Shampoo (1975)

Director: Hal Ashby

Producer: Warren Beatty

Writers: Robert Towne; Warren Beatty

Actors: Warren Beatty; Julie Christie; Goldie Hawn; Lee Grant; Jack Warden; Tony Bill

Music: Paul Simon

Cinematography: László Kovács

Running time: 110 mins.

Rated: R

Beverly Hills  60s excess--- seen from the 70s.

       Shampoo is a satire on the narcissistic culture prevalent in the upper classes in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. It was made in 1975, so there was a several year period of reflection between the time depicted and the writing of the screenplay. Robert Towne and Warren Beatty, the writers knew what they were writing about having had direct experience with the subject matter. Towne was, and still is, the consumate L.A. writer (he wrote the screenplay for Chinatown), and Beatty is an actor who lived the culture of 1960s Hollywood/Beverly Hills. Both are Hollywood liberals, so the critique here is sharply directed at the self-absorbed, materialistic, hedonistic moneyed class they were very familiar with. The politics is blatant.

       The story takes place during one twenty-four hour period--- Election Day, November 4,1968--- hence the politics. Beatty plays George Roundy, a Beverly Hills hairdresser, who is trying to open his own salon while managing his overactive, multi-partnered sex life at the same time. George’s unrelenting heterosexual sex drive is beginning to catch up with him. He’s having simultaneous affairs with several women--- two of them the wife, Felicia, and the mistress, Jackie, of Lester Karpf (Jack Warden), a Beverly Hills millionaire businessman who George is hoping will help finance his business venture. George is ambitious and thinks he using his conquests to further his own ends; but not being the brightest guy on the block, he doesn’t realize that he’s just being exploited by these bored, unsatisfied, frustrated rich women. He winds up getting dumped by all of them and finding himself alone on a hill above Mulholland Drive after Jackie (Julie Christie), the one he really cared for, goes off with the money (Lester). 

          The social comments in this film are strong--- and the political even more so. Lester, the rich Republican businessman and Nixon supporter, who claims to be concerned about the disintegration of the moral fiber of our society, drives around in a Rolls Royce listening to stock reports while his wife Felicia (Lee Grant) wiles away her time in beauty salons--- when she’s not having sex with George. Lester is unfaithful to his wife with a woman who is unfaithful to him; and his daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher) plays tennis all day and solicits sex from men she barely knows (George again). He may be a shrewd businessman, but he’s not sharp enough to notice that he’s being cuckolded twice, or maybe thrice--- if you include his daughter. Everybody in this movie is either using someone, and/or being used by someone.

        There are two Election Night parties the principal characters attend that spotlight the political divide prevalent at the time in upper L.A. society (a divide that is still with us). One is an old-line, conservative Republican reception at the Bistro on Cañon Drive in Beverly Hills. The attendees are older well-heeled establishment types. Pictures of Nixon, Agnew and Reagan abound as the partygoers await the intended victory. The other is at a private residence in Benedict Canyon attended by hip, young and seemingly liberal types--- also well-heeled and loose. But here alcohol, drugs, and sex are the order as opposed to the stuffy, ridiculousness evident at the Bistro. Both worlds depicted here are out of touch with reality and the problems afflicting the country at that time.

           Nixon is the elephant in the room in Shampoo. He’s everywhere lurking in the background, just waiting to take over. The year 1968 was when the sharp, political and social divisions in this country became deadly evident. It witnessed the assassinations of King and Kennedy, the riots that followed, the Chicago Democratic Convention debacle, and a war that refused to end. The New Frontier and the Great Society were coming to an end. Nixon was elected on the day this movie takes place with the slogan “Bring us together”; and from the vantage point of 1975 when the movie was made, and knowing what was to come: five more years of war in Vietnam, Watergate, and the eventual resignations of both Nixon and Agnew, it was obvious that that did not happen.

Note: See my overviews of Model Shop and Zabriskie Point for two other views of that pivotal year 1968 in L.A. 

