Brian De Palma’s stint in film noir — a stint that reached its height with the release of crime classic ‘Scarface’ in 1983 — continues over twenty years later with this adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, ‘The Black Dahlia’. In this typically 40′s crime drama, Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are two L.A. cops on the hunt for the brutal killer of aspiring Hollywood actress Elizabeth Short. Bucky Bleichert (Hartnett) and his partner Lee Blanchard (Eckhart) are drawn into the investigation, but when Blanchard begins to obsess over the case, Bleichert is left to pursue it alone, meeting along the way what can only be described as a very against-type Hilary Swank as Madeleine, the mysterious, sumptuous daughter of Hollywood tycoon Emmet Linscott. But as Blanchard grows ever more unstable, Bucky is drawn closer to his wife Kay, played by Scarlett Johansson.

Although ‘The Black Dahlia’ is based on a real-life murder, the actual murder was never solved, and therefore the characters in the story are entirely a work of fiction. Presumably this is why many of the characters suffer from a lack of authenticity, bar the dahlia herself, a mesmeric performance from Mia Kirshner. Shown in snippets of archives, Kirshner’s Short is the most human and believable of Dahlia’s weird and wonderful concoction, enveloping the translucent desperation of an aspiring dreamer with stunning resonance. With the flick of her eyelash, the hint of a seductive pout, you can’t help but be drawn to her multi-faceted monologues. The ability of Kirshner to keep you guessing is extraordinary, particularly evident in a screen test in which she launches into a bad impersonation of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara, and then proceeds to look gazingly into the eyes of the camera, a wounded soul, as she utters the words “Even if I have to lie, or cheat, or steal”.

Her mysterious visionary captures the audience as much as the mystery of the Dahlia is supposed to grip us, but in truth, Kirshner generates most of the intrigue of this mystery herself, as the narrative of the film gets bogged down in dull, meaningless exchanges, and random unaffecting sub-plots. It is Hartnett that leads the audience amidst a typhoon of somewhat ridiculous characters that are either underplayed (Swank), overplayed (Shaw), or simply badly acted (Johansson). De Palma watches the level of interest in his plotline rapidly descend, while Hartnett struggles bravely against a tired and at times painful script.

As things hot up, and Dahlia’s love triangle subplot is ended once and for all, the pieces of the puzzle do finally begin to merge, or rather, splat together. But while De Palma likes to keep us dangling on a string for much of the film — a string that’s very very very fine I’d like to add — he wastes no time in wrapping the film up into a frayed and bundled mess. Most disappointing is a finale that reeks of bad TV Whodunits, racing towards a silly conclusion like ‘Murder, She Wrote’ on acid (and I LOVE Murder, She Wrote). Dahlia may be gloriously stupid, but I can’t help but wonder that this could have been a classic, had a bigger effort been made on creating a convincing enigma than there was on iconising its title star.

Source: theflimlair.blogspot.com

The real standout in the cast, however, is Mia Kirshner (TV’s 24), who turns in a haunting, blisteringly effective performance as Short. Even though she is seen only in four key scenes, Kirshner’s performance is so evocative and searing that she should earn an Academy Award nomination, even though the movie is a disaster. Whenever she is on the screen, her performance is better than De Palma and his movie deserve.

Brian De Palma has made bad movies before. “Raising Cain,” “Wise Guys,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Femme Fatale,” and “Mission to Mars” … For a supposedly “major” director, De Palma’s track record is seriously flawed. For every “Carlito’s Way” or “The Untouchables,” there seem to be two “Body Doubles.” Prone to infuriating stylistic tics and slapdash misogyny, it is little wonder that De Palma’s legacy – which was already in doubt during his glory days during the ’70s and ’80s – has almost totally eroded heading into the 21st century.

Nothing De Palma has done before, however, can prepare us for his newest film, “The Black Dahlia,” which is easily De Palma’s worst movie. Based on a novel by James Elroy (“L.A. Confidential”), the film is an ugly, soulless, misogynistic film noir. Like all of De Palma’s films, there are flashes of brilliance, but the overall effect is so toxic, so unpleasant, that it is nearly impossible to watch.

