1983. The original, from 1932, co-written by Ben Hecht and directed by Howard Hawks, was considered extremely violent and perverse in its time. It had been one of the last straws that brought on picture Code that censored violence in films for many years.  Brian De Palma’s filming of Oliver Stone’s script dialed up the violence to a level that had never been met in previous American films, including Sam Peckinpagh’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) or “Bonnie And Clyde” (1967), which had shocked the public in the blood soaked Viet-Nam era.  

The explosive climax of “Gangster Squad” is a shootout seemingly modeled on a western template, but channeled through the post modern tolerance or rather addiction to extreme shooting.  It is as if the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was updated to include Thompson submachine guns and grenades wielded by the Clantons and Tarantino’s “Crazy 88's” against the Earp, Doc Holliday, and “The Justice League”.  In fact, I was not surprised to learn that Fleischer’s previous movie was “Zombieland” and that Beall is attached to “Justice League” and “Lethal Weapon 5".

It is no wonder that the film’s release has been delayed in the wake of recent shootings at Aurora and now Newtown. 

Whether the venerable film noir genre can survive all of this is in doubt.   

Jim Thompson And Noir Cinema

In previous posts, I’ve remarked on the influence of popular crime writing on the history of moving pictures, especially in the genre known as film noir and the far reaching influence of its style and values.  

I noted the writing of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, W.R. Burnett, and John Fante, who wrote hard boiled stylish stories about desperate dangerous people.  

Their writing reflected and illuminated their times better than so-called mainstream literature: beginning in the 1920's prohibition / mobster era and continuing through the Depression with existential and socially aware crime stories.  Into the 1940's with its cynical worldly post-war weary violence, and the paranoid angst ridden 1950's, their vivid stories were easily adaptable into cheap — mostly black and white, mostly B — movies.  

One writer I neglected to mention — and neglected to know at the time — was Jim Thompson (born 1906), who was a rough contemporary of the more famous writers but whose best work seems to have been written in the mid-1950's and early 60's.  

Thompson followed the time honored pledge of the worldly writer, writing about places, people, things he knew about.  Many of his novels are set in small southern towns he knew well.  He was born in Oklahoma territory, lived later in Texas, his father a local sheriff who was forced out of office by accusations of misdeeds, which haunted Thompson's childhood. (The central protagonists of some of his best novels, “Pop. 1980" and “The Killer Inside Me” were lawmen who are not heroes). 

He worked at many jobs, notably as a bellhop (used this in “A Swell Looking Babe”) during prohibition in an atmosphere of hustling, liquor, women, gambling.  He suffered a nervous breakdown early in life and many of his protagonists suffer from mental states that motivate and underlie their actions. 

During the Depression his politics were left leaning, being active in WPA writers project and the Communist Party. His novels are replete with the suggestion of class and race injustice.

For most of his life he was an alcoholic, but that illness did not seem to affect his prolific writing, at least during his most productive period.  

The novels I have read thus far vary from and expand upon the earlier work of the previous generation of writers. Reflecting the 1950's, his characters are more psychologically complex, often driven to their inevitable (though unpredictable and therefore exciting) doom by their fatalistic attraction to violent risks. Often seeing themselves as victims of injustice, they see their crimes as justified by a twisted sense of entitlement, the impulse for justified revenge, or explained as the way things must be. 

His novels revel in the notion that life is absurd, pointless except to survive and continue to exist without interference from hypocrites or other moralists.  His protagonists are anti-social in the sense of seeing their victims as mere obstacles to their existence.  Many characters fit the Thoreau model of leading “lives of quiet desperation”, that is until fate provides opportunities: meeting a beautiful woman or a con artist, being put into an anxious box by events.  Their adventures are like surreal dramas of the fantasies of all losers: success at sex, feeling the thrill of action, risking all at a chance to win the game, all the while knowing deep down that it will be futile.  

His insights into humanity are incisive, and his conclusions are among the darkest and least optimistic in popular literature. Heroes are rare in these stories.  Romance is often manipulative, for his characters love is not the cure. 

The stories are sexist, in tune with their time in that the central protagonists are mostly men, and women are sexualized --- although as in the previous generation of noir pulp writing, they are often empowered and independent, using their sexual natures to survive. Women are often victimized, rarely innocent, sometimes survivors.  

Psychological depth involves delving into perversion: incest, sadism, masochism.  Thompson's characters seem capable of anything to please or pleasure themselves. In his stories, crime often doesn’t pay in the end, though not because of a sense of values or morality. Rather, losers lose, irony and fate demand payment, and it is a zero sum game.     

His pulp novels were often published primarily in paperback form and on the book racks of the time their covers with leggy bosomy blondes and cigarette dangling gunmen would have been easily lost amid the crowded pulp titles.  He came to the attention of some Hollywood movie people, notably Stanley Kubrick, for whom he wrote some screen treatments (including a script for "The Killers" and "Paths Of Glory"), Robert Redford, Sam Fuller, and writer Harlan Ellison. When the few cognoscenti discovered him during his last years (he died in 1977), the movie adaptations began to flow.  

