L.A. Private Eyes

Dahlia Schweitzer

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813596389
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

L.A. Private Eyes examines the tradition of the private eye as it evolves in films, books, and television shows set in Los Angeles from the 1930's through the present day. It takes a closer look at narratives—both on screen and on the printed page—in which detectives travel the streets of Los Angeles, uncovering corruption, moral ambiguity, and greed with the conviction of urban cowboys, while always ultimately finding truth and redemption. With a review of Los Angeles history, crime stories, and film noir, L.A. Private Eyes explores the metamorphosis of the solitary detective figure and the many facets of the genre itself, from noir to mystery, on the screen. While the conventions of the genre may have remained consistent and recognizable, the points where they evolve illuminate much about our changing gender and power roles.Watch a video of the author speaking about this topic: https://goo.gl/Xr9RFD
And also: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mkqw3mplruf7jje/Detective%20Talk%20Full.mp4?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mkqw3mplruf7jje/Detective%20Talk%20Full.mp4?dl=0)

1

LOS ANGELES

L.A. has always been flat and featureless. Anybody could be anywhere out there. . . . There was no logic to the layout of the city. And there were more people every day. Sharecroppers and starlets, migrant Mexicans and insurance salesman, come to pick over the money tree for a few years before they went home. But they never went home.

—Walter Mosley, Black Betty

THE L.A. PRIVATE EYE

From Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Michael Connelly’s “Lincoln Lawyer” (aka Mickey Haller), the figure of the renegade sleuth driving around the winding, crime-ridden streets of L.A. has remained a favorite for almost a century. Permanently single, often alcoholic, usually en route to emphysema, and always acting alone, the L.A. private eye has become an icon. And the rootlessness of his footsteps—rarely would we find him in a permanent place of his own—echoed that of many Angelinos. The detective’s home would inevitably become a surrogate office space, and his office space would be his car. Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) may have shaped the mold, giving us the lasting visual of the trench-coated private eye with rain dripping from the brim of his hat, but detectives have continued to roam the streets of Los Angeles as solitary heroes and urban knights ever since. Despite the rapid evolution of society since the 1930s, the conventions of the genre, the character of our hero, and the trappings of the city have remained consistent.

Surprisingly, considering the power and persistence of that enigmatic figure known colloquially as the “L.A. private eye,” or P.I. (private investigator), he is a relatively recent creation. Not even a hundred years old, he first appeared on the pages of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep in 1939. The Big Sleep was then adapted into the classic film—starring Humphrey Bogart as the quintessential L.A. private eye—seven years later, not only shaping the template of the L.A. private eye but also embracing and advancing the aesthetic and tone of “film noir.”

NOIR

Literally translating to “black film,” film noir was only referred to as such in later years. At the time of the initial release of noir films, they were merely considered to be melodramas. French film critics, however, finally able to watch Hollywood pictures again after World War II, observed the distinctive darkness—both literal and metaphorical—of films such as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), and Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944). The French critic Nino Frank may have coined the term “film noir” in 1946, but the term was not adopted in America until the 1960s and ’70s. It then came to refer to films made in America largely during the 1940s and 1950s that had a style both dark and cynical, with urban settings full of pessimism, fatalism, and paranoia and characters full of intrigue and suspicion.

Visually, the high-contrast black-and-white imagery echoed the cinematography common to German expressionism, a German art and film movement characterized by highly dramatic visuals and psychological states. These films often featured criminals, psychopaths, and serial killers, such as the character of Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) in Georg Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) or Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Many German filmmakers, such as Lang, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, came to Hollywood to escape the Nazi regime, and they brought this style with them. As David Marsham wrote for Life magazine in 1947, “Whoever went to the movies with any regularity during 1946 was caught in the middle of Hollywood’s profound postwar affection for morbid drama. From January through December, deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind flashed across the screen in a panting display of psychoneuroses, unsublimated sex and murder most foul” (qtd. in Clarens 192). While this comment may be as melodramatic as some of the plot twists found onscreen, it does reflect the popularity of noir films and the vivid imagery within then.