The film is a fictionalized account of the still-unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, a struggling actress who was found disemboweled on a lonely stretch of a Los Angeles road on Jan. 15, 1947. The film follows the path of the two detectives assigned to the investigation – the young, introspective Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett, “Lucky Number Slevin”) and hotheaded Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, “Thank You for Smoking”) as they try and solve the case.

As the two men bond over amateur boxing and candlelit dinners put on by Blanchard’s girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson, “Scoop,” who seems lost as she is relegated to playing the thankless role of Lee’s all-trusting significant other), each man deals with the investigation in his own way. Blanchard almost goes into a hermetic state, shutting himself off and becoming more and more obsessed with the minutia of the case, while Bleichert spins off and begins collecting suspects.

Bleichert’s trail leads him to heiress Madeline Linscott (played by Hillary Swank, “Million Dollar Baby,” in a confused, one-note performance) who may or may not have had an affair with Short. She looks like Short, acts like Short and dresses like Short (she does not, however, sound like Short – Swank’s accent jumps all over the map).

The cast is a good one, but De Palma puts them into some very strange positions. Never known as an actor’s director, De Palma puts all the emphasis on using his stylistic tics in order to establish atmosphere and character. Granted, Josh Friedman’s script is too simple with regards to both plot and character. For a film noir, the arc is way too simple, as there is really only one suspect.

Hartnett’s performance is actually quite respectable – quiet and introspective – but it feels like it is from a different film. It’s far too subtle and nuanced (read: good) for a movie like this. Eckhart fits into the film a bit more, although that’s not necessarily a good thing. After seeing him in “Thank You For Smoking” and now in “The Black Dahlia,” not surprising that audiences are starting to find him increasingly intolerable and one-note as an actor. Here, his performance has a certain kind of schizophrenia that is almost admirable in its confusion – Blanchard veers from confident, to haunted, to conniving, sometimes all in one scene. Swank’s performance is similarly confused, and Johansson is not used properly. The real standout in the cast, however, is Mia Kirshner (TV’s “24″), who turns in a haunting, blisteringly effective performance as Short. Even though she is seen only in four key scenes, Kirshner’s performance is so evocative and searing that she should earn an Academy Award nomination, even though the movie is a disaster. Whenever she is on the screen, her performance is better than De Palma and his movie deserve.

All of these problems, however, are nothing compared with what really ails the film – the unmistakable feeling of misogyny that colors the movie. The problems are both macro – the whole movie is based on a woman being cut in half and left by the side of the road – and micro – note the way De Palma parades Johansson around in angora sweaters.

De Palma has never been a director to eschew fetishizing violence, but again, he goes over board. There’s no reason for him to linger so lovingly over the sight of Short’s corpse on the operating table. There’s no reason we need to see every detail of Short’s murder. The fact that De Palma is such a waste as a director even makes Kirshner’s performance more evocative and heartbreaking. Still, even as the hearts of audience members break for her, it only makes viewers hate the film even more.

Grade: 1 out of 5

Source: The Badger Herald

As with most reviews of The Black Dahlia, this video review (click on “Latest Programme” button in the sidebar located under the images of the two women to view) on the BBC News website is a scathing one, but also like other reviews, they praise Mia Kirshner’s performance as Elizabeth Short. Be sure and check it out when you have a free moment.

Thanks again to Mifunes for sending in the link.

Source: BBC News

Nearly 60 years old now, the Black Dahlia case continues to cast its pulpy mythic spell over Los Angeles culture. It represents a time and a place that only a few of the living can remember for real; for the rest of us, postwar L.A. is a world of black and white, of nocturnal jazz, of tough guys in fedoras and sultry dolls in heels. In short, it’s the world of classic film noir, made at the time, about the time.

Of course, everyone knows that those films rarely had pretensions to realism, let alone documentary truth. But with the passage of time they are the images that endure and shape our collective memories in a way that may never again be possible. A world of camcorders and 24-hour news provides detail that is harsh and overexposed, if no closer to the truth. Despite its notoriety, the O.J. Simpson case – with everything but the initial violent act transmitted in real time as it occurred – can never achieve the sort of mythic status that has grown up around the sad life and gruesome death of Elizabeth Short.