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Director: Robert Aldrich

Writer: A. I. Bezzerides

Based on: Kiss Me Deadly, a novel by Mickey Spillane

Actors: Ralph Meeker; Albert Dekker; Paul Stewart; Juano Hernandez; Cloris Leachman; Maxine Cooper; Gaby Rodgers

Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo

Music: Frank DeVol

Running Time: 106 mins.

L.A. Noir Apocalypse

             Kiss Me Deadly is a 1950s detective story; at least that’s what it appears to be--- it’s more. Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides took Mickey Spillane’s lurid pulp  private eye novel and made it into something else: a critique on the Cold War American political/social mindset of the 1950s. They took Spillane’s two-dimensional characters and his standard pulp fiction plot and gave them cosmic significance.

               The story deals with detective Mike Hammer’s (Ralph Meeker) quest across L.A. for a mysterious box containing something important that several people have died for. Greedy and unscrupulous Hammer thinks it might be “something big”, something valuable, but is totally unaware of what it really is---dangerous nuclear material capable of blowing L.A. and possibly the rest of the world to kingdom come. Hammer’s obsessive quest forms the matrix for Man’s obsessive journey to ultimate destruction. This movie more than any other 50s film, with the possible exception of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), best epitomizes the doomsday paranoia of the period.

                 Hammer’s quest begins when one night he picks up a woman hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman) on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She tells him her name is Christina and that people are chasing her. Mike grudgingly offers to drop her off at the nearest bus stop, but they are intercepted by several gangster types who knock Mike out, torture and murder Christina, and leave him unconscious in his wrecked sports car.

                 Upon recovery and released from the hospital, Mike sets out, haunted by Christina’s memory and her last words to him “ remember me”, to track down the “something big” she died for--- or the “great whatsit” as his assistant/girlfriend, Velda (Maxine Cooper) calls it.

                  In the course of his odyssey through mid-1950s Los Angeles Hammer meets an assortment of characters: a wily boxing promoter, a nervous truck driver, a cagey morgue assistant, a philosophical furniture mover; sarcastic apartment managers; an opera enthusiast, gangsters, an extremely deadly femme fatale, and various other strange types. Some are helpful, but most, especially the gangsters and the police, try to discourage him from his pursuit; but pig-headed, avaricious Mike takes no heed. In the end he finds what he’s looking for, but the big payoff turns out to be a nuclear apocalypse. The movie ends with him and Velda fleeing into the Pacific Ocean as the Malibu beach house where they were being held by the mysterious and sinister Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker) and his gangster minions erupts in a nuclear reaction.

               For Aldrich and Bezzerides, political leftists, Spillane’s pulp novel Mike Hammer with his latent fascist inclinations symbolized what they felt was wrong with America at that time of political witch hunts and McCarthy hearings. Instead of Spillane’s hero figure this movie version of him is anything but heroic. Hammer is self-centered and narcissistic, as Christina so aptly tags him. He likes the good life: sharp sports cars, a comfortable art-bedecked apartment, and fancy up-to-date gadgets (e.g. a tape operated answering machine decades before they became available to the public)--- and he’s not particular how he gets it. He uses Velda shamefully, taking advantage of her affection for him by pimping her out to get dirt for his divorce clients. He roughs up old men, insults women, and enjoys inflicting pain. He symbolizes the pettiness of those of us with assumed superior egos. And he, like the rest of us, is too concerned with his own little world to realize what’s going on in the greater world around him. His pettiness in the end will bring down the curtain on us all.

              Kiss Me Deadly is a remarkable piece of filmmaking on several different levels. The utter unreality of the style is unique. Almost everything in the movie seems to be out of joint. The whole film has a dreamlike quality that causes the viewer to doubt what he’s seeing and hearing. Camera angles are off, dialogues seem unnatural, sequences appear to have incongruities and odd time lapses. The opening credits tell right off that this movie is not ordinary--- they’re reversed. They move from bottom to top, not in the expected order. The L.A. portrayed is a strange place located between reality and fantasy.

