Deee Essay Research Paper LA Confidential1997Directed by

Deee Essay, Research Paper

L.A. Confidential

1997.

Directed by Curtis Hanson.

With

Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes,

Russell Crowe as Bud White,

Guy Pearce as Ed Exley,

Kim Basinger as Lynn Bracken,

James Cromwell as Dudley Smith,

David Strathairn as Pierce Patchett,

Danny DeVito as Sid Hudgeons,

Graham Beckel as Dick Stensland,

Simon Baker Denny as Matt Reynolds,

Gene Wolande as Ray Pinker,

Matt McCoy as Brett Chase,

John Mahon as Police Chief,

Paul Guilfoyle as Mickey Cohen,

Ron Rifkin as D.A. Ellis Loew,

Paolo Seganti as Johnny Stompanato,

Amber Smith as Susan Lefferts,

Gwenda Deacon as Mrs. Lefferts.

Screenplay by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson.

From the book by by James Ellroy.

L.A. Confidential

has won a

Reviews and Reflections Award

for Outstanding Picture.

Curtis Hanson has won

as Outstanding Director.

Kim Basinger has won

as Outstanding Supporting Actress.

Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson have won

for Outstanding Adapted Screenplay.

Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and Kevin Spacey have won

for Excellence as Actors.

L.A. Confidential starts as an expos., told by scandal magazine columnist Sid Hudgeons. It’s stylized, and also stylish, to the point of being a gently funny self-parody. It’s so determinedly immersed in 50’s Los Angeles that we’re always partly enjoying the time travel to this tasty milieu and partly laughing at the film and ourselves for our extravagance.

At the same time, L.A. Confidential is something much more serious, a post-morality play in shades of dark and light. The novel on which it is based is the third volume in James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, quintessentially expressing the author’s vision, at once bleak and promising. It is a journey to the end of a night of near total destruction. The only thing that’s left afterwards is what the characters are able, of themselves, to salvage. But what they are able to salvage is something of value, a life maybe better than the daydream that they started out to achieve.

Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson have earnestly taken on the job of adapting James Ellroy’s book. It is inevitable that they have simplified it. A book can have a more intricate plot than a film because it is experienced under different circumstances: the reader is able to stretch it out over several days and, when puzzled, can turn the pages back. Even for a novel, the plot of Ellroy’s book is complex, piling up layer upon layer of incident and explanation to build a sense of total apocalypse.

My impression of the strategy Helgeland and Hanson have used is that they have translated the book to a film by stepping its tone back one notch to match more closely to that of the book’s predecessor, The Big Nowhere, the less extreme second volume of Ellroy’s Quartet. Thematically, the main characters undergo instructively different versions of the transformation undergone by Buzz Meeks in that book. The film is still a good dose of genuine Ellroy. Although there are very many changes in plot details (including a complete change in the character of Buzz Meeks) and some of these are drastic, there is no betrayal or sanitizing. I am very impressed. Ellroy himself is on record as saying that he thought the book was “movie-adaptation-proof” until Helgeland and Hanson proved him wrong.

Following a brief introduction, the action takes place within a relatively short period and deals with the LAPD’s investigation of the “Nite Owl Killings.” The plot seems complex as it unfolds chronologically within that period, but becomes quite neat by the film’s end when we have learned all the antecedent events. Comparatively, the book covers a much longer period, Christmas Eve 1950 to April 1958, and although we are afterwards able to explain its plot as well, it is less straightforward. In the book, the explanations turn out to involve the partly coincidental superimposition of the activities of several independent groups of characters.

Sergeant Jack Vincennes, “The Big V,” celebrity cop, advisor to the Badge of Honor television show, has a neat scam going with Sid Hudgeons. Sid leaks information about lawbreakers to Jack, along with some cash. Then Jack lets Sid be present, with photographers, at the resulting arrest. These arrests help Jack’s career and his celebrity status. Correspondingly, they help the circulation of Sid’s magazine Hush Hush.

Early in the picture, Sid and Jack wreck the career of a young movie actor, Matt Reynolds, by arresting him and his girlfriend for felony possession of marijuana. Later, Sid finds out that D.A. Ellis Loew is a homo. Sid needs a bit player to lure Loew into bed so that Jack can arrest him. Matt Reynolds, so airheaded that after his 6-month jolt in the pen he doesn’t even recognize Jack VIncennes as the man who sent him there, agrees to be the patsy. Sid and Jack assure him that if he does well they can help him get a part on Badge of Honor. As Matt goes off to introduce himself to Loew, Sid remarks to Jack about Matt being stupid enough to think that Badge of Honor would even look at him “after he’s been Hush Hush cover boy twice in on

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