The Black Dahlia (Widescreen Edition)
by Brian De Palma
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DVD details
Actor: Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, John Kavanagh, Josh Hartnett, Scarlett JohanssonDirector: Brian De Palma
Brand: NBC Universal
Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond
Composer: Mark Isham
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; German (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 121 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-26
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of The Black Dahlia (Widescreen Edition)
DVD Review: Brilliant Frantic Subversive Noir
Summary: 4 Stars
Exiting the theatre after seeing Brian DePalma's latest film Black Dahlia I had a lot of the same mixed-reactions as I had with David Lynch's Blue Velvet twenty years earlier. Black Dahlia like Blue Velvet is the kind of film that leaves viewers a bit dumbfounded at first; and it does not surprise me in the least that the initial reviews of Black Dahlia like the initial reviews of Blue Velvet are confused because both films leave the viewer with a feeling that they have experienced something that they can not quite make heads or tails of. I think what most reviewers, amateur and professional, are trying to do when they review Black Dahlia is sort out their own disorientation and sense of unease. The film simply refuses to do what we expect it to do (there are plenty of obvious villains but no obvious heroes) or be what we expect it to be (this is not Scarface with its caricatured over-the-top "bad guy" or Untouchables with its caricatured "good guys"--Costner, Connery, Garcia-- and "bad guy"--DeNiro); instead in Black Dahlia we are given characters that do not fit the good guy or the bad guy stereotype or good girl and bad girl stereotype and this creates anxiety in the filmgoer which is exactly what a good film noir is supposed to do. Adventure films and romances and action-thrillers give you comfortable stereotypes but film noir is the most subversive film genre out there because it refuses to give you a world where old world distinctions like "good" and "bad" have any validity and however much one would like to to impose such pat labels on these characters they simply do not stick. From the first scene DePalma thrusts us into a world where we cannot determine just who is fighting for what and just who has the upper hand. The LA Police Department in 1946 is not exactly the place to go if what you are after is justice or moral clarity for the entire department is more concerned with maintaining it own mob ties and increasing revenues from its own rackets than it is in solving crimes. What the LAPD and its various homicide and vice units are really involved in is kept in the shadows and a sense of order is maintained only because the LAPD is very good at manipulating the press. Like everything else in the city cop/press relations is a racket and its rigged. In order to thrive in this corrupt city one must be corrupt; and the more corrupt you are the better off you'll be.
When we first encounter young wanna-be detectives Eckhart and Hartnett they are just lowly cops on the beat. Most of the cops just stand by and watch the riot between the (mostly white) servicemen and the local (mostly black and latino) zootsuiters. Its a virtual race war but the cops do nothing to curb the violence. Eckhart and Hartnett aren't under any illusion that they can stop the race war but both being ex-fighters neither can resist the thrill of a good fight and so they throw themselves into the fray beating up sailors and zootsuiters indiscriminately. The fact that these two guys were both minor celebrities on the local boxing scene comes to the attention of the higher-ups who then arrange a spectacle to entertain the entire city and to win postive publicity for the police department (as well as public support for a department wide pay raise currently on the ballot). The cops agree to the fight even though they know the fight is just a huge publicity stunt because they are promised jobs as detectives as their reward. As a result of the fight both cops become "stars" in the public eye even though we know that they are just doing what they have to do to survive which in this case means becoming corrupt cops on the make (even the fight is of course rigged so that the cops not only win public sympathy and support but the cops can also make money betting on the fighter they know will win). Even though we want to believe one or both the cops is really a good guy we can see that there is no way for either of these guys to remian untainted by the corruption that surrounds them. And the young male cops moral corruption is juxtaposed brilliantly with the corruption of various young ladies who come to Hollywoodland in order to become "stars" in their own right. Most of these young girls get only bit parts as extras and have to supplement their income by working as call-girls or doing blue films. The Black Dahlia is exactly like many other girls her age but she ends up famous only because she ends up dead. The lurid headlines that link her to the world of porn and prostitution make her seem somehow notorious but we can see that she is just an ordinary girl who simply did what was necessary to survive. In this world crime is good business. Crime is this cities biggest employer. It gives the cops, pimps, murderers and journalists all something to do. Everyone is seen to be part of the same corrupt system; so long as there is crime and corruption everyone gets paid. The Black Dahlia just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and so she gets crushed by one of the cities especially greasy and especially maligned wheels. Just who gets villainized in such a corrupt city and why becomes one of the films central concerns.