               This movie is a cautionary tale, and Aldrich and Bezzerides artfully use mythological and classical allusions throughout the film to express the eternal truths and cataclysmic  message they want to relate. Hammer’s investigation is nothing less than a trip into the underworld, and a journey through the labyrinth. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, he even picks up a “golden bough” (in the wheel of his car) upon his entrance, but foolishly discards it, thereby sealing his fate. The “great whatsit” is the fatal box containing the Medusa’s head and guarded by Cerberus the hound of hell. And Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers), Soberin’s femme fatale associate and the woman who out of curiosity and lust opens the deadly box, is no other than Pandora herself bringing ultimate woe and destruction into the world. Who would have thought that a 1950s rather run of the mill film noir could be so ingeniously contrived?

                Besides its oddness and offbeat artistry, Kiss Me Deadly has one more very important element to offer the modern viewer: it’s a cinematic time capsule of a long-gone Los Angeles. Dwight Eisenhower was president, take-cover drills were a common occurrence in most schools, and in a couple of years backyard bomb shelters would be all the rage. L.A. was changing fast and Hammer’s quest gives us a last view of what was about to pass away. Hammer does most of his investigating on Bunker Hill--- the former Bunker Hill of decrepit Victorian mansions, rickety old hotels, decaying apartment buildings, and the original Angel’s Flight. His travels also take him from his up-scale apartment building (still there) in a then sparsely populated Westwood, to a gangster’s estate in Beverly Hills (Greystone Mansion), a black lounge in South Central, the Hollywood Athletic Club (still there), a gas station in Calabasas, and finally to a spectacular explosive ending in the surf in Malibu.

                  Kiss Me Deadly is a one of a kind movie. Once you see it your opinion of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking as formulaic and unimaginative will be forever altered.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Producers: Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi, Joanne Sellar

Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

Actors: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman, Mary Lynn Rajskub

Cinematographer: Robert Elswit

Music: Jon Brion           

Rating: R

Running: 95 mins.

 Valley punch drunk comédie humaine

          Paul Thomas Anderson is a Valley Guy (Studio City) and most of his early movies take place there: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and this one Punch-Drunk Love. For Anderson his native San Fernando Valley is a place just a bit off center--- near Hollywood, on the other side of Beverly Hills and Bel Air, but continents away in ambience and worldview. It’s a place inhabited by second-tier T.V. people, porno workers, want-a-be’s and has-beens. Anderson’s Valley is very removed from the middle-class suburban image once applied to this disconnected third of L.A. located over the hill. His characters are misfits of a sort--- people who just don’t seem to belong anywhere; they live in the Valley because it’s the Valley. The misfit protagonist of Punch-Drunk Love, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is just such a person.

        Barry is a small businessman who lives in Sherman Oaks and sells toilet plungers out of his warehouse in Chatsworth. He is a total neurotic, on the verge of a complete mental collapse owing to the fact of having been raised the only boy with seven deprecating sisters. He collects frequent flyer miles by buying large amounts of products he doesn't need (Healthy Choice pudding for instance)--- this in  spite of the fact he doesn't go anywhere and doesn't eat pudding. He has no social life, is nervous, quirky, and has uncontrolled fits of anger and crying. His sisters treat him as if he were an idiot and consider him a born loser. His rather incompetent co-workers seem mystified by him, and his foreman Lance (Luis Gúzman)--- a Latino named Lance!!--- appears to be his only friend.

          Things begin to turn around for Barry when he meets Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a friend of one of his sisters. Lena saw Barry in a photo and was determined to meet him. She thought he looked interesting--- Lena is not your typical match-up. After a shaky start they hit it off.

          But then things get a bit rough. Just before Lena came into his life, Barry, to ease his loneliness and be able to talk to someone, in desperation called a phone sex line and wound up being extorted by the lowlife scammers on the other end. This turns out to be quite serious when the extortionists send four knuckle-brained thugs to collect whatever they can get out of him. 

