The Blue Dahlia

source: The Blue Dahlia

Johnny Morrison returns from the war to find that his wife has become a lush: drinking heavily and apparently more into other men than him. When he learns that the death of his young son was not the victim of a disease but was really killed in a car wreck her drinking caused. He walks out and heads off to another life. However when his wife turns up dead the day after he was seen hitting her, he becomes number one suspect and sets out to try and find the real murderer before he hangs for it. Despite its reputation and famous title, I personally found The Blue Dahlia to be a pretty average film all told. The plot is rather heavy in improbable turns and actions and I found it quite difficult to get into. It was enough to keep me watching but it was far from being. As a noir it is surprisingly soft and toned down – perhaps in part due to the objections from the US Military about the way that characters with a military background were portrayed. Lacking the grit and substance of true noir, the result is a rather melodramatic mystery that moves forward without a great deal to really hook the viewer. The cast help to some degree. Ladd would be much better in other films but here he does well enough to lead the film. He cannot stop himself coming over as a bit of a clean-cut matinée idol but he does have a bit of toughness to him. Lake is OK but generally quite bland although Dowling is good in a small early role. Bendix and Da Silva are both good in their roles and support from Beaumont, Powers and Dowling is solid. Overall this is a solid enough drama despite the problems but it is certainly not worthy of the status that it has somehow garnered over the years. As a noir it is far too soft and simple while as a drama it is a bit too lacking in credibility to really draw me in. Interesting but if you are looking for something that exemplifies noir then this is not it although it does work as a good drama.

Most reviewers comment on the on screen chemistry between Ladd and Lake. I just watched this movie for the fourth time along with the Glass Key and I just do not get it. Sure they are continually making asides and innuendos but I don't see it as convincing. I think the reason is that to me Lake has zero sex appeal, when I look at her I think of a blond Morticia, an ugly blond Morticia. I am sure that in the forties they had a different take on what makes an attractive, sexy woman, but it's hard to believe that Lake fit the bill. Also she can't act worth a damn. The movie is stolen by Bendix and the ending is a surprise because it is not the real ending it was made up to please the US Navy. Also it is not a true noir it is a straight forward mystery and not a very good one.

Alan Ladd (Johnny Morrison) returns from the war to his wife Doris Dowling (Helen). However, she has been tarting about behind his back with Howard Da Silva (Eddie Harwood) and she also admits responsibility for the death of Ladd's son. This revelation proves too much for Alan Ladd and he walks out. However, Dowling is shot that night and Ladd becomes the number one suspect. He forms an alliance with Eddie's wife Veronica Lake (Joyce) and the film becomes a murder mystery. Who-dunnit....? The acting honours go to Howard Da Silva as the confident nightclub owner and Doris Dowling as the partying floozy, followed by Alan Ladd in the lead role. William Bendix as army buddy "Buzz" can be annoying at times. He shouts his way through the film and although he gets much credit for playing an ex-serviceman with shell-shock, the truth is that he is irritating at times. I wasn't sure what the film was about for the first half hour or so and the film gets a bit slow in parts. The story also stretches credulity with the rather convenient meeting between Ladd and lake and their association with each other. The ending is also a cop-out. Although the film keeps you guessing as to the identity of the murderer (I didn't guess it), all is ultimately revealed in a very poor confession from out of the blue. Tacky. It could have been much better. Overall, the film lacks something.

Raymond Chandler scripted the screenplay. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (sporting a slightly shorter version of her trademark peek-a-boo hairstyle), are reunited in this stylish film noir. Johnny Morrison, just returned from military service, comes home to his Los Angeles bungalow to discover his fickle, unscrupulous wife, Helen (the relatively unknown Doris Dowling, best remembered as Ray Milland's drinking buddy in "The Lost Weekend"), hasn't exactly been waiting in the wings for him - she has been having an affair with Eddie Harwood (Howard da Silva) owner of the Blue Dahlia nightclub ("You've got the wrong lipstick on, mister!"). She then drunkenly shrieks of how her impaired driving had killed their young son, which leads Johnny to threaten her with a gun, but he promptly leaves before he does something he'll regret later. However, Helen is found dead the next morning, and Johnny, who had made the acquaintance of Joyce (Veronica Lake) is the prime suspect. Joyce offers to help, and Johnny's war buddy (William Benedix) also wants him cleared, but, as with all Chandler noir, there are plenty of red herrings, twists and mazes of clues that don't always make sense. Johnny feels he can't trust Joyce when he discovers that she is the wife of Harwood, although she clearly wants nothing more to do with him. She tries to explain, but, Johnny dismisses her with, "So long, baby!" The truth does come out, but not until after a few fascinating plot twists. Many have said that this is not really noir, since Lake's character is not so much a femme fatale as she is a mystery dame, but hey, if she sparks Ladd's interest, that's more than enough! Benedix, who had teamed with Ladd and Lake in "The Glass Key", four years earlier, gives tremendous support, and his wounded, traumatized war veteran is a compelling character. Chandler's ungentlemanly treatment of Lake (calling her Moronica Lake and deriding her acting skills couldn't have earned him very many points), may account for the reason why she appears blank in a few scenes, but she pulls the role off and she and Ladd make screen magic, as always. She and Dowling are beautifully costumed by Edith Head. On a rather morbid note, this film's title was the inspiration of giving murder victim Elizabeth Short the moniker, "The Black Dahlia". And the similar turns that both Ladd and Lake's lives would take is very ironic and sad - both would see their careers slide, suffer from depression and die relatively young as a result of alcoholism. If there ever was a screen couple who ran neck and neck, it was these two! A worthy DVD contender (what the heck is taking so long?) and let's hope when such a day comes, plenty of extras will be included!

