To me obviously "The Rockford Files" in not a few of its eps venerates
the seminal noir tradition: it's a hip extension. For example, we've
already talked about Cannell doing this in such eps as "The Attractive
Nuisance" and "Paradise Cove." Here he's showing a little humorous
reverence as well as some parody that feels just right for the
changing times and audience.

I think it's interesting to look at, and compare to TRF, other kinds
of "neo noir."

Two that I've seen lately, much more contemporary than TRF but showing
the durability of noir, are "The Black Dahlia" and "Where The Truth
Lies." The critical reception for both was mixed, at best. The general
rap on DePalma's rendition of James Ellroy's "Dahlia" is that it falls
short of Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential" in its movie version. The
negatives on Atom Egoyan's "Where The Truth Lies" is that it is too
complex.

Actually, I thought "LA Confidential" was pretty obvious early on. You
just know that Hollywood's standard thrust in almost every film that
includes the police procedural aspect--"Dirty Harry," "Serpico,"
"Training Day," "Zodiac," "LA Confidential" etc. etc. etc. will have
the erstwhile police hero discover that the most villianous adversary
is not the criminal but the police buraucracy and that often that
bureaucracy is the collapsing spine of an even larger villany, City
Hall and municipal politics, and that the Thin Blue Line not only does
not protect and serve but is lazy, corrupt, etc. Being a cop IS the
problem for our hero out to defend society. Usually, in the last reel
(to borrow an older technological cliche) our hero leaves the force,
having become disillusioned but also having come of age. Same
storyline over and over. "LA Confidential" is transparent from the get
go; just a short-term matter of figuring out which cop is the bad guy.

Probably the predominant mainstream critical negativity toward "Truth"
and "Dahlia" is alone a strong recommendation for both movies. ("8
Millimeter" was generally attacked by mainstream critics as too mired
in sleaze, and I think it's a superb noirish update; Joel Schumacher
outdoes himself here, hearkening all the way back to classic stuff
like Dante in the general tried-and-true storyline of the Descent-Into-
Hell drama.) Mainstream critics are, in my view, mostly airheads,
compromised by their institutional constraints in which they'd better
damn well live if they expect to have access to Hollywood and hence
remain on their newspaper or magazine or cable TV payroll next week.
Take Leonard Maltlin. He's useless; his "Maltin" moments for DTV
movies are ridiculous: not wanting to end up working at Ace Hardware
("That's an insect repellant bulb, Mam"), Leonard, like cheerleader
Rex Reed of earlier fame, hasn't met a movie he hasn't liked in a long
time, certainly not for DTV. With Ebert missing, Roeper has had some
real turkeys on with him as co-hosts of late as they give thumbs up to
some real stinkers, like animated abominations which seem a plague
visited upon us these days as the studio suits strangle drama and
risky creativity out of Hollywood fare and pretarget as their audience
the people who can't tell Jaywalking Jay Leno who is buried in Grant's
tomb, this because the conglomerate monsters in the dark suits and
thin ties make life miserable for those comparatively lowly Hollywood
studio suits at the dreaded quarterly financial meetings where all the
conglomerate divisions are compared as to their bottom lines. "Mr.
Murdoch, sir, I'm sure our next quarter will be much more profitable."

"The Black Dahlia" finds DePalma telling too many stories
simultaneously, but the Linscott family is an unforgettable discovery
of noirish monstrosity, and Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Linscott, on camera
only a short time, is just superb as the chief monster, albeit one
who, like Chandler's murderess Carmen Sternwood, might well baffle
Freud and Darwin as to the morbid psychology--maybe inscrutable, not
merely mysterious--behind her nightmarish but frighteningly and
pathologically natural savagery. From the time you first see her,
everything else in the movie seems to fall into place, though this
works on you "subliminally" to begin with in the dinner scene at the
obligatory noir mansion in which she first appears, far, far into the
movie, which I think is a high achievement in noir, for she is hardly
to be unanticipated in the hallmark of great noir where you think upon
encountering her, "Yes, I might have expected her because of what's
already happened" or the equivalent "Well, she doesn't surprise me."
Like Noah Cross in "Chinatown" and the Ganolfini character in "8
Millimeter," she shows that often the most hardboiled detectives are
not quite prepared for the most awful monsters and attendant realism
they dramatize about the darker proclivities of Homo sapiens. I can't
think of anyone in all of DePalma nearly as frightening, and though
this movie is "uneven" (which often means it just takes awhile for the
whole thing to become unified in your mind which, if you are generous
in your retrospective, I will be), it has in the last 1/3 to 1/4 part
of the story what is to me one of the unforgettable and most powerful
dramatizations of noir you are ever likely to see. I don't think
you'll forget Mrs. Linscott any time soon; the terrible images and
scenes stay with you. DePalma superbly renders the look-and-feel, the
dark (literally, "black") atmospherics, of noir, like the night scenes
do in "Paradise Cove."

But I guess most of today's "neo noir" isn't partly humorous like TRF.
It tends instead to blend in more in these nastier times than a touch
of the horror film. "Dahlia,' as you probably know, is based on the
notorious, appalling Elizabeth Short murder in LA in the 1940s. (The
great film, "True Confessions," also incorporates this terrible murder
and offers its own speculative explanation for that case that remains
unsolved to this day and surely will never be resolved).

"Where The Truth Lies" is, to me, a superb Atom Egoyan film, also neo
noir. And what do you know? There's a ghoulish strain of the hip TRF
humor in it: the butler did it! There is a great parody of the
archetypal gangster, in a modern dark way not less than at least a
distant kin of the Manett et al. mobsters in TRF: I laughed at the
Egoydan prototypical gangster, and I knew I was supposed to. Kevin
Bacon (who gets off some great, morbidly funny lines), Colin Firth and
especially Lindsay Lohan are excellent, to my taste. It's a solid
storyline, based on a dark, noirish view of Martin and Lewis when they
were doing their twosome act. There's also a grim, cynical take on the
Cinderella myth that underlies so many chick films; Cinderella has
become very worldly and saavy; she doesn't need the fairy godmother
any longer.

I'd recommend these two movies for TRF fans.