          When Lena is slightly injured in a car accident caused by the extortion collectors, Barry, now totally in love, and superhumanly empowered, beats the hell out of the thugs, takes Lena to a hospital, and having previously found out the location of the scammers, heads for Provo, Utah, phone in hand, to confront the sex line “supervisor” Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a local mattress salesman. Barry and Dean have a heated shouting match ending in a stand-off when Dean realizes he’s dealing with a total nut job. Barry returns to L.A. and seeks out Lena to apologize for leaving her alone at the hospital. She hesitates at first, but then invites him into her apartment. The movie ends with Lena saying, “So, here we go,” as the two of them play a tune on a harmonium.

            This movie has a lot going for it. The structure is quirky, the casting is off-beat (Adam Sandler--- who would have known?) and the humor outrageous. The film is divided into several segments by unusual pastel colored interludes, and the discordant music score definitely fits the quirky mood. Anderson creates characters, who would be funny anywhere, but because this story takes place in the Valley, seem to touch a special nerve for Angelenos who happen to live there--- myself included. 

            What Valleyite cannot identify with Barry lost in the all-too typical labyrinthine halls of Lena’s apartment complex trying to find his way back to her. These gargantuan rabbit warrens dominate the south Valley, my own area of Studio City is full of them. And how about  the utter quiet desolation of the industrial zone of Chatsworth at dawn? Whoever has worked there at night, as I have, can testify what a sudden horrific street noise can do to your nerves. Eckhart Auto on Canoga Avenue, by the way, became world famous owing to its few seconds appearance in the movie. Other places and street names featured in the film also add a touch of reality to this very un-real love story: Barry and Lena’s first date is at the Petit Chateau in North Hollywood (a well-known Valley restaurant, and a favorite of the late Bob Hope), and Barry’s residence is on Moorpark Street, where all the thirty-somethings--- along with the forty-year old virgin--- live

            What Dickens in his novels did for his Victorian London and its lowlife, and Balzac his nineteenth century Paris and its bourgeois middle class, Anderson, in his movies, does for his twenty first century San Fernando Valley and its over-the hill inhabitants: he gives us a look at L.A.’s backyard and the human comedy that can be found there.

Targets (1968)

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Producer: Roger Corman

Writers: Peter Bogdanovich, Samuell Fuller

Actors: Boris Karloff, Tim O’Kelly, Peter Bogdanovich

Cinematography: László Kovács

Music: Ronald Stein (The Terror)

Rated: R

Running time: 90 mins.

 Terror in the Valley--- Karloff comes to Reseda

       With Targets we have another entry from 1968.The sixties were a decade when America began to take a look at itself, and L.A. got a lot of attention that year. There are a couple more films from that period I intend to write about (e.g Point Blank, andThe Graduate), so stay tuned. This was Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature, and it was a good start.      

        The story is actually an artificial bonding of two different stories: one about an elderly, burnt-out horror actor, Byron Orlok, who wants to retire and return to his native England; the other about a maladjusted young man who cracks one day and begins shooting people at random on the freeway and at a drive-in theater. The bonding, although improbable, surprisingly works. Bogdanovich originally wrote the shooter story based on two then recent notorious incidents of random violence: the 1965 101 Freeway sniper and the Charles Witman (Texas tower) shooter case from 1966. He presented it to Roger Corman, who offered to produce it if Bogdanovich would write Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days work, into the story. Thus:Targets came to be.

   

   

        This is how the story goes. It opens with footage of a scene from Corman’s The Terror with Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. When the scene ends and the lights are switched on, we see several people in a viewing room; one of them, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), announces that he wishes to retire and is not interested in doing a new film by young director, Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich). He also plans not to do a pre-scheduled publicity appearance at a Valley drive-in the next day. Michaels, along with Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), his girlfriend and Orlok’s secretary, try to persuade Byron to reconsider.

        Meanwhile right across the street (Sunset Boulevard) from where the movie people are meeting young Bobby Thompson is buying a rifle. Bobby is an apparently average, polite and outwardly happy guy, who with his wife, lives with his middle-class parents in the San Fernando Valley. Bobby’s family life resembles that of the Andersons on the 1950s T.V. show Father Knows Best. But underneath Bobby is a troubled young man with murderous thoughts.