To appreciate this, you need to know a bit about writing styles. Just a small bit, is about all I know, but it is enough to understand the great struggle this denotes. There are all sorts of styles of course, but writing professors (those great deciders) like to think in terms of clean and not clean. The clean ones are easy to parse, easy to navigate. They are friendly to a reader. They are easy to advise if you are part of an organization where one person writes and many advise. A subset of this clean writing is the sort of sparse stuff that Raymond Chandler is known for. In this year, William Faulkner would adapt a Chandler book and create a collection of attractive phrases, settled into a broad story. "The Big Sleep" was successful because by that time we had already learned how to consume small bits as if they stood alone. The only "long form" writing challenge in this model is to give enough of an interesting shape of the story to allow observers in it to remark wittily. In Chandler's case, this is "hard-boiled." Meanwhile, while the Faulker/Bogart/Hawks billboard model was being shaped, Chandler himself was working on this smaller thing. It fails. Usually, that is blamed on the weak director, or the short timeframe, or the unprofessional actors. But I think what we have here is the collapse of this sort of terse writing in film. We'll see it re-emerge in summer action films, but as an armature for engagement, it is dissolving here before our eyes. The story is that we have the obligatory night club, that regular stand-in for movies. And we have three returning soldiers. One is loopy, one a cuckold. The wife is murdered and suspicion is variously thrown on the crazy fellow, the night club owner and the husband hero. We find that all these are wrong, that the professional watcher is the killer. Chandler was drunk during the writing of this, but you can see how his mind is working. Viewers are killing his reason to be. His words are in all three of these suspects, but the one that interests this commenter is the nutjob, the William Bendix character. He's driven crazy by the jazz music that has been given root during the war. Jazz (at least then) is to popular music as real writing is to Chandler's simple strokes. Jazz is unclean. Each bit of it contributes, but the thing weaves a complex whole. Some bit of it may be inscrutable when you hear it but if it is memorable enough, you will recall it later when it finds its connection with other bits. Jazz is all about rich agents that self assemble in your mind to produce something unique to how you perceive. It drives the simple minded crazy, because the individual bits don't make sense. You cannot see the end from the beginning. Hearing this, Bendix's character holds his head and rails against "monkey music." Its racist of course, but here at least in this stroke it is ennobling because the white guys are the simple ones. Today you would call them fundamentalists. And the offscreen black influence is the rich stuff. Life. Complex, rewarding writing that is creeping in. That makes it ever sharper where one of Chandler's clever lines is "Thanks, that's mighty white of you," when one of our characters is dealt with honestly. Its a bad movie. But if you want to see narrative evolution at work, visit this. Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

"The Blue Dahlia" is one of the more high profile film noirs of the mid-forties, with a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, direction by George Marshall, and starring performances by one of the more famous romantic teams of the era, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. It sounds like a classic but plays out as just somewhat above average. Chandler put Ladd down as not in Bogart's class, a small boy's idea of a tough guy, but Ladd is strong in his role of the returning veteran. The real weakness is Lake, catatonic in a bland role with little dimension or mystery. We know from the get go that she didn't do it, which may have been a mistake and no reason is given for this sweet girl-next-door being married to a gangster. Their meeting, with Lake picking up Ladd in the rain followed by an instant romance, is beyond contrived. The plot is a sort of sour take-off on "The Best Years of Our Lives" with three returning servicemen heading back into civilian life. While Fredric March came back to perfect wife Myrna Loy, Ladd finds an unfaithful Doris Dowling drunkenly laughing in his face over being responsible for the death of their son. Ladd threatens her with his gun but, in another contrivance, leaves it and her behind as he walks out into the rain. The next morning wifey is found shot dead with Ladd the obvious suspect. With help from Lake, he eludes the police and tries to ferret out his wife's killer, another contrivance as she meant nothing to him and his motivation is a pale copy of Bogart's logic from "The Maltese Falcon." The solution to the mystery is no great shakes, but the movie plays well because of some crisp dialogue by Chandler, plus interesting and well-acted supporting characters. William Bendix shines as a wounded serviceman with mental problems, Howard Da Silva as a smooth gangster with a hidden past, Will Wright as an extremely sleazy bungalow peeper and blackmailer, and Tom Powers as a sarcastic cop. All in all, I expected it to be better, but certainly worth a look for fans of old crime movies.

