Film noir is dark by definition, but Hollywood noir has a twist: it's about the darkness that so often follows the pursuit of fame.
Few eras continue to obsess moviemakers like the Los Angeles boom years after World War II, a time when Hollywood made some of its greatest movies and filmmakers would have you believe the city was filled with noble gumshoes, women in trouble and glamour tempered only by despair.
The noir tradition continues this month with the release of "Hollywoodland" and "The Black Dahlia." While the first film dramatizes the death of "Superman" star George Reeves, the "The Black Dahlia" revisits the brutal murder and bisection of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose death bred decades of investigation and false confessions.
The noir fixation doesn't just persist in film: Round-toed heels fill women's shoe racks. Pinup girls and burlesque are all the risque rage. Christina Aguilera has dropped the "Dirrty" act for a vampy noir-influenced personae, and "The Black Dahlia" star Scarlett Johansson often seems delivered to red carpets by time machine.
Why are so many people still fascinated with Hollywood noir?
"It's that whole thing about romanticism masked with cynicism, and all the glamour that goes with it," says Ricki Kline, designer for Los Angeles's 213, Inc., which builds bars that emulate a noir mood without aping postwar lighting and furniture. "It's modern, so it's accessible, but it's far enough away that they can romanticize it."
Some fans of Hollywood's smoke-filled years long for times they may consider less complicated, says Nathan Marsak, author of "Los Angeles Neon" and one of three contributors to 1947project.com, a Web site that seeks to demythologize what may have been the most noirish year in Los Angeles' postwar era. (Elizabeth "The Black Dahlia" Short was killed in January 1947, and gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was fatally shot in his Beverly Hills home that June.)
For decades, women have been nicking the look of Veronica Lake. (AP Photo)
These hats are designed to make you talk. Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett play cops in "The Black Dahlia." (AP Photo/Merrick Morton/Universal Pictures)
"In Hollywood in the '40s and '50s, cars were made of solid steel, people smoked and drank a lot, and stars -- actual movie and recording stars -- walked the streets," Marsak said in an e-mail. "Now all the stars are holed up in their mansions, eating nothing and their cars are made of plastic."
But he and 1947project.com collaborator Larry Harnisch, a Los Angeles Times copy editor writing a book about the Black Dahlia murder, says people have oversimplified the era into a series of clichés.
Harnisch calls noir "a fictional genre in which the fabric of daily life loses all its subtlety and richness, reduced to a few common, empty gestures: The flawed hero, the glamorous woman in trouble, corruption under the palm trees and lots of shadows."
"I find the noir shtick incredibly stale, dull and predictable," he says.
Escapism is a major factor, but people are wrong to think the years of the Cold War and Red Scare were less anxious than the modern age of terror alerts, Harnisch says.
Misguided or not, noir nostalgia enjoys a resurgence at least once a decade: from the high praise for "Chinatown" in the 1970s to the crowd-pleasing "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" of the 1980s to the "Swingers"-inspired cocktail and cigar fixation of the 1990s.
They join the ranks of countless other films about collisions of fame and tragedy: in "Bugsy," Warren Beatty plays a celebrity gangster who really wants to act.
In "L.A. Confidential," widely considered the gold standard of postwar noir -- "Chinatown" is prewar noir -- Kevin Spacey's Det. Sgt. Jack Vincennes chases small screen stardom as Russell Crowe's Officer "Bud" White tries to rescue a prostitute transformed into a Veronica Lake wannabe.
As thriving as the genre is on film, it is becoming harder and harder to find real-life remnants of that era.
213, Inc.'s noir-influenced bars -- the Golden Gopher, Broadway Bar, and the new Seven Grand -- admirably evoke the era, but the first two opened within the last three years and Seven Grand is opening soon.
Other names regularly cited by lovers of noir are the Musso and Frank Grill, a Hollywood restaurant that defines "venerable" with its wood paneling and red-jacketed career waiters.
Man, I can't wait to get this shot up on MySpace. (AP Photo/Focus Features/George Kraychyk)
The downtown Biltmore Hotel, the last place Elizabeth Short was seen alive -- still stands, a perfect embodiment of slick surfaces and palm trees.
