Black Dahlia, The (2006) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Drama | Mystery

Tagline: Inspired by the most notorious unsolved murder in California history.

From the acclaimed director of Scarface and the author of L.A. Confidential comes the spellbinding thriller The Black Dahlia. Two ambitious cops, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), investigate the shocking murder of an aspiring young starlet. With a corpse so mutilated that photos are kept from the public, the case becomes an obsession for the men, and their lives begin to unravel. Blanchard's relationship with his girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett Johansson), deteriorates, while Bleichert finds himself drawn to the enigmatic Madeleine (Hilary Swank), a wealthy woman with a dark and twisted connection to the victim.

Storyline: In 1946, the former boxers Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert and Lee Blanchard are policemen in Los Angeles. Lee has a good relationship with his chief and uses a box fight between them to promote the department and get a raise to the police force. They succeed and are promoted to homicide detectives, working together. Bucky becomes a close friend of Lee and his girlfriend Kay Lake, forming a triangle of love. When the corpse of the aspirant actress 'Elizabeth Short (I)' is found mutilated, Lee becomes obsessed to solve the case called by the press Black Dahlia. Meanwhile, Bucky's investigation leads him to a Madeleine Linscott, the daughter of a powerful and wealthy constructor that resembles the Black Dahlia. In an environment of corruption and lies, Bucky discloses hidden truths. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 15, 2010 Does the name Elizabeth Short mean anything to you? If not, what if you were asked about her nickname, The Black Dahlia? That soubriquet has become part and parcel of American crime lore and legend, ever since Short's mutilated body was found on a Los Angeles suburb street on a chilly January morning in 1947. The postwar era was in full swing, American confidence and consumerism was high, and though beginning its rather startling decline off the precipice created by television, the American film industry was still raking in piles of cash, as well as eager young potential starlets who wanted their share. Despite the horrors and ravages of World War II, this was still a time of rather startling innocence, looking back on it now from the vantage point of 60 plus years. And so when detectives found a body severed and disfigured, drained of its blood and with patently sexual overtones, it was the sort of shock and scandal which had not yet become daily fodder for now increasingly quaint newspapers. Though there's some argument as to how exactly Elizabeth ended up with the moniker The Black Dahlia post-mortem, it's obviously a play on the then popular film The Blue Dahlia, and it was such a striking nickname that today probably more people remember it than the poor murder victim's actual name.

Over the years the unsolved murder has been the source of wild speculation and several posited theories of solution. Books about the case, both fiction and nonfiction, have cluttered the shelves, and a variety of film and television adaptations, while relatively less ubiquitous, have also seen the light of day through the years. Probably no adaptation was more feverishly anticipated than the 2006 Brian De Palma film The Black Dahlia. Based on famed crimewriter James Ellroy's take on the case, this had the potential under De Palma's direction to be, perhaps, a companion piece to the celebrated film adaptation of another Ellroy classic, L.A. Confidential. If De Palma and scenarist Josh Friedman (not to mention Ellroy himself in his original novel) had stuck closer to the facts at hand, as nebulous as they may be, The Black Dahlia could have been a riveting time capsule of a nation slowly emerging from postwar euphoria into the realities, and madness, of everyday life, including the birth of the modern tabloid era, when sensationalism helped define the media. Instead, with a lurid and fictional series of subplots, Elizabeth Short gets, well, short shrifted, and the film, while marginally compelling, becomes just another look at the unseemly underbelly of cops, victims and killers.

There are a number of maddening things about The Black Dahlia. First and foremost is the fact that the source material is so rife with possibilities. Elizabeth Short is a near perfect glyph of an innocent degraded by the vagaries of Hollywood and the quixotic quest for fame and fortune. Though scores of people have been named as potential suspects, and Short's own activities in Hollywood have been the subject of rampant speculation, barely any of the actual facts, as few as may be definitively known, make it into this film. Adding insult to injury is the fascinating addendum that Ellroy himself has been obsessed with the Short murder since he was a young boy and his own mother was slain in what was probably a date rape gone horribly wrong. Shortly thereafter Ellroy was given an account of the Short murder and that killing and his mother's slaying became inextricably linked in his young mind. That could have made a really interesting film in and of itself. Alas, De Palma and Friedman opt instead for a B-movie version of L.A. Confidential, with cops with dubious motives and call girls with even more dubious reputations.

While Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart do fine, if largely unremarkable, work as the cops, the film is filled with some of the most patently outré supporting turns in recent memory, ones that push this film solidly over the cliff into unintendedly (at least we can hope) funny camp territory. Hilary Swank is here as a supposed femme fatale, Lauren Bacall style, a Daddy's girl in the most smarmy way imaginable, batting her eyes and trying with all her might (largely unsuccessfully, sadly) to be alluring and sinister. The most hyperbolic moments, however, surely belong squarely to the usually incredible Fiona Shaw, who here portrays a sort of Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte meets Baby Jane demented Southern belle in a performance that simply has to be seen to be believed (and not in a good way). Shaw's climactic scene toward the film's first (of several) denouements is surely one of the most weirdly comic moments in a supposedly grim crime film ever caught on celluloid.

De Palma often comes into considerable criticism, rightly or wrongly, for not having an original bone in his directorial body, choosing instead to ape everyone from Hitchcock to Antonioni. Here he seems to want to be L.A. Confidential's Curtis Hanson, mixed with an almost 50s exploitation hack director like Jack Arnold. The romance between Hartnett and co-star Scarlett Johansson is about the only thing in this film that has even the semblance of reality to it, certainly not a good sign for a film that is built around one of the most sensational, and sensationalized, murders of the 20th century. Elizabeth Short remains an icon of dreams gone awry, hideously so. The Black Dahlia never attains the nightmarish ambience it's aiming for. Instead it's like the odd waking dream you have when you suffer from a serious bout of indigestion.

The Black Dahlia simply strays too far from its actual source material (as opposed to the Ellroy adaptation) to be completely successful. Elizabeth Short's murder is an enduring mystery, but this film takes off on too many odd, and at times just completely bizarre, tangents to ever be anything other than a frankly humorous at times freak show.

[CSW] -2- The original novel was based on aspiring actress Elizabeth Short's unsolved grizzly murder in 1947. This fictionalized account threw in too many subplots that were both unnecessary and only added to the confusion. In the end it almost wasn't worth sorting out who did what and why. There was also too much character development that you only paid attention to because you didn't yet know that it was unimportant. All in all you were forced to watch the entire to-long movie because small parts of the real plot were hidden in parts that you would rather have slept through. This is one film that basically isn't worth the effort.
[V3.5-A4.0] VC-1 - No D-Box.

º º