More than just a group of films particular to a certain era, noir became a style, a reflection of urban anxiety that transcended a specific moment in time. The protagonists of these movies—much like the character of the private detective—were defined by an inability “to dwell comfortably anywhere” (Dimendberg 7). Aimless, violent, perpetually on the outside of every official institution, these were true antiheroes, seemingly just as prone to violence as to acts of integrity. The films would inevitably revolve around a male protagonist—bitter, jaded, and down on his luck—who would be seduced by a femme fatale with ulterior motives. She would betray him, and there would often be at least one fatality, if not a threat to the protagonist to give up and go home (wherever that might be). The story lines were usually complex and disorienting, with lots of flashbacks and plot twists, while the endings were rarely optimistic. The disorientation was enhanced visually, as well, with the use of techniques such as multiple reflections—rendering it difficult to determine which image was “real”—and shots through curved or frosted glass. A sense of claustrophobia or entrapment was a must, usually enhanced by the prison-bar-like shadows of window blinds and the frequent darkness lurking at the edge of every frame. It was often raining, and there was frequent use of voice-over.

Even though not all noir films contained private detectives—Double Indemnity features an insurance claims investigator, and Touch of Evil features both a Mexican drug enforcement official and some American police officers, for instance—others such as The Maltese Falcon (based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett), The Big Sleep (based on the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler), Murder, My Sweet (based on Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely and also featuring Philip Marlowe, only this time played by Dick Powell), and Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) helped to craft the iconic character. And all but The Maltese Falcon (which is set in San Francisco) and Touch of Evil (which is set on the Mexican-U.S. border) are set in Los Angeles.

Raymond Chandler wrote seven novels set in Los Angeles. All were turned into films, some more than once. Chandler also worked on the screenplays for Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946), and Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951). But the film that both defined the noir style and launched the character of the private detective was the first film adaptation of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Both the book and the film set up a stark contrast between the enormous mansion belonging to General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) up in the luxurious hills and the shadier parts of Los Angeles below, complete with gamblers, pornographers, nymphomaniacs, and illicit homosexual relationships. The story revolves around the general and his two daughters, Carmen (Martha Vickers) and Vivian (Bacall). The bookseller Arthur Geiger (Theodore von Eltz), a man who claims that Carmen owes him money, is blackmailing Sternwood. Sternwood hires private detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) to take care of the problem. Marlowe discovers that Geiger is actually running an illegal pornography operation out of the bookstore. At this point, the plot becomes notoriously complicated; additional bodies surface, someone gets poisoned, and other people are shot. Marlowe has more questions than answers when he discovers that Vivian is also being blackmailed and Vivian’s husband, Regan, mysteriously disappears. Vivian has gambling debts, although hers are owed to Eddie Mars (John Ridgely), and, unsurprisingly, attempts are made on Marlowe’s life. This complexity is common to these types of stories, in which the actual initial crime proves only a buoy marking the sordid depths just beneath.

Marlowe eventually realizes that nothing will ever really change and that the rich will never pay for their crimes. Whereas in the book Carmen suffers no penalty for her actions—including killing Regan and trying to kill Marlowe—the Production Code officials insisted that the film version provide more of a punishment for her sins, and Carmen is sent to an asylum or rehabilitation institution to be “cured.” General Sternwood, however, is told lies about the events in order to appease him. This lack of resolution or restitution is common to narratives in which the goal for the private eye is never to vanquish “the bad guys” but merely to maintain some form of stoic integrity, to protect those who need protecting—while wading through the sordid muck.