Author Kim Cooper, the third contributor to 1947project.com, notes that Los Feliz' Good Luck Bar "is a convincing re-imagining of a dim, exotic Chinatown bar that might have been frequented by Alan Ladd or Veronica Lake."
And the spacious Vista Theater around the corner -- built in the 1920s -- is one of the city's greatest old movie theaters, along with San Pedro's stunning Warner Grand.
It's still easier in Los Angeles, of course, to find aspiring reality show performers than remaining noir landmarks. Marsak compares the city to an onion: "You peel it apart and it makes you cry."
"I drive around Los Angeles and I peel apart what I see, because neighborhoods and business districts are fascinating when you realize you're looking at layers, and post-World War II Los Angeles is there, under the layers," he said. "And sometimes you cry, because so much has been destroyed."
CONTRIBUTORS TO 1947PROJECT.COM COMMENT ON L.A. NOIR
Why do you think the Los Angeles of the '40s and '50s continue to fascinate?
For a dose of oldfangled noir, see the 1947 movie "Out of the Past" starring Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum. (AP Photo/Warner Home Video)
COOPER: As our physical world becomes more cluttered with loud, ugly places, signs and people, I think folks are attracted to a more elegant, refined and less generic time, when men and women carried and expressed themselves with more grace and style -- even when robbing banks, punching each other or shooting at cops.
HARNISCH: We have an extremely superficial, slick, glossy, glamorized view of the past. ... I don't think anyone can delve into the complex history of postwar America and come away with the notion that life was simple, gentle or kind. ... Part of what is alluring about Los Angeles in the 1940s and '50s is the simplistic images spun by television and films.
MARSAK: People may be nostalgic for the "good old days," when the streets were clean and the cops rescued kittens, but they miss out on the fact that people were still people, and misery and mayhem always follow wherever people congregate.
Are there any modern Los Angeles locations that personify the postwar noir era for you?
COOPER: Many, though great old locations are always under threat from developers or overzealous owners who think their gorgeous old signs, facades and interiors are old and tacky, and would look better if they were modernized....Once you train yourself to see them under the cosmetic coverings, you see Quonset Huts everywhere -- these U-shaped war surplus structures formed the quick walls and roof of many a quickly built storefront, and for some time in the late '40s provided family housing for returning soldiers in what are now the parking lots of the L.A. Zoo.
HARNISCH: I think noir is the most trite of clichés. There's lots of interesting architecture in Los Angeles, but there isn't a stick of wood standing in L.A. that symbolizes noir to me. The film aestheticians have gotten so lax about their standards that any black-and- white film is considered noir. Today's pseudo-noir, as opposed to a few original films produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is a joke.
MARSAK: Noir is everywhere, if you train yourself to see it. If you watch the old movies, and study, really study, books of twentieth century architecture, you can get a feeling of what L.A. used to look like. And when a neon sign is glowing against the wet pavement at sundown, you almost expect a shadowy figure -- a gangster? a dishy dame? -- to emerge from the shadows.
Can you think of any modern person who personifies the era?
I clean up good. Ben Affleck in "Hollywoodland." (AP Photo/Focus Features/George Kraychyk)
HARNISCH: Absolutely not. The studio system manufactured glamour on a huge assembly line that was dismantled years ago. We know, with the embarrassing thoroughness of tabloid TV, the stars' foibles and human flaws. Under the studio system, actors and actresses served a long apprenticeship with extensive training before getting a starring role. There isn't a single young leading man or woman today who has the acting skills of the older generation. And of course, when movies are nothing but video games in which the figures are replaced by live people, there's no demand for any acting ability. Which is why I rarely go to the movies.
MARSAK: Leo DiCaprio might have looked great in The Aviator, but when he's out and about, he looks like a slob. George Clooney, though, never leaves the house without looking like a glamorous movie star. The person who should best personify the '40s and '50s is YOU -- go to a vintage clothing store, buy yourself some snappy duds, and become your own noir superhero!
COOPER: Nicole Kidman carries herself like one of the established female stars of the day (a la Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyk), and chooses modest gowns that are more suggestive than revealing. And Kate Winslet has a sophisticated, retro quality that lets her seem at home in many eras. Dita Von Teese, on the more erotic side, can be counted on to turn out in period perfect make up, hair and attire.
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asap contributor Tim Molloy is an editor on the AP's national desk.
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