Haggisboy
17-09-2006, 11:56 AM
In 1947 at the age of 22, Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress, was found murdered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. Her body had been severely mutilated and cut in half at the waist. The case was nicknamed “The Black Dahlia” by newspaper reporters seeking to capitalize on the then-popular movie “The Blue Dahlia” which was enjoying its theatre run at the time.
The case remains unsolved, although at its peak police suspects included Norman Chandler, the Publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and folksinger Woody Guthrie. More recently true crime authors have gone so far as to speculate that Orson Wells was the killer.
Enter novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) and Director Brian De Palma (The Untouchables, Scarface, Dressed to Kill), who had signed on to bring Ellroy’s novel based on the case to the big screen in a film-noir homage to movies like Double Indemnity. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that with the talents of these two behind the camera, and the onscreen presence of Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart and Hillary Swank, The Black Dahlia would be a delightfully dark fedora-filled pot boiler that would be entertaining from beginning to end.
Sadly, such is not the case. Instead what gets served up is a muddled, confusing and at times hysterically over-acted movie that seems to treat the actual Dahlia case as mere window dressing for other, less engrossing story lines. There are no less that three plots to this film, all of them seemingly competing against the Dahlia murder mystery for top billing. In fact, at times I got the impression that Ellroy’s script would rather delve into anything else, other than the actual murder, as if looking for any excuse not to get in sync with the film’s title.
It’s too bad because among this film’s few highlights are the screen test clips featuring a glimpse into the soul of Elizabeth (Betty) Short, played mesmerizingly by the stunning Mia Kirshner.
I couldn’t help but feel that if Ellroy and De Palma had jettisoned some of the extraneous competing plots, and instead placed their focus on telling more of Short’s back story rather than the confused gumshoe narrative that they went with, the end result would have been a vastly superior film.
The Black Dahlia - Official Site (http://www.theblackdahliamovie.net/)
The case remains unsolved, although at its peak police suspects included Norman Chandler, the Publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and folksinger Woody Guthrie. More recently true crime authors have gone so far as to speculate that Orson Wells was the killer.
Enter novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) and Director Brian De Palma (The Untouchables, Scarface, Dressed to Kill), who had signed on to bring Ellroy’s novel based on the case to the big screen in a film-noir homage to movies like Double Indemnity. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that with the talents of these two behind the camera, and the onscreen presence of Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart and Hillary Swank, The Black Dahlia would be a delightfully dark fedora-filled pot boiler that would be entertaining from beginning to end.
Sadly, such is not the case. Instead what gets served up is a muddled, confusing and at times hysterically over-acted movie that seems to treat the actual Dahlia case as mere window dressing for other, less engrossing story lines. There are no less that three plots to this film, all of them seemingly competing against the Dahlia murder mystery for top billing. In fact, at times I got the impression that Ellroy’s script would rather delve into anything else, other than the actual murder, as if looking for any excuse not to get in sync with the film’s title.
It’s too bad because among this film’s few highlights are the screen test clips featuring a glimpse into the soul of Elizabeth (Betty) Short, played mesmerizingly by the stunning Mia Kirshner.
I couldn’t help but feel that if Ellroy and De Palma had jettisoned some of the extraneous competing plots, and instead placed their focus on telling more of Short’s back story rather than the confused gumshoe narrative that they went with, the end result would have been a vastly superior film.
The Black Dahlia - Official Site (http://www.theblackdahliamovie.net/)