Novelist James Ellroy reframed our view of the period in his L.A. Quartet, the first of which – 1987’s The Black Dahlia – has now been filmed by Brian De Palma. Ellroy’s prose can be overheated, but it’s also gripping, which is more than can be said for De Palma’s film, which sits on the screen, mysteriously inert and uninvolving, no matter the amount of sound and fury. The case has been covered in a number of other film and TV projects, the best being the thinly veiled version at the heart of Ulu Grosbard’s 1981 adaptation of John Gregory Dunne’s novel True Confessions. Sadly, it remains the one to beat.

Josh Hartnett stars as Dwight Bleichert – a.k.a. Bucky, a.k.a. Mr. Ice – one of a pair of boxers-turned-LAPD-partners. The other half of the team is Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), ambitious, politically savvy, and ethically unsteady. In violation of department rules, Lee lives out of wedlock with Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), the former moll of someone he sent up the river. Kay is educated, strong-willed, and sexually dissatisfied.

The three form a sort of unofficial family or, perhaps more accurately, triangle – Noël Coward’s Design for Living in shades of noir. Lee is not totally unaware that there is romantic tension between his best friend and his girl. The film drops a quick reference to the fact that she and Lee don’t sleep together, despite Kay’s apparent willingness. This bizarre celibacy is never explained further, leaving you to wonder just which of his partners Lee is more in love with.

When Short, soon to be dubbed “The Black Dahlia” by the press, is found murdered, grotesquely mutilated, and dumped in a vacant lot, Dwight and Lee are pulled off their current case and assigned to the Dahlia task force. Dwight resents the assignment, but Lee becomes obsessed, popping bennies to work around the clock. While chasing down Short’s associates, Dwight meets Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank), a hard-edged sexual adventuress whose father is a construction magnate. An affair ensues.

It is hard not to compare the film to Curtis Hanson’s 1997 L.A. Confidential, which remains the best Ellroy adaptation by a substantial margin. De Palma goes for a more artificial style, at times verging toward the unreality of Dick Richards’s 1975 Farewell My Lovely, which itself points toward Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. (Maybe this has something to do with The Black Dahlia being shot primarily in Bulgaria.)

If the style doesn’t necessarily hurt the film, the casting sometimes does. Eckhart and Johansson are exactly right; at times, De Palma seems to direct them to overplay it, as though their characters are consciously drawing their manner from Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake movies. Hartnett, if less spot-on, is still believable in a more naturalistic performance, despite moments of distracting melodramatic excess: His voiceover includes clunkers like “Who are these men who feed on others?” And it’s hard not to giggle when passion drives him to messily yank away a tablecloth like a bad magician in order to make love on the tabletop. This bit invokes similar overwrought moments in Body Heat and The Postman Always Rings Twice (both 1981) that were, at best, only marginally more convincing.

But Swank is horribly miscast as the femme fatale. There’s a reason her two most successful performances were in Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby: With her lean frame and square jaw, she is most at home in butch roles. She looks great in blue jeans, short hair, and no makeup – the very opposite of Madeleine Linscott.

Worse yet is John Kavanagh as Papa Linscott. His Scottish brogue may be genuine, but it sounds fake; his facial hair may be real, but it looks pasted on. Fiona Shaw is far more believable as Mama Linscott, even though the character is by design the most outrageous.

Numerous fine character actors fill the smaller parts: If you blink twice, you might miss Pepe Serna and Gregg Henry – victims of 11th-hour cutting, perhaps. The appearances of Rose McGowan, William Finley, and Ian McNeice are more satisfying and seem to be brief by design.

But the actor who holds the screen more powerfully than any other is Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short. The character doesn’t fit within the story’s chronological frame, but – since Short was known to have auditioned for Hollywood roles – De Palma shows us the cops viewing her screen tests. (In one, he also provides the offscreen voice of the audition’s director.) Short comes across as not very bright: She can’t remember lines, and her pride in her range of accents is misplaced. But, in the person of Kirshner, she projects what used to be called “It” – an attractiveness that far transcends a pretty face.

The real question is why – despite De Palma’s always-reliable technical skills – the movie never comes alive. It may well be his worst film since the execrable Wise Guys (1986).