      Sammy Michaels, after an evening visit to Byron’s apartment, finally persuades him at least  to make the publicity appearance at the drive-in in Reseda. Later that day, however, Bobby finally snaps and kills his wife, his mother, and a grocery delivery boy. After neatly tucking the bodies of his wife and mom in bed and moving the delivery boy out of the way, Bobby calmly cleans up, leaves a prominent note telling what he’s done and what he’s about to do, leaves the house, goes to an oil storage tank next to the 405 Freeway in Van Nuys and begins to shoot unsuspecting drivers.

      After killing the lone attendant at the storage facility, and as the police approach, Bobby, to elude them speeds down Sepulveda Boulevard and eventually turns into the Reseda Drive-In--- the same drive-in where Byron Orlok is expected to appear that evening.. He hides behind the screen, and soon after the start of the movie (again Corman’s The Terror) begins to pick off patrons seated in their cars. Some people start to panic and try to escape, but most are unaware that anything is amiss. Byron and Jenny soon arrive and when Byron realizes what’s going on he faces down the young killer, slaps him around, and forthwith deposits him in the hands of the police. That’s the bare bones of this low budget production.

        This movie is really a forgotten gem; if you can, try to see it. First of all it was one of Boris Karloff’s last appearances--- and one of his best; Karloff died a year later. Although he contributed only two days work to the movie, all the great lines are his: my favorite being, “What a lousy town this has become!” said to Jenny while glancing through the window of his limo at the myriad of car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard on his way to the drive-in. There is also a “morning after” comic encounter between him and Bogdanovich and some rich banter between him and Jenny, the secretary.

         For a quickly made movie the production quality is rather good.They shot the freeway scenes without any authorization or sound equipment--- the sound was added later. The scenes of people pulling into the drive-in and purchasing refreshments at the candy counter were all shot clandestinely a few days before the actual filming at the drive-in. Indoor scenes of the viewing room, Byron’s apartment, and Bobby’s home were done on the same set--- the furniture was changed and the walls were repainted.

          For me the principal plus this movie offers, beside Boris Karloff’s performance, is that it gives the viewer a good look at the San Fernando Valley as it was in 1967. The best Valley vistas since Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). Bogdanovich takes you down some prominent Valley streets like Sherman Way, Sepulveda and Van Nuys Boulevards; and from Bobby’s vantage point on top of the oil storage tank there’s a nice view of the Sepulveda Basin with its dam clearly visible. The storage tank facility, by the way, is still there; and ironically just a block and half south of it on Sepulveda Boulevard there is now a Target department store! But most of all, it is great to see the Reseda Drive-In (long gone) in its heyday.

          Other rather interesting points to be found in this movie are the use of radio and television broadcasts as background in certain scenes. One in particular is when Bobby and his “ideal” family are watching television, you can clearly hear the voice of Joey Bishop (The Joey Bishop Show) speaking to the audience. The family are visible, but Bishop is not. Bogdanovich also uses, of course since it’s Bogdanovich, clips from an early Howard Hawks movie--- a movie I’ve never heard of--- Criminal Code (1931) that Boris Karloff was in.

         With Targets Bogdanovich does a good job of emphasizing the contrast between the movie horror put forth by the likes of Karloff and the real horrors of today’s society--- the apparently innocuous Bobby Thompsons who say grace at dinner and then go out and randomly slaughter innocent people. Who are the real monsters?

           

Zabriskie Point (1970)

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Producer: Carlo Ponti

Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Fred Gardner, SamShepard,

                    Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe

Cinematographer: Alfio Contini

Actors: Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor

Music: Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia

Rated: R

Running time: 110 mins.

  L.A., metaphor for a desert

        In the late 1960s it looked like the United States was about to implode. Ghetto rage led to riots that were burning down our cities, assassinations were bringing down our social and political leaders, an unwanted war was alienating and radicalizing our youth. The country’s future did not seem promising.

