When director Brian De Palma is brought up in film discussions, much is made of his work prior to 2000, and anything past that year is completely ignored, if not disparaged. Indeed, many seem to believe that De Palma lost his touch in the new millennium, if critical reaction to his output is any indication. This is a tragic dismissal of some of the most interesting work to come from one of America’s greatest living directors. While any of the movies De Palma has made in this time are worth discussing, few are as intriguing or as captivating as The Black Dahlia (De Palma, 2006).
Released in 2006 to a critical thrashing, The Black Dahlia is a mixture of historical fiction, film noir, and speculative murder mystery. It is also an incredible throwback to B-picture mystery films of the 1940s and 1950s, told with high camp and masterful direction. De Palma communicates his intent to the audience within the first few seconds of the film: it opens on Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) preparing for a boxing match, in cinematography drenched in molten amber colors reminiscent of Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1945). A trumpet plays a mysterious tune on the soundtrack, and as Bucky narrates an inner monologue the film segues into a flashback. With this opening the audience is invited into a world of pure, unfiltered noir conventions and tropes dialed to eleven.
The actors in the film all contribute to the off-kilter, campy throwback tone the film achieves by utilizing bizarre performances that all call back to techniques and styles long out of fashion. Among the highlights are Aaron Eckheart delivering his lines in a rapid fire, screwball mode, Josh Hartnett channeling Tom Neal’s deadpan performance from Detour (Ulmer, 1945), and Fiona Shaw playing her part in a way that can only be described as “Norma Desmond on drugs.” None of the performances in this film are naturalistic in any way. However, considering how over the top the film is, and how it is trying so hard to emulate styles and elements that haven’t been in vogue since 1960, it works. The only person who doesn’t seem to get the idea is Hillary Swank – which is a huge problem, unfortunately, since she’s playing the film’s femme fatale. Her performance is stiff and uncertain, and just doesn’t fit with everyone else. It is the one truly bad part of the film on a performance level. One bad performance, however, does not ruin the effect every other actor’s work has on the viewer.
Even the film’s complicated narrative helps it feel like a relic from the past. Supposedly, an hour of the movie was cut at the last second – at least, this is what James Ellroy, author of the novel the film is based on, claims after having seen a workprint. While the film certainly does feel like it is missing some pieces, I would argue this helps the film. After all, what film noir wouldn’t be complete without a twist-filled plot? For me, this complex storyline only made me more interested in the movie because it made the film wildly unpredictable. It is worth noting here that the film has something of a reputation for being confusing. If you ask me, this reputation is totally unfounded. There is a difference between convoluted and confusing. As twisty and complicated as its narrative may be, The Black Dahlia does give a viewer all the narrative pieces they would need in order to follow the plot. On top of this, no matter how complex the narrative may be, everything still makes sense at the end of the film – the driving mystery is solved, the villains are killed, and our hero finds love and a happy ending. Compared to truly confusing and weird movies like, say, Dennis Hopper’s unfairly maligned The Last Movie (Hopper, 1971), this film is completely straightforward.
While the acting, color palette, and screenplay all work to imitate old Hollywood style, one cannot say the same of De Palma’s direction. Instead of trying to emulate the direction of films from the 40s or 50s, he directs the film utilizing every trick and technique he learned up to that point in his career. The boxing scene that begins the film is a masterpiece of editing and composition, and is constructed in such a way as to where one can watch it without dialogue and still follow the plot. See, too, the extended long take that first reveals the body of the Dahlia: the camera starts on the street, then cranes up over a building to show a woman discovering the body in a field, follows her running to find help, continues by tracking a car, then a man on a bike, and finally circles around to two characters walking down a street and having a conversation before landing on the film’s protagonists sitting in a car. Or consider the scene where one of our heroes is killed in a hotel staircase, which is one of the best sequences of De Palma’s career. It is a stunning and tense use of light, shadow, slow motion, setup, and payoff. It features a character seemingly made of darkness flicking a bright knife out of nothing, a showstopping shot of two men falling to their brutal deaths on a fountain, and a heartbreaking subversion of the audience’s expectations that one of our heroes will make it up the stairs in time to save his friend, all achieved via the use of slow motion and scene geography.
The Black Dahlia is a visually spectacular tribute to old film noir. A deep love for the genre permeates every frame of the movie, with De Palma and Zsigmond perfectly recreating the feel of a lost B-movie from the fifties, but packed with more style and gore than you’d find in those films. It is an underrated effort from a master filmmaker, and I firmly believe it will be reevaluated with time.
Author Biography
Yaakov “Jacob” Smith is a student in the University of North Carolina’s Film Studies program. He aspires to be a movie director one day and hopes to continue his studies through graduate school. When he is not studying movies, he dabbles in photography and creative writing, and reads novels.
Film Details
The Black Dahlia (2006)
United States/France/Germany
Director Brian De Palma
Runtime 120 minutes
Blu-Ray
USA, 2010
Distributed by Universal Studios Home Entertainment (region 1)