The plot is a big contributor. Ellroy’s books are filled with more twists and revelations than can be reasonably transferred into a single feature. L.A. Confidential did a brilliant job of compressing, simplifying, and sometimes replacing Ellroy’s narrative complexities. The Black Dahlia may be too faithful to the letter of the book, if not the spirit.

This is not the first film to string out too many epiphanies. After the first few “Aha!” moments, we simply begin not to care. We may be stunned to learn that Professor Plum did it, not Mrs. White. We may then be admirably surprised when it turns out that Plum, for reasons in their distant past, was merely taking the fall for Mrs. Peacock. But by the time it’s revealed that Mrs. Peacock, for even more newly learned reasons, was acting on behalf of Colonel Mustard, the whole mess grows wearisome. The contrivances not only cancel each other out; they each tell us new ways that we’ve misread the characters, who grow steadily less familiar. By the end, we feel not so much impressed as manipulated.

Source: lacitybeat.com

Brian De Palma has made legendary crime and noir-ish thrillers, so adapting James Ellroy seems like a perfect fit for him. His film of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia combines all those elements – seedy gangsters, hard boiled detectives, violent crimes and a macabre sense of humor. He talked about that and more when I caught him out junketing for The Black Dahlia.

“But that’s the tone of the book,” said De Palma. “That very much exists in the book. I was just talking to some journalist about this is closer to Sunset Boulevard with the funeral of the monkey and when he arrives at Norma’s estate. It’s like, ‘Okay, how are we supposed to take that?’ I mean, you take Bill Holden’s kind of wry analysis of what he’s watching and this is very much true in this piece too because once you’re at the Linscotts, you’re in a nut house. These people are insane and the way that Ellroy wrote it is sort of like a comic opera. I don’t know how else to explain it, and so what I did in order to get that approach to the audience originally was to shoot the entrance in first person. I said, ‘Okay, you want to see these people? Let them look at you. Let Mrs. Linscott just look at you like you’re trash.’ ‘How is a policeman in my living room?’ So that was the adjustment that I made. When you have a dog stuffed with the newspaper with his first million dollars and Hilary [Swank] just started tosses it off like the weather, I mean, you go, ‘Wow. I’m in a looney bin here and everyone seems to think it’s quite normal.’ That exactly how I did it. It was very much in the tone of the Ellroy book”

Set in 1940s Hollywood, detectives Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) try to solve the famous unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short. Old time L.A. was actually constructed in Bulgaria. “This was an unusual movie because the financing kept falling through so I had to go to different capitals and find the locations all again. I keep thinking the Linscott Mansion I found in four different countries. So you have to deal with what you actually have and then with your art director you figure out how I can change it to sort of fit into the design of the movie. In this case the key locations changed many times until we finally got enough financing to make the movie in Bulgaria. By then I had gone through a permutation of these different principle locations like the Linscott’s and the circular staircase which I originally found here in Los Angeles and then I found something in the municipal building in Bulgaria that was somewhat similar to my initial idea. What happens is that these ideas they become concrete in photograph and then they go into your brain and you then design a sequence to make it and that becomes the design of the movie. And of course you’re collaborating with Dante Ferretti who was a great eye and he’d come up with something that is an original look for the noir piece.”

Short becomes known as The Black Dahlia because of the brutal nature of her murder. In the film, Short comes to life when Buckey discovers audition footage of her. “That was something that wasn’t in the book and all he had was The Dahlia in her eight by ten and then this grotesquely carved body. So everyone talks about her in all kinds of not in too positive of ways whether it’s her father or The Cleopatra. They all have sort of bad stories about her. So I thought that we had to show the audience her so that they cared about her and so they could get involved with this tragedy the way that Lee and Bucky ultimately did. So there were a bunch of screen tests in an earlier version of the script. So Mia [Kirshner] and I got together and we started with that. I played the director and she played a person auditioning and I would just do what a very destructive director trying – I guess I was Otto Preminger – to destroy the actress before your eyes and Mia played off of it. She’s an actress and she’s insecure and she wants the job and I’m saying, ‘Is that acting? Is that sadness?’ She brought it right to the heart of the audience. It was very moving stuff because it’s all real. It was just one long take after another and the reason that it seemed so vivid was that it was happening right before your eyes.”