      The nation and Western society in general with it, was facing a serious crisis.   Hollywood, which since the advent of television had its own crisis to deal with, was not blind to what was going down around it; it saw it as an opportunity to become relevant again. Several classic movies of the time dealt with this apparent social breakdown then afflicting America. The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969) and Medium Cool (1970), to mention just three, tackled different aspects of what had been happening here in the years following the assassination of President Kennedy and the arrival of the Beatles: youth lost in a consumeristic, sexually liberated society; the rise of countercultures and the hostility to it; and police brutality and the crushing of dissent.

            Enter leftist Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura (1960), Blowup (1966). Antonioni was enlisted by MGM to contribute his take on the crisis. The result was Zabriskie Point--- a movie that would turn out to be a disaster both for MGM and Antonioni. It would take another several years for him to regain his reputation with The Passenger (1976).

             Zabriskie Point tells a story about a young university suspendee, Mark,who is suspected of shooting a policeman during a student confrontation, steals a plane, and winds up in Death Valley where he meets Daria, a young secretary and possible mistress to a real estate development corporate head, who’s on her way to Phoenix to attend a business conference her boss has set up with some big investors.

             Mark and Daria make love in the desert, and Mark then decides to return the plane to Hawthorne Airport--- after having painted it over with peace slogans and sexually suggestive graffiti. On arriving back in L.A. Mark is shot and killed by the police, and Daria, upon hearing the news on the radio, sabotages her boss’s business deal--- and fantasizes about blowing up his desert hideaway (multiple times!). That’s the story. It’s hard to believe that so many talented people could not create a more fleshed out storyline!

            The real story, however, is the film itself and what it says about Antonioni, 1960s America--- and Los Angeles, the city where half of it takes place. Antonioni was a European leftist, and the anti-capitalist symbolism is very heavy-handedly strewn throughout the film. L.A. is depicted as a city of billboards and freeways, selling everything from pork to condos. Shots of Lee Allen (Rod Taylor), the real estate developer and principal capitalist in the movie, always seem to include a prominent American flag behind him! The people Mark and Daria come in contact with--- police, bar patrons and everyday citizens seem semi-lobotomized or dumb, and there are even two “typical” yokel American tourists types Daria encounters at Zabriskie Point. These were common European stereotypical views of Americans at the time, and I don’t think this view has changed much in the last forty years, except maybe American tourists are little more highly regarded now than then.

             In the sharp contrast between the barren blight of the city and barren beauty of  Death Valley, Antonioni tries to emphasize the corruption of corporate America versus the pristine innocence of the desert. The bizarre sexual fantasy scene at Zabriskie Point with multiple hippie couples copulating at the same time is definitely interesting to view (and quite artistically shot), but adds nothing to the story and only seems like an attention grabber for the audience. The message Antonioni was trying to make was probably a valid one then, as it is now, but it could have been presented a little more subtly to be effective. The Graduate, Easy Rider, and Medium Cool did a better job of it.

             To give it credit, Zabriskie Point is a beautifully filmed movie. The cinematography, especially the desert sequences, is superb; as is the music score, with names like Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, Roy Orbison among others contributing. But the storyline is weak and un-engaging, and the acting is flat and unemotional. Antonioni cast non-actors in the principal roles, and (with a few exceptions e.g. Rod

Taylor) throughout the film. This weak script, bad acting, and bumptious symbolism is what turned off the critics--- and the public with them.

             Compare this movie with Jacques Demy’s Model Shop made at the same time and dealing with similar subject matter--- the L.A. youth scene--- and you see how  two European filmmakers of genius looked at Los Angeles in 1968 and came away with two diametrically opposed views. I wonder what they would say today!

Double Indemnity (1944)

 Director: Billy Wilder

 Producer: Joseph Sistrom

 Writers: Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder (from a novella by James M. Cain)

 Actors: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G, Robinson

 Cinematography: John F. Seitz

 Music: Miklos Rozsa

 Rated: N/A

 Running time: 106 mins.

Classic L.A. Noir

         A car races through the dark, hazy streets of downtown Los Angeles. It stops in front of an office building on Olive Street, a man gets out, staggers into the lobby, gets into an elevator, gets out, enters an office, sits down at a dictaphone, and begins to record a sordid story about lust, adultery, greed, and murder--- as blood slowly seeps through his shirt. So begins Double Indemnity.

