The Black Dahlia
Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson

On the early morning of January 15, 1947, housewife Betty Bersinger and her three-year-old daughter made their way to a local shoe repair shop near their home in Los Angeles. Reaching Norton and 39th Street, they walked past several vacant lots when the mother spied something that no child should ever see. In the midst of the weeds, there appeared to be a broken mannequin. Yet, Betty quickly realized that what she was witnessing was no store window dummy. It was a woman’s body When police officers Will Fitzgerald and Frank Perkins arrived on the scene a few minutes later, the sight they witnessed was out of some horror writer’s imagination. The dead woman had been cut in two at the waist. Rope marks on her ankles and neck, vicious cuts to her face told the tale that her last few hours on this earth had not been peaceful. When other investigators arrived, it was quickly determined that she had been killed somewhere else and dumped in this vacant lot, and strangely, that the perpetrator had washed and cleaned the body before getting rid of it. The case was assigned to LAPD detectives Harry Hansen, Herman Willis, and Finis Brown to the case. What the detectives found when they arrived on the scene was a madhouse. Bystanders, photographers, and reporters were trampling all over the crime scene and contaminating everything. Doing the best they could, they sent the woman’s fingerprints to the FBI in Washington, and miraculously they matched the fingerprints to a 22-year-old woman named Elizabeth Short, who had been a clerk at Camp Cooke in California during World War II. Short has come like thousands before and after to her to California to become an actress, and found the streets a lot colder than she was prepared for. Nicknamed the Black Dahlia (a 1946 Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake film) because she stood out from the crowd with her jet black hair, pale skin, smoky eyes, vampish looks, and often black lacy attire. She carried her the dreams of little girl from a broken home whose greatest enjoyment came sitting in a darkened theater, escaping the poverty that clung to the family a cheap suit on a hot day. Dreams of marrying a handsome serviceman were put on hold as he pursued her dream of being on the silver screen. With a nice figure and attractive face, she was often seen at the best nightclubs and hot spots trying to get noticed. Having done some modeling in her native Massachusetts, she never caught that brass ring. Jobs were few and far between. While the police devoted a great deal of time and resources, they were never able to discover who the killer was. The killer sent a package containing the young woman’s belongings to the Los Angeles Times. Strangely, everything had been washed with gasoline and her address book had several pages torn out of it. This woman unknown in life, became a symbol in death to many on the reality of what Hollywood was really all about. She had come to the town innocent and sweet, probably still a virgin, and met her end in such an unpleasant fashion. Her grave in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery is a symbol to the end of the line that meets most Tinseltown dreamers.
It is little wonder that the Black Dahlia murder has become a cornerstone of the movie industry, and the tales that it tells about itself. It is also little wonder that America’s greatest living crime noir writer, James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, My Dark Places, Brown's Requiem) spun his own yarn around the murder. While universally hailed as a genius, even after the dramatic success of L.A. Confidential, Hollywood drug its feet in turning his novels into movies. Much of this can be blamed on Ellroy’s complicated storytelling style, but even so, it took an inordinate amount of time for most them to reach the cineplex. Movies like My Dark Places, The Big Nowhere, White Jazz, and this film spent long periods of time in developmental hell. In 2002, Ellroy spat, "Just forget Ellroy movies and concentrate on Ellroy books and you and I will be a whole lot better off." Yet, Ellroy found a champion in director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Blow Out, Scarface), a director famous for his dark crime stories and De Palma kept the project alive through several years of developmental hell.
Like most of Ellroy’s novels, this crime noir tale is told against the backdrop of 1940s Los Angeles with all of its political intrigue, police corruption, and social grittiness. In other words, the teenage kids that studios usually aim their films at are going to see this film listed and then wonder if there is a low rent comedy about two slackers playing somewhere else instead. Using the real life Black Dahlia murder case as a backdrop, Ellroy centers his story on detectives Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert (Josh Harnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and ambitious Assistant Attorney Ellis Loew (Patrick Fischler) who are in charge of the case. Over the course of the next two years, the detectives piece together the clues of who done it. More important, like the rest of Ellroy’s novels, the two detectives find themselves in the midst of a sea of corruption and deceit that envelopes Los Angeles and even Mexico.
Cineplexes are a lot like bookstores. There is always a wide selection of movies to choose from and just like a book store, you quickly realize that most people choose crap, the kind of stuff that should have a warning sticker slapped on them about this product could turn your brain to mush. But if you search, every once and awhile you find that gem. The best way to tell if this is your kind of gem is if you love Ellroy’s works or enjoyed the movie version of L.A. Confidential.

Verdict: Great Book, Good Movie