Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 Book

In today's book world a tragedy is evolving among some reviewers in writing personalized hit pieces and classifying them under the heading of reviews. As the author of L.A. NOIR: NINE DARK VISIONS OF THE CITY OF ANGELS I was waiting for the reviewer called Suvi to make one salient comment on why, in being bestowed a one star review, misfired with reckless abandon repeatedly and hurled the comments with such seething bile.

One of the few specific examples given was over endless repetition when Suvi disgustedly proclaims getting tired of Burt Lancaster in my Chapter Two analysis of "Criss Cross" of being told that he was blonde and an acrobat. I could not recall any such tendency much less galling repetition being invoked. I decided to check out the claim, perusing the chapter not once but twice. Alas, I found that I had referred to a grand total of once.

The reviewer then moved into an irate and impatient collection of ad hominem attacks, two of the more ferocious being long and unfocused sections and repeated editorial errors. At McFarland I had a chief editor and additional editors assisting. Since the company sells large numbers of books to colleges and libraries and some books are chosen as textbooks the editors are ever careful about not letting such mistakes go unrecognized. "L.A. Noir" was not rampant with errors. Had it been rest assured that Suvi would have pounced on any specifics to buttress the reviewer's points about my alleged writing incompetence.

The angry zinger that Suvi saved for the end of her verbal assault against me related to the title of my book and concomitant assertion that it dealt with how the movies selected focused on the essence of the city being endowed with certain characteristics that made Los Angeles an ideal city to make films in the noir category. Suvi scoffingly berated me for failing to follow a promise related in the book's title.

Here is a brief breakdown and the correlation between film noir and Los Angeles. In Chapter One "The Big Sleep" depicts Los Angeles in an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel. The rootlessness and wild west element he observed made Los Angeles such an attractive city for him to write about. The element of lost souls converging from everywhere has been cited for the scene in which Humphrey Bogart encounters Dorothy Malone in a bookstore and as rain begins to fall she dramatically closes the store and turns her attention romantically toward him. A quick liaison was the order of the day between two people meeting for the first time before they have even become acquainted.

Chapter Two is set in Bunker Hill, the run down area just above downtown Los Angeles where Chandler spent his first night in Los Angeles. Detroit mobster Dan Duryea has come to prosper in a town where the citizenry not that many years earlier recalled Mayor Frank Shaw for joining rather than fighting criminal elements. A confused drifter who can't forget ex-wife Yvonne De Carlo comes home, gets a job driving an armored car, and is persuaded and thoroughly used by his ex-wife to participate in an armored car heist. Femme fatale De Carlo has hypnotized Burt Lancaster just as Ava Gardner had in "The Killers".

Chapter Three features Edmond O'Brien as an accountant from the small town of Banning near Palm Springs in "D.O.A.". He becomes a victim of circumstances and is given poison intended to kill him. An Armenian gang led by Luther Adler seeks to finish the job before O'Brien can gain his revenge. The size and scope of the city is microscopically examined in a long chase scene in which famous relics such as the Garden of Allah, the Laurel Arms where F. Scott Fitzgerald sustained his fatal heart attack, and the Arcade Building are all on display. The city's by evening is revealed in all its noir vastness.

"In a Lonely Place" finds Bogart as a brilliant screenwriter driven by his inner demons accentuated by the conflict he has encountered as an officer in World War Two. He is suspected of murder by one of the men who served him in World War Two, Frank Lovejoy, now a Beverly Hills Police detective. Neighbor Gloria Grahame becomes romantically involved but, observing Bogart's violent manner, wonders if he is a killer. Once more the rootlessness of people herded into the largesse of the endless city, the grist of Raymond Chandler drama, is on full dramatic display.

One can then move on to the climactic chapters of Eight and Nine for the capstone of the vicious marriage of rootlessness and a sprawling city with "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential" If these two explosive film noir masterpieces do not depict sprawling Los Angeles amid its violent nights and panoply of endless and frequently conflicted people caught in a whirlpool of activity then what does?
The latter film was even based on a novel written by James Ellroy, who was born and raised in the city and as a writer has traversed the land of Raymond Chandler with spirited vigor. Meanwhile "Chinatown " gives us definitive outsider Jack Nicholson seeking to rein in super rich sociopath John Huston after he falls in love with Faye Dunaway, a victim of father Huston's sexual abuse.

So Suvi sees no nexus between film noir and Los Angeles in this book. Could Suvi have read this book and paid any attention at all except for personal laments?