           The plot goes something like this: in 1938 L.A. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman, becomes infatuated with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the wife of an oil company executive, and the two of them plot and eventually carry out the murder of her husband in order to cash in on the double indemnity clause of his insurance policy--- a policy he’s not even aware he has. The two lovers almost get away with it, but Neff’s associate, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the insurance claims manager, suspects murder as the cause of death, but is unaware of Neff’s part in it.. He soon unknowingly tips Neff off to the fact that Mrs. Dietrichson has been two-timing him and just used him as a means to get rid of her unwanted husband.

            Walter and Phyllis confront each other at her house, she shoots and wounds him, he shoots and kills her. The movie ends with Neff lying in the doorway of his office building incapacitated by his bullet wound awaiting the police with Keyes, his friend and mentor, standing over him and lamenting his disappointment in Neff’s end.

             This Billy Wilder movie from 1944 has all the earmarks of the classic noir film. It proved to be the standard for all the dark crime movies that came after in the period known as classic noir: the late 40s and 50s. The screenplay is based on a James M. Cain novella from 1935, and was written (not without conflict) by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder. In 1992 the film was deemed worthy of preservation by the National Film Registry, and in 2007 was ranked 29th on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American films of the twentieth century.

          Double Indemnity opened doors as to what could be depicted on an American movie screen. Murder for sex and money was, of course, nothing new in 1944, the tabloids had been thriving on it for years; but it was new to see it so glaringly portrayed on the screen. This movie pushed the envelope when it came to just what the Taft Office (film censors) would allow. Wilder took it as far as he could--- and got most of what he wanted. The original ending with Neff in the San Quentin gas chamber as Keyes looks on was, however, considered too gruesome and was cut. 

             This movie, to my knowledge, was the first film noir to feature Los Angeles as a prominent background for the narrative. There would in years to come be many more. L.A. would become, and has remained, the premier noir city. Wilder used L.A. extensively for exterior shots: the Dietrichson’s Spanish colonial house in Los Feliz (which still looks as it did then), Jerry’s Market on Melrose Avenue (now gone), the Hollywood Bowl, Olvera Street, Glendale Station, and the intersection of Hollywood and Western serve as backdrops to key scenes. The viewer gets an interesting glance at life in mid-40s L.A. Angelenos, then as now, attended concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, dined in Mexican restaurants on Olvera Street, went to lectures at UCLA, but quite amazingly--- could buy a beer in a drive-in restaurant and drink it in their car!              

            The dialogues, especially those between Walter and Phyllis, emphasize the fact that this story is taking place in So. California and would not be the same if it occurred anywhere else. For writers like Chandler and Cain, and filmmakers like Wilder L.A. symbolized the American dream gone sour. It was not only a place where people came to get away from restraint and seek their fortunes, but also where lust and murder lurked beneath the stately palm trees and above the neatly mowed lawns--- a place where a mundane thing like an insurance policy could be deadly.

             Double Indemnity  came at a critical moment both for the country and the city. In 1944 the United States was entering the last and bloodiest year of World War II. The war was changing America--- and America’s perception of itself. Film noir highlights this change in perception. Los Angeles at that time was a city full of servicemen on leave, drifters, war workers, and opportunists who came to get what they could, while they could. Tensions were at the breaking point. This was a year after the Zoot Suit riots, and the Sleepy Lagoon murder case; and that very autumn two unspeakably gruesome murders took place at the Barclay and Joyce Hotels downtown. L.A. was a city on the edge. All this is subtly presented as subtext in this classic tale of middle-class corruption, greed and deceit in the City of the Angels.

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

Director: Josef Rusnak

Producer: Roland Emmerich, Ute Emmerich, Marco Weber

Writers: Josef Rusnak; Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez

Actors: Craig Bierko; Gretchen Mol; Vincent D’Onofrio; Dennis Haysbert; Armin Mueller-   Stahl

Cinematography: Wendigo von Schultzendorff

Music: Harald Kloser

Rated: R (violence and language)

Running time: 100 mins.