The cops, however, make a mistake when they announce to the press early on that they will solve the Black Dahlia case when, in fact, solving the case would mean revealing the huge network of crime that seethes just below the surface of LA. Some would say that DePalma makes a mistake when he calls his film Black Dahlia when in fact that particular crime remains on the periphery for much of this film. For the noir sensibilites of James Ellroy and Brian DePalma the real interest is not in the Black Dahlia herself but in the moral emptiness and impotence that is so rampant in LA. The Black Dahlia is not so much a character (for we never get to know her; we see her only as a struggling young actress on a screen test and, ironically, playing an unwilling "victim" in a blue film) but a symbol of innocence lost. The fact that the Black Dahlia story is not foregrounded more in a film that is called the Black Dahlia does frustrate those viewers that want a more conventional whodunnit. Ellroy & DePalma aren't interested in this kind of approach though. They both turn the focus away from the luridly murdered victim and onto the lurid community where the crime occurred and this actually makes for a much more interesting and nuanced kind of film experience. But in transfering the Ellroy novel into a film DePalma goes one step further, as he always does, and makes the novel into a highly stylized film noir that is highly self-conscious and ironic about just what it is doing with the genre. For instance many noir films feature a very mannered kind of acting (where men are extremely masculine and self-possessed to the point of being caricatures of men, and women are made to embody all the anxieties that endanger that manly sense of self-possession and security) and DePalma pays homage to that technique but he also uses it for his own purposes. There was always something funny about the way the noir tough guys and their dangerous dames talked and acted but DePalma really amps up the comedy by having his characters mouth the most absurd lines. The artificiality of this noir brand of acting is used purposefully by DePalma to foreground the absurdity of the character's attitudes and how self-involved and oblivious to others these characters are; each character seems to be isolated in his/her own fantasy world. Eckhart, Hartnett, and Johansson, though ostensibly friends, exist on three different planes (each can be seen to be following their own private agendas/ obsessions). Eckhart is manically seeking to avenge his sister's death (all villains in his eyes become his sister's rapist/murderer), Johansson is seeking to escape from a seedy past and so lives out a fantasy of being rescued (she has a superman fantasy and it doesn't seem to matter to her who is playing superman), and Hartnett acts out a narcissistic fantasy of his own as he explores his own divided nature. He is attracted to both blonde Johansson (who enables Hartnett a glimpse of himself as a superman/supercop) and to the Black Dahlia look-a-like played by a darkly coiffed Hilary Swank (who is utterly and irredeemably addicted to "sin" and committed to recruting as many to her devlish ways as possible and who allows Hartnett to explore his own morally ambiguous dark side at the same time he is supposed to be solving a case). Many reviewers have noted that Hilary Swank's acting seems artificial but that is the idea. Swank is playing a rich girl/ femme fatale who is self-consciously modeling herself after a dead girl. This character is the most original creation of the film. She is so jaded that she wants to meet the Black Dahlia, whom she has heard bears a striking resemblance to herself, because she thinks it would be a thrill to sleep with her own look-a-like (the ultimate act of narcissism/ self-obsession). Once the Black Dahlia is dead she seems to find it thrilling to go around playing the Black Dahlia and playing at being a street girl (but she makes no attempt to hide her accent which is a social marker of status and that she is not interested in abandoning). Swank has her character affect an accent and do it badly because the accent is itself an act, a pretence of social quality. I think a lot of credit should go to Swank for this performance for to play "a bad actress" convincingly(even if its just the penultimately jaded rich girl playing around with various roles out of boredom) requires accomplished acting (the same kind of thing was required of Kim Basinger in LA Confidential when she played a celebrity look-a-like hooker, but Basinger was not playing one of the upper-class and she was not to be perceived as being in control of her performance in the way that Swank's character is in control of hers). Swank's accent is horrendous and its supposed to be. Her entire dysfunctional mob of a family all affect continental accents and indulge in outrageous fantasies in order to veil their seedy realities; and it is they who collectively create a monster/martyr/sacrifice who must bear the weight of their collective guilt. (And DePalma brilliantly implicates the Eckhart/Hartnett/Johansson trio in this same kind of transference of personal guilt onto a maligned other by having them bond while watching a film about that very topic: a 1928 film version of the Victor Hugo classic The Man Who Laughs which is the story of a child who is grossly disfigured and thus made to wear a mark of his aristocratic father's sins against the king). The entire family must be seen and heard to be believed. DePalma's den of faux aristocrats is one of the funniest and most disturbing things to appear on screen since, well, Lynch's mob of psychopaths and lunatics in Blue Velvet. This film has been maligned because it has been misunderstood. I have no doubt that this film will be considered a classic once those who appreciate great subversive film- making have a chance to have their say.
Description of The Black Dahlia (Widescreen Edition)
Inspired by the Most Notorious Unsolved Murder in California History. From the acclaimed director of Scarface and the author of LA Confidential comes the spellbinding thriller The Black Dahlia. Two ambitious cops, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), investigate the shocking murder of an aspiring young starlet. With a corpse so mutilated that photos are kept from the public, the case becomes an obsession for the men, and their lives begin to unravel. Blanchard's relationship with his girlfriend Kay (Scarlett Johansson) deteriorates, while Bleichert finds himself drawn to the enigmatic Madeleine (Hilary Swank), a wealthy woman with a dark and twisted connection to the victim. Starring: Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Mia Kirshner, Mike Starr, Fiona Shaw, Patrick Fischler, James Otis, John Kavanagh, Troy Evans, Anthony Russell, Pepe Serna, Angus MacInnis, Rose McGowan Directed by: Brian De PalmaBestsellers in DVD
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