Told as a series of episodic scenes rather than one overarching narrative, The Big Sleep—both the film and the book—can be hard to follow. In fact, Chandler himself recounts a time when Hawks and Bogart “got into an argument as to whether one of the characters was murdered or committed suicide”: “They sent me a wire . . . and dammit I didn’t know either” (“Letter to Jamie Hamilton” 105). Chandler did not know because these “minor” details do not matter. The purpose of the detective narrative, as seen in The Big Sleep, is merely to present these episodic fragments; life is portrayed as a series of moments without an overarching narrative. It is the crime that becomes the impromptu organizational device, not only in The Big Sleep but in other detective narratives to follow. The crime provides an illusion of movement to a string of otherwise plotless moments, organizing those moments “into the formally satisfying arabesques of a puzzle unfolding,” writes Fredric Jameson, in his book Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. Jameson goes on to emphasize, however, that the puzzle is a mere distraction from the real content of these narratives: the setting (6). And the setting that would inevitably be linked to the iconic private detective is the city of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, as depicted by Chandler, is a city full of desire and deceit, where money, power, and ambition hold more ground than morality, law, or tradition, where bookstores conceal pornography and private mansions conceal murder. And it is the drive to penetrate the mask, to discover the truth behind the façade, to expose the secrets that would otherwise remain hidden that drives both the L.A. detective and the L.A. detective story. This is why both belong together.

LOS ANGELES

Unexpectedly, for a city known for sunshine and sprawl, noir was defined by Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was defined by noir. The real-life characteristics of Los Angeles—the endless winding roads, the sudden cliffs and breathtaking views, the waves beating against the shore, the rows of palm trees, the Hollywood glitterati with their sordid secrets, the Spanish-style architecture—became intertwined with the noir aesthetic. The urban form offered by Los Angeles is markedly different from the urban form of Manhattan. This allowed Los Angeles to become the ultimate example of a city sans center, a perfect setting for a protagonist who cannot find his way home. The aimless sprawl, the insular nature of specific neighborhoods, and the fundamental incomprehensibility of the city became repeated themes in film noir as well as in detective narratives—in film, television, and books.

Not only was the verticality of New York superseded by the horizontal nature of Los Angeles, the claustrophobia of Manhattan replaced by seemingly endless urban sprawl, but the jostling crowds of midtown were exchanged for the isolation of a car. Nowhere became as defined by the automobile as Los Angeles. In keeping with the Department of City Planning’s 1941 regional parkway model, which ordained the car as its centerpiece, the car became the pivot around which Los Angeles revolved. Representing a shifting U.S. economy, one that swapped a principally rural country with the highway, Los Angeles offered a visual manifestation of a faster, more streamlined way of life. The success of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, built between Los Angeles and Pasadena in 1940, encouraged the construction of a massive freeway network. (California was unique in insisting that highways be called “freeways,” despite just how “free” that highway might become at rush hour.) This network promised to alleviate growing congestion within the Los Angeles metropolitan area and to connect Los Angeles to outlying cities such as Whittier and Long Beach, as well as to improve rates of home ownership. Proximity to a city center was no longer as desirable as a house in the suburbs, and Los Angeles was desperate to demonstrate that this was the case. Construction on this freeway network began in the early 1950s and was mostly finished by the mid-1960s, shaping Los Angeles for decades to come.

Any sense of a central urban community was now replaced by freeway exits, pockets of internally defined areas that separated the larger city into isolated neighborhoods. As Norman M. Klein writes in his book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, “One literally passes through to arrive, but rarely stops. We are supposed to watch, or be watched, in the privacy of our vehicle” (85). This isolation was reinforced by the anonymity of transportation, people making lonely commutes in their pod-like automobiles. No matter how crowded the streets or freeways, Angelinos remained alone, albeit colored by the neighborhoods they traversed or failed to leave. Los Angeles became distinguished not only by the automobile but also by these seemingly different and distinct spaces that lived cheek by jowl, a characteristic integral to the development of the L.A. private eye.