L.A. on a wire

     Los Angeles: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This tech-noir movie opens in the past (1937), jumps quickly to the present (1999), and ends in the future (2024). But how much of it is reality? 

     We learn early on that the 1937 L.A. is actually a virtual simulation created by Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), head of a multi-billion dollar computer enterprise in present-day Los Angeles. The simulation is a first step attempt to create a virtual world---- a sophisticated video game using computer generated people possessing self-awareness. Fuller chose 1937 because it was the era of his childhood. 

       We also learn that Fuller has been using the system to “jack in”, or transfer consciousness with one of the 1937 characters (called units in the movie) in order to have sex with several young women working at a high-end hotel on Wilshire Boulevard (the Ambassador). During one of his virtual visits he leaves a letter with Ashton (Vincent D’Onofrio), the hotel bartender, and asks him to give it to a certain Douglas Hall, who Fuller expected would be asking for it. In the letter was shocking information Fuller had recently discovered.

        Upon his return to the present, Fuller is brutally murdered in an alley downtown; and Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko), who it turns out is Fuller’s associate and second-in-command, is suspected of the killing. Soon a woman claiming to be Fuller’s daughter Jane (Gretchen Moll) shows up intending to close down the company. She and Hall feel an affinity for each other and soon become romantically involved. But everything points to Hall as the murderer, and the detective on the case, McBain (Dennis Haysbert), persists in pursuing him.

         Soon Hall begins to suspect himself; and after finding out about Fuller’s trips into virtuality, he decides to do the same in order to find out if Fuller left any clues that might clear him of murder. What he does find “shakes the very foundation of his being”.

          The Thirteenth Floor is a German production loosely based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, and the movie Welt im Draht (World on a Wire)(1973) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In 2000 it was nominated for the Saturn Award for best science fiction film, but lost out to The Matrix. It opens with Descartes famous quote, “I think, therefore I am”, and asks the questions: what is reality, and what makes us human? Why Roland Emmerich, the producer, chose Los Angeles as the setting for this sci-fi noir is speculative, but for a century L.A. has been famed for being the center of unreality and fantasy. The movies made here are renowned for creating virtual worlds and times and for making fantasy appear as reality. What better place to explore the whole concept of reality. 

         The CGI in this late 90s movie is very artistic. For the 1937 simulation the technicians took photos of present-day Broadway and Wilshire Boulevard and cancelled out the modern buildings, leaving in those from pre-World War II. They then filled in the blank spaces using actual photos from the the 30s. The Red Cars on Wilshire have a genuine look to them as do the autos and extras depicted in the streets. Both the Ambassador and Biltmore Hotels, called the Wilshire Grand Hotel in the film, were used for the important nightclub scenes as was the Queen Mary. It’s a last look at the old Ambassador still in its original art deco glory just before it was renovated and defaced to make way for a school. These club scenes are so well done you expect to see Cary Grant and Jean Harlow walk in at any minute, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appear in a dance number. The brief future scenes, set in 2024, are effective, but not as noteworthy.

            In typical noir style, most of the scenes, particularly the present-day ones, take place at night and are centered downtown and in the San Pedro-Wilmington harbor area. The Ennis-Brown House in Los Feliz was used for Doug Hall’s apartment, as it was for Rick Deckard’s in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner seventeen years before. Hall like Deckard is another Angeleno who winds up doubting his reality.

            This Emmerich/Rusnak look at Los Angeles is another one coming from a non-American perspective. Unlike others that deal solely with the contemporary city at a particular time--- Model Shop and Zabriskie Point--- this one is more well-rounded; it shows a city with a past, a present, and a future: a glamorous past, an inventive pioneering present, and a technologically advanced future. The questions it poses regarding the nature of reality and the essence of humanity are not answered, but are left for the viewer to figure out.  Even the reality of the future L.A. depicted at the end of the film is put in doubt, for the movie does not end--- it shuts off.