L.A. Confidential

[Snarky Oracle!]

It's the general consensus that had 1997 not been the year of TITANIC (the biggest box office hit since GWTW and the beneficiary of two-studio block voting) L.A. CONFIDENTIAL would likely have taken home the Best Picture Oscar, instead of a consolation prize Academy Award for supporting actress going to Kim Basinger -- she's perfectly decent, by the way, but it doesn't seem an Oscar type of performance despite the fact that hooker roles tend to dominate the supporting actress category wins.

The films casts two Australian actors, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce -- both largely unknown in the States at the time -- as two very different crusading Los Angeles cops in the early-'50s investigating a grisly group murder in a local diner, the Night Owl.

Directed by Curtis Hanson from James Ellroy's unfilmably dense novel, there's Ron Rifkin, James Cromwell, Danny DeVito as a weasely tabloid reporter, David Strathairn, nubile Simon Baker, and Kevin Spacey as a publicity-happy cop who does double duty as a consultant on a DRAGNET-type TV series. And a Jerry Goldsmith score as effective as the one he composed for CHINATOWN.

The movie does a pleasing job of evoking 1953 L.A., or the way we enivision it might have been, the unsalvageably-corrupt reality lurking just below the shiny veneer.

My only real problem is the Lana Turner scene -- a far too famous Hollywood icon (and one who'd died barely a year before this movie was shot) for them to have hired an actress who looks absolutely nothing like Lana Turner to play her. Doesn't Tinseltown have those celebrity double agencies which loan out lookalikes for parties and security purposes??

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Maybe Richard Grieco could have stepped in as doomed Johnny Stompanato, a small role -- but Lana Turner could have been any well-chosen unknown model they could find with a similar face .. A voice-over actresses could do her lines in a Lana-esque manner.

 

[Crimson]

L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is one of my favorites -- Top 20 all-time favorites, even.

Agreed about Basinger. She's acceptable-good in the role, but it's kind of an actress proof part; any decent, beautiful blonde could have done just as well. On the other hand, I think, say, Michelle Pfieffer would have exceeded those low expectations. And in my imaginary, made in the era it was set film, I always cast Gloria Grahame which makes Basinger look downright shabby.

It's been a long time since I read it, but I recall that in the novel it was Crawford, not Turner, who the detectives encountered and who they mistook for a hooker.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

Perhaps it might have been easier to cast a Crawford (whose face was painted on anyway) than Lana Turner (the girl they cast looked nothing like Turner, which hurt the scene).

Both ladies killed a partner, allegedly, as befitting a true diva.

I say, circa 1997, cast Linda Gray as Crawford --- but no one would think of her for it.

 

[Oh!Carol Christmasson]

Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce

I watched this movie last night (well, early this morning) and even though Guy Pearce looked somewhat familiar in that typical clean-cut, square-jawed US military kind of way (or the perfect son-in-law with psycho tendencies) I couldn't really place him.
Glancing over his filmography I'm not sure I've seen him in anything else, and maybe that's why I kept thinking I was watching Mark Wahlberg.

But anyway.
I thought it was a very entertaining film with twists and turