Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #6

...Here, take his hat... Pick up

his crutches back on the tracks.

The murder that inspired Cain's novel

had occurred fifteen years earlier...

...in Queen's Village, New York,

...but the crime seemed to fit the rootlessness and moral

corruption of the southern California middle class.

Double Indemnity and the Cain

adaptations that followed it...

...convinced everyone that Los Angeles is

the world capital of adultery and murder.

"Okay, baby, that's it."

"What's the matter, aren't

you going to kiss me?"

"It's straight down the line, isn't it?"

"I love you, Walter."

"I love you, baby."

Nowhere else is evil so banal.

Double Indemnity evokes Los Angeles

without much location shooting,

...but each location is memorable:

The Glendale train station at night,

...a street corner identified

as Vermont and Franklin...

...although actually it's

Hollywood and Western,

...the exterior of

Jerry's Market on Melrose,

...and the Spanish Colonial Revival house that

plays the residence of Phyllis Dietrichson,

...her husband, and her step-daughter.

Neff's voice-over places this

house in the hills of Los Feliz,

...and that location seems right,

...although the actual house

is a few miles to the west,

...just above the north

end of Vine Street,

...close to Hollywoodland

where Cain had placed it.

They must have searched for a house that matched

this description as closely as possible:

It was built cock-eyed.

The garage was under the house,

...the first floor was over that,

...and the rest of it was spilled up the

hill anyway they could get it in.

Although all the interiors

were filmed on studio sets,

...Wilder stuck close to reality here,

...taking his inspiration from the

dramatic entry hall staircase.

He simply moved the living room from the left

side of the entry hall to the right side.

For Wilder, a consistent modernist,

...the phony historicism of the

architecture and interior decor...

...reflects the dishonesty of

the lives contained within.

But tastes have changed.

Now we all love those red-tile roofs

and that wrought iron grillwork...

...and would do anything

to preserve them.

So just as modernist architecture

connotes epicene villainy,

...the Spanish Colonial Revival

suggests petty bourgeois good taste.

It's the ideal home for a good-bad

call girl ripe for reform...

...or a vigilante hero out for revenge.

Genteel respectability is the

message in Mildred Pierce,

...Hollywood's second version

of a James M. Cain novel,

...in which the suburbs of Los

Angeles have a bit part.

"We lived on Corvallis Street,

where all the houses looked alike."

Ours was number eleven-forty-three.

It's an odd observation...

...since the houses we see

don't all look alike,

...but a typical criticism of Los Angeles.

If you don't like one thing,

...complain about its opposite as well.

The architecture is too eclectic,

...but it's also too uniform.

Once again, the drama ends in murder.

And so it will in The

Postman Always Rings Twice,

...the last novel in Cain's

southern California trilogy.

Hollywood filmed it twice,

...in 1946 and again in 1981.

Cain's novels were written in the thirties,

...and they reflect the fears

of a lower middle class...

...hit especially hard by the Depression.

Explicitly or implicitly,

...the mid-forties movie

adaptations are period films.

The contemporary postwar

world looked brighter.

"Daddy says, southern California is

the coming part of the country..."

...Dad dy says, six out of every ten

veterans will settle here after the war...

"...Daddy says..."

"Never mind about your daddy. Don't

you have any ideas of your own?"

"Well, for a returning Marine,

I've got some super ideas."

A new suburbia was created for

the vets back from the war.

They could look forward to a good job

in the booming aircraft industry,

...a detached house for every family,

...a trash incinerator in every backyard,

...and plenty of bathrooms

without toilets...

...at least for movie characters.

In movies, there were many

harbingers of a baby boom,

...yet these excessively cute kids

would become, in just a few years,

...the excessively troubled teenagers

of Rebel Without a Cause,

...the first teen noir.

"That's a fine way to behave."

"Well, you know who he takes after."

"You're tearing me apart!"

Director Nicholas Ray photographed

real locations around Los Angeles...

...to look like sets in a studio musical.

Musicals establish alternate worlds,

...and that is precisely

Ray's achievement.

The teenagers live in a world that is parallel

to the adult world of normality and stability,

...in a world they have

created for themselves...

...and that is almost

a parody of film noir.

Their world is more dangerous

than that of their parents...

...and more attractive.

"Hit your lights!"

It is also privileged in the film.

We see the adult world through their eyes.

But we have no other perspective on theirs.

The teenagers are able to

create their own separate world...

...only because of their easy

access to automobiles.

They were the first teenagers with cars,

...at least in the movies,

...and maybe that's why Rebel Without

a Cause seems so prophetic...

...and so evocative of Los Angeles.

More conventional noir films only

fitfully revealed the look of the city.

Those streets dark with

something more than night...

...were still more often than not

located on studio back lots.

Film noir generally shunned the

mean streets for the meaner sewers.

The real streets appear in Kiss Me Deadly,

...although this urban road movie...

...didn't announce itself as a

portrait of Los Angeles.

It's a private eye movie,

...a revisionist version

of Mickey Spillane...

...that tries to reverse his

hyperfascist version of McCarthyism...

...by giving Mike Hammer enough

rope to hang himself.

"My dear sir."

"Now tell me about the key."

"Just a minute, sir."

It's close to definitive as a portrait

of the city in the mid-fifties.

Kiss Me Deadly is a literalist film.

Mike Hammer has a real address:

10401 Wilshire Boulevard.

And when he pulls away from his

apartment building in his new Corvette,

...what we see is what was really there.

"My mustache, my father's mustache..."

"...Let's go to the freeway..."

"I want to see how this little bird flies."

Mike Hammer's journeys,

...all shot on location,

...reveal a city divided.

The rich...

...and the poor.

The old...

...and the new.

What was new then is still with us.

"This is Crestview

five-four-one-two-four..."

Mr. Hammer, whom you are calling,

is not available at present...

If you wish to leave

a record of your call,

"...please state your message

at the sound of the tone."

"Hello, Mike, just checking

to see if you got home...

Please call me when you..."

"Velda."

What was old has been destroyed.

Images of things that

aren't there any more...

...mean a lot to those of us

who live in Los Angeles,

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