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.
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