> 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.