L.A. Confidential

Today, ladies and germs, I'm going to do a combined movie and book review, much like I did for The Black Dahlia a while back. A fitting association, I might add, because today's review is going to be L.A. Confidential, the third installment in the L.A. Quartet series of novels, of which The Black Dahlia is the first entry (L.A. Confidential is the third).

Set in the early 1950s against the persona of a glamorous and glitzy Los Angeles and Hollywood, L.A. Confidential essentially tells the story of how corrupt and duplicitous life was underneath the veneer of Hollywood glamour. This motif gets illustrated right from the opening credits, where we're treated to the voiceover of Sid Hudgens, a scandal/tabloid reporter for Hush-Hush Magazine (played by Danny DeVito), who points out all the clever marketing techniques that portray Los Angeles as the perfect city for the perfect family. (And where else can you see swimmers bathing in a pool filled with oranges?) But underneath the surface, L.A. is ruled by the ironclad mob fist of Mickey Cohen, at least until his arrest for income tax evasion. So with crime in the city now out of control, all is not well in paradise.

Russell Crowe plays Bud White, a hotheaded, bulky cop who hunts down woman-beaters. In just his first scene, he and his partner Dick Stensland are parked outside someone's house while Bud observes a fight brewing between a husband and wife. Bud naturally intervenes, beating the living hell out of the husband and helping the wife find refuge. From there we move to cool Hollywood gladhandler Jack Vincennes, played by Kevin Spacey in a sort of Dean Martin-esque portrayal. Jack is a police consultant on the TV show Dragnet Badge of Honor, and in the meantime gives Hush-Hush writer Sid Hudgens insider tips about Hollywood scandal, always for a $50 fee. And lastly we have Guy Pearce portraying Ed Exley, an opportunistic, politically-minded, rookie cop who has weird ideas about justice, and won't think twice about ratting out other officers in the name of justice (and his own ambitions).

Two major events happen early in the story to set the stage. The first is a major jailhouse beating of prisoners on Christmas Eve, labeled by the press as "Bloody Christmas." In an attempt to quell public outrage against the incident (not to mention preserve the niceties of Los Angeles P.R.), the mayor and D.A.'s office quickly step in and ask several police officers to testify before the grand jury against designated scapegoats in the Bloody Christmas affair. Ed Exley is the only one to testify, so as to further the cause of justice and give him a big promotion. In the process, though, he earns the wrath of many other officers—not the least of whom is Bud White and Dick Stensland, the two designated scapegoats.

The second major event is a late-night shooting at the Nite Owl coffee shop, where every patron is shot to death, along with the entire cooking staff, and left on display in the men's room. It appears to just be a robbery at first, but one of the dead is Dick Stensland, which prompts Bud White to wonder if there's more to this shooting than what's on the surface. And as the investigation into the Nite Owl progresses, a lot of old skeletons are unearthed, and a lot of shady characters come to the forefront:

• Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn), a real-estate developer who also runs a business on the side, one where he runs call-girls who are surgically-altered to resemble period actresses.
• Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger, who won an Oscar for her efforts), one such call-girl who's altered to resemble actress Veronica Lake, and who serves as the mysteriously seductive love interest for Bud White.
• Ellis Loew (Ron Rifkin), the slimy district attorney who has his own ambitions and skeletons in the closet.
• And last but not least, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell in a pitch-perfect portrayal), the larger-than-life police captain who, along with Bud White, runs a mob unwelcome wagon at a nearby abandoned motel for any would-be thugs looking to take over Mickey Cohen's rackets. It's Dudley Smith who's truly the center of the story, though, as the question continually arises about which side of the law this guy is truly on.

Set to a perfectly-pitched '50s soundtrack, with dead-on-target dialogue to reflect the times, L.A. Confidential is actually a very densely layered, enormously complicated story where ethics are questioned and morals are redefined. My one complaint about the film is that, by the end, the audience is practically spoon-fed the solution rather than given the chance to figure it out—though this spoon-feeding is almost necessary, given the enormity of the story. That's not to say it's unfulfilling, because by the end, you're left very satisfied with this epic tale of blackmailing, scandal, and corruption set against '50s Hollywood idealism. And in both the movie and the novel, I loved how real-life figures were interwoven into the actual story. Mickey Cohen was actually a real-life gangster in the 1950s, as was his bodyguard Johnny Stompanato. (And I loved the scene in the movie where Exley and Vincennes stumble upon Lana Turner.)

I recently read the James Ellroy novel upon which the movie was based, and let me tell you, that was an enormous story! Far more broader and epic than the movie, I'm amazed that it translated as well as it did to the big screen. But having said that, I'm puzzled by one thing: why this won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, because the movie took a great many liberties with the story in its big-screen adaptation—far more than I thought warranted an Oscar. The book, you see, took place across the span of 5-8 years, and featured many more characters and storylines than the movie allowed. A few major breaks from the book, just off the top of my head, are as follows:

• Buzz Meeks was only featured in the opening of the novel but had a far greater role in the previous Ellroy novel, The Big Nowhere. And it wasn't his body found under Mrs. Lefferts' house in the book. That was a man named Duke Cathcart.
• In the book, Dick Stensland didn't die at the Nite Owl, but instead someone impersonating the aforementioned Duke Cathcart. In the book, Dick Stensland died in the gas chamber because he robbed a liquor store after being thrown off the force (I think there was more to it than that, but I can't remember).
• In the book, Ed Exley's father was a central character, so the "Rollo Tomasi" story was created for the movie. But along with Ed Exley's father was a family friend named Raymond Dieterling, who clearly was supposed to be Walt Disney because he'd just opened up a cartoon-themed amusement park called Dream-a-Dreamland, featuring characters like Moochie Mouse, Danny Duck, and Scooter Squirrel.
• While serving as Dudley Smith's muscle, Bud White also searched for a killer of young hookers, which tangentially involved a pornography angle that was briefly touched upon in the movie.
• Jack Vincennes wasn't the cool Dean Martin-type guy that Kevin Spacey portrayed. He still gave high-profile tips to Hush-Hush Magazine, but in the novel, he was a man who had many skeletons in the closet, and started to unravel under their weight.
• The overall tone of the book was much darker, more noir-like, whereas the movie was more stylistic and suave, more of a fun ride.
• The ending between the two was completely different, and Dudley Smith doesn't die in the novel. He goes on to appear in the next entry into the L.A. Quartet, White Jazz.

There are many more than the ones I've listed, but these are the biggies for right now. L.A. Confidential was up for several Oscars in 1998, only taking the aforementioned Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actress awards. It lost Best Picture to Titanic, which disappoints me, as I would have preferred this or Good Will Hunting to have taken Best Picture. But all the same, L.A. Confidential succeeds well as both book and movie, and I give both a score of 9.