My recording off UK Channel 4 13th Feb 1987 is nearing its end cycle, hopefully the next time I want to trot this episodic classic out it'll be on DVD. Because it was Chandler I always regarded it maybe too highly, but it certainly has some powerful noir-ish moments whilst remaining essentially a normal Paramount studio-bound potboiler. War vet Alan Ladd comes home to find his wife playing around, gets accused of murdering her while being picked up by Veronica Lake. They indulged in some snappy laconic Chandler-banter but that's as far as their relationship seemed to progress. Murder and mayhem follow Ladd while monkey-music followed his buddy William Bendix. I always wondered: how on Earth did Buzz settle down afterwards, especially when rock & roll came? Everyone has angles or axes to grind, is edgy, dislikeable, seedy or all three, the house-peeper particularly coming in for a lot of stick. Some savage and clunky fight scenes might surprise especially at the Old Cabin when juxtaposed with the romantic nightclub scene. The atmosphere throughout is perfect as was only possible on nitrate film stock. The only thing I never liked was at the climax after Hendrickson asks "You didn't think you were going to walk out that door did you?" - a heavily contrived and swift ending follows. It was a stranger to me a long time ago, but has been a firm friend of mine for decades now. Did the horticulturists ever succeed in creating a real blue dahlia?

After everything I read about The Blue Dahlia, I was expecting a dark and sinister movie. Boy, was I disappointed. The themes dealt with are definitely noir, but the look and feel of the film was decidedly not noir. There is virtually no use of shadow anywhere. The only dark scenes were the night shots in the rain and the ranch house near the end of the film. Everywhere we are subjected to gaudy, high-key shots that you need sunglasses to watch. Maybe it's a cliché (not in 1946, though), but the scenes in the cheap flophouse just begged for sinister, dark shadows - but no, we only get more MGM-type lighting. I kept waiting for Judy Garland to walk out of the closet and sing a song... Another major problem I had with this movie was the incredible amount of coincidences. It was absolutely ridiculous! I know it's a movie, but how many times can strangers bump into each other and instantly become friends. It was just too unbelievable even for a fictional story. Also, when did the drunken wife write the note on the back of their son's picture? It made no sense. She couldn't have done it after Alan Ladd walked out on her because he took the photo with him. That means she did it in the past, but if she did, the wording would be different. How would Johnny know who Harwood is? She was having an affair with Harwood, I'm sure she would've kept it secret. The note would've needed to be more specific. This is an OK film, with a great performance from Mr. DeSilva. Otherwise, watch and delete.

Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) and his two friends (including a good and funny William Bendix) are coming back in town after serving in the navy during WWII. While his two friends find a place for themselves, Johnny returns to his home to see his wife and his son he hasn't seen for years. There, his wife is having a party with a dozen of friends in which her lover, Eddie Harwood, is also invited. After an argument, during which Johnny threatens his wife with his gun (after learning that she is unfaithful, alcoholic and that their son is dead by her fault), he leaves the place and his gun, judging that she is not worth a killing, to find a hotel for the night. That same rainy night, she is killed with Johnny's gun. For the Police, he becomes the first suspect of this crime. I've heard a lot about this movie (a classic of film noir with the legendary couple Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake) without being able to see it for years. I just saw this movie tonight at the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis. Overall the movie is good thanks to a good plot (the scenario is signed Raymond Chandler, not quiet a coincidence). At first, I found the acting very poor and dated. Especially during the argument between Alan Ladd and his wife (played Doris Dowling). This was quiet a surprise for me because I met this actress in Othello (in which she has a small part) directed by Orson Welles, a director who generally hires only good actors. But as soon as you get into the story, the acting and the dialogues get better and you really want to know the name of the murderer (really I could not guess it!). After the plot, the scenes between Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are what make the movie worth to remember. Frustrating enough for the most romantic of us, you won't see them kiss each other during this movie, even at the end (this was probably not allowed on screen at the time when the movie was made). It is also hard to tell if the Dahlias in the movie were actually blue since it was filmed in black and white. Finally, yes, Veronica Lake is very beautiful. This is good entertainment, I recommend it with a 7/10.