Los Angeles had more problems than traffic and isolation, however. Despite the efforts of the lush landscaping to conceal the fact, Los Angeles is a desert, and this means that it is a city under constant pressure to maintain a water supply. By 1904, the population of Los Angeles had increased from eleven thousand in 1880 to above two hundred thousand. Water—or the lack thereof—became a pressing concern. William Mulholland, superintendent of a private water company that was purchased by the city in 1904, found water 250 miles north, on the edge of the High Sierras, in Owens Valley (Eaton 24). The city of Los Angeles began buying up more and more land and water rights from Owens Valley, even filing suit in 1924 against some of the valley’s farmers for “wrongfully diverting” the water into their own irrigation ditches. Despite continued protests from Owens Valley residents, Mulholland built the Los Angeles Aqueduct to divert water from the Owens Valley region to the growing metropolis. The farmers’ response was to blow up a spillway gate with dynamite. Over the next three years, “at least seven more blasts damaged the northern end of the aqueduct” (Malnic). City employees would be held at gunpoint and chased out of Owens Valley when they were recognized. Eventually the residents of Owens Valley gave up, leaving Los Angeles to pretend it had always had its own water supply. This particular narrative formed the basis for the classic L.A. private eye film Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974).

There was more to shatter the illusion of paradise by the sea. During the 1920s, the population of Los Angeles continued to rise dramatically as a result of the discovery of oil. However, as thousands made their way west, dreaming of financial success and lucrative possibility, they were met, instead, with high prices and low salaries. The lack of employment led to tensions between new residents, established residents, and ethnic minorities who were seen as competition for a limited number of jobs. While conflicts between white military personnel and police officers on the one hand and Latino and African Americans on the other was nothing new, these tensions were fueled further by poor working conditions for Mexicans, persistently inflammatory and derogatory language by the press, and building developments that displaced Hispanic neighborhoods.

In June 1943, eleven sailors in downtown Los Angeles got into an altercation with a group of Mexican youth. This altercation prompted thousands of military personnel, off-duty police, and civilians to beat up and arrest more than five hundred Latino and African American youth. Referred to as the “Zoot Suit Riots,” in response to the suits popular among these youth, the racial tensions had nothing to do with apparel. However, those who wore the flashy suits—often accessorized with porkpie hats and watch chains—were frequently assumed to be dangerous criminals and were described as such by the media. Rioting spread throughout Los Angeles, with taxi drivers fuelling the fire by offering servicemen free rides to rioting areas. Military personnel and civilians from around Southern California streamed toward Los Angeles, eager to beat up Mexicans, Filipinos, and African Americans. The riots only subsided when U.S. military personnel were confined to their base, Los Angeles declared off-limits (Andrews). This was only a temporary fix, however, as the racial tensions would simmer for decades to come.

With the city’s combination of “anything goes” mentality and get-rich-quick aspirations, Los Angeles also became an example of sordid living and corruption. As David Fine describes in his book Imagining Los Angeles, L.A. was “a big city layered on a Wild West frontier town,” and behind the scenes was “a corrupt municipal government.” Fine describes gangsters and gamblers, drug addicts and prostitutes, all part of a web of collusion and scandal that rocked not only the big local industries—oil and movies—but plenty of others along the way. Everything was for sale, including police protection (118). Mob activity in Los Angeles began around the start of the century, and the mob was often involved with anything involving trucks or truckers in Hollywood. It was also common for mobsters, moguls, and movie stars to commingle, crossing paths at “nightclubs, bars, clandestine gambling establishments, and private parties,” their interactions often including alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling, and blackmail (Lewis 52). In 1950, the Los Angeles Police Department seized a personal phone book belonging to Mickey Cohen, an American gangster who had moved to Los Angeles to work under “Bugsy” Siegel. Contact information for a variety of Hollywood celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Joan Collins, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall, was included in this book, revealing just how commonplace interactions had become between ruthless gangers and movie stars (Lewis 69, 208n27).

The discovery of Elizabeth Short’s body in January 1947 helped mark the shift from a Hollywood where everything seemed possible to a Hollywood that was brutal and unforgiving. The still-unsolved murder of Short—an aspiring actress who had moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress and who came to be known posth...