Word: ellroy
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...Wolves. Just as I was entering my teens, though, I discovered my father's collection of mystery novels. I snuck the works of Chandler, Hammett, and others up to my bedroom and read them under the covers late at night, when I was sure that my parents were asleep. Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, which he calls "a valediction in blood," left me sleepless and staring at the ceiling for weeks, sure that I would come to an immediate and gory end if I so much as closed my eyes...
...last three to four years, noir has become culturally rehabilitated. The recent success of L.A. Confidential is one example: the re-release of Purple Noon (based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, with hunky French actor Alain Delon) is another. In the world of books, James Ellroy's novels are selling well. Ross MacDonald's works have been reissued in a Vintage edition, and the Harvard Bookstore featured a compilation of crime novels of the '40s and '50s only a month or two ago. I am compelled to ask: why now? Why are people suddenly interested in noir...
...keep it, lose it, steal it, and above all kill for it. The world of noir is populated by gangsters, heiresses and thieves. The detective's work is usually motivated more by the promise of hard cash than anything else, though there are exceptions (notably Ellroy's haunted policemen in The Big Nowhere and The Black Dahlia). Now, as in the '40s when noir was at its peak, the economy is booming in an uprecedented way. Perhaps the consequences of money, its slovenly side, only interest readers when lots of money is to be had for the asking. The topics...
...know L.A. Confidential has ended when it is both daytime and not raining. In a fine version of the some-what beefy Ellroy crime novel ostensibly about a strange murder, director Curtis Hanson portrays the cool, brutal world of Hollywood glam and corrupt police in `50s Los Angeles with all its gradations of questionable ethics. Guy Pearce and Russel Crow turn in fine performances that give us two different approaches to policing, thinking first and hitting later, or vice versa. A reptilian James Cromwell and slick Kevin Spacey round out a fine cast and a finer tale. Could this...
SHOULD WINCurtis Hanson for L.A. Confidential, who also had a hand in writing (or at least adapting) the script from Ellroy's classic novel--with much better success, complemented by crisp, savvy direction...