The Black Dahlia went through many directors before finally landing on De Palma, but he had no problem making the project his own. “It all has to do with specific places, your vision. The process of making a movie is that you take what’s in your head and then you have to concretely represent it, the things that have to be photographed. So you start with what’s available in terms of the places that you can shoot. So immediately you look around and this is something that I used to teach a little bit. When you see a movie and someone just drives up in front of a hotel and gets out and it’s not like a very interesting hotel and it doesn’t tell you anything about the characters and the story you say, ‘Was anyone thinking about this particular selection?’ I mean, these days people see movies all the time and I’ve also gone into movies and said, ‘Any idiot can do this.’ because it doesn’t look like there is any thought that goes into this. I mean, I think about everything that goes up on that screen because I remember movies where I was entranced by the selection of the actors, the costumes, the locations, the historical period, all of those things. And when you see someone that actually looks like [some thought went into it]… take Pride and Prejudice for an instance. There is a subject that has been many times over and suddenly you have some director bring some specific vision to it with a great art director and you go, ‘Wow. I’ve seen 73 Pride and Prejudices. Why does this one seem to jump off of the screen?’ It has a lot to do with the selection of those visual elements.”

It also involves selecting actors. De Palma cast British great Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Linscott, who only has two scenes but becomes a pivotal character in Shaw’s hands. “Well, I’ve known Fiona Shaw and I’ve watched her work for years. I mean, she is one of the great actresses of our day and you’re right to say that no one knows who the hell she is. When she comes into my office in Santa Monica, you know, Fiona Shaw and starts to read, and she wasn’t even reading for that part. She was reading for the neighbor and suddenly, we sit in offices and we watch people read lines and you go, ‘Okay, that’s great.’ And you’ve heard them 173 times and they don’t come to life unless they’re in the hands of a really fine actor and then suddenly you get a great actress. I mean, one of the great actresses of her day and she suddenly makes this material jump off at you and she can do anything. You can mold her and direct her. This is what I found with Vanessa Redgrave in Mission Impossible. They can do anything and they’re very cooperative. They’re used to being directed and they just want to see what I can do to make this better and she was a revelation. She’s got all that horrendous exposition to deal with. Can you imagine that in the hands of someone else? She manages to do some grotesque comic thing with it that’s fascinating. When I was shooting her I was just like this. ‘Oh my God, what is she going to do next?’ She had to get through that whole flashback and all of that stuff that you had to communicate, that Freddy the Explainer has to communicate to the audience and she does it in some fantastic kind of grand opera way complete with the sort of smile. Of course many people will think, ‘Oh my God, it’s over the top. How can anyone believe this.’ But I thought that it was just marvelous and I think that she’s a genius of an actress.”

Ellroy himself didn’t mind De Palma cutting the neighbor character ultimately. “Oh, no, no. Ellroy’s attitude is like, ‘I got the money. Good luck.’ We have to deal with these problems by ourselves. That part was a neighbor who has the clown portrait. Okay, I have this clown portrait that I’m supposed to get in the audiences mind. Now, how the hell am I going to do that because it’s in the neighbors house? It’s not even in the Linscott house. It was sold later on because the book of course has many things that happen over a period of time. Her husband just killed himself and there is a whole other story with the neighbor that talks about the Linscott children and especially about Madeleine and what a nut case she is. That’s a whole other line that I had to sort of deal with. I had actually cast the part. My friend Amy Irving was cast in the part and we were going to do it and then I said, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to go down to the neighbors and that’s where the painting is, and then we’re going to explain how it got there.’ I said, ‘Why don’t we just have the painting in the Linscott house? It never got out of the house.’ So that’s the process of cutting all of that stuff up. It’s like combining the assassination of Baxter Fitch with the discovery of The Dahlia body. Those happen one thing after another, days and weeks apart, but I put them together to move the story along because everyone [is like], ‘When are we going to get to The Black Dahlia?’ In the book it’s like page a hundred and thirty. So, again, it was an attempt to try and deal with the back story which is indeed there is a whole bunch more material about Bucky and his dirty dealings and Lee with the bank robbery and all of that stuff. I tried to get that very much compressed in the beginning so that you can get on to the sort of nightmare that is obsessing this trio in the mid part of the story.”

Source: cinemablend.com