The first was “The Getaway” directed by Sam Peckinpah in 1972, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, remade in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger). 

That was followed by “The Killer Inside Me” (1976) directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Stacy Keach as Sheriff Lew Ford.  It was remade in 2010 by Michael Winterbottom, starring Casey Affleck, with Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson.  

The French director Alain Corneau filmed a version of Thompson’s novel “A Hell Of A Woman” re-titled “Série noire,” (1979).  In 1981, “Coup de Torchon” an adaptation of Thompson’s “Pop. 1280" was released, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, starring Phillipe Noiret, with Isabelle Huppert and Stéphane Audran.  

Three Thompson novels were adapted into movies released in 1990:

“The Kill-Off” is one of Thompson’s novels that was a novelization based on a proposed screen treatment or screenplay. It was filmed by Maggie Greenwald based on her own screenplay which apparently abandoned most of Thompson’s plot and dialogue and sank into oblivion after a few decent festival showings.

“After Dark, My Sweet” was released in the same year. James Foley and Robert Ridlin adapted Thompson’s novel for a movie staring Jason Patric, with Bruce Dern and Rachel Ward. 

The most successful Thompson based movie of 1990 was obviously “The Grifters.”  The script was written by Donald Westlake who, along with director Stephen Frears, and lead actors John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening, intentionally honored the novel on which it was based.  Frears in his commentary to the DVD shows his awareness of movie lore by referencing John Huston’s successful strategy in adapting “The Maltese Falcon” by filming the book with few thoughtful exceptions. Frears goes so far as to quote from the classic Huston movie by showing his femme fatale, “Lilly,” descending in a grated elevator as his climax.  

The 90's also saw the Baldwin / Basinger remake of “The Getaway” in 1994, and two years later, the release of “Hit Me” with Elias Koteas in Stephen Shainberg’s adaptation of Thompson’s novel, “A Swell Looking Babe”.  The next year “This World, Then The Fireworks” was released, starring Billy Zane and Gina Gershon as a perverse brother and sister.  

How I Feel About "The Descendants"

Blunted affect is the scientific term describing a lack of emotional reactivity on the part of an individual. It is manifest as a failure to express feelings either verbally or non-verbally, even when talking about issues that would normally be expected to engage the emotions. Expressive gestures are rare and there is little animation in facial expression or in vocal inflection.[1]
Blunt affect 'can be symptomatic of schizophrenia, depression, or brain damage'.[2] 'The difference between flat and blunted affect is in degree. A person with flat affect has no or nearly no emotional expression. He or she may not react at all to circumstances that usually evoke strong emotions in others. A person with blunted affect, on the other hand, has a significantly reduced intensity in emotional expression'.[3]

That seems to define the acting technique that is the modern equal of "The Method" that influenced acting in the previous generation (Clift, Dean, Brando, Pacino).  

The latest advocate of Blunted Affect is George Clooney, the favorite in the best actor race for this year's Oscar for "The Descendants".  Others who espouse this technique include Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Robin Williams, Adam Sandler, and other comics who dial down their personalities when they want to be taken seriously. 

Peter Sellers in "Being There" was the best example of this school which was pioneered long long ago by Buster Keaton, "The Great Stone Face". Sellers, of all the actors mentioned, was probably the most natural exponent of the style, inasmuch as he was, by most accounts, a certifiable schizophrenic.  

Other actors of past generations sometimes resorted to the flattened affect approach to character. Gregory Peck was accused by critics of having a limited range of expression. Cary Grant, when trying for drama, suppressed his naturally abundant personality. Gary Cooper was viewed as a shallow "yup-nope" type, which I think was a sad under rating of his talents as a film actor. He understood his face and at his best (as in "High Noon") he was nearly perfect.  

A still earlier school of screen actors resorted to a more extreme style, which could be labeled bipolar. They indulged in severe mood swings chewing the scenery in emotive flailing. The pantomime needs of silent films led to acting that would later be ridiculed for its over the top manner. 

Garbo's critical acclaim was based on a perception that she, apart from other silent stars, was able to express a wide range of emotions with reactions that were subtle. (Oddly, when she was able to speak, her acting became less subtle, sometimes awful, as in "Grand Hotel" and "Camille"). She was the first screen actor of whom it was said that the camera alone exposed her genius. On the set, directors worried about her performances. But when they saw the film, they were awed.  Garbo's face was described as like the Mona Lisa, a slate upon which the viewer wrote his or her feelings.  Famously, in the final scene of "Queen Christina", she stares at the horizon evoking profound emotions, and was told by the director to think of nothing. 

In "The Descendants," Clooney's character has plenty of reason to be closed down emotionally and to be somewhat depressed, considering the difficulties of his domestic life: a wife in a coma who he learns was unfaithful and in fact planning to leave him, a rebellious teen daughter, and financial burdens about whether to dispose of his inherited fortune.  I must admit that I myself felt detached from these characters. I felt that in one sense I had little in common with them because I do not have the terrible dilemma of being filthy rich and living in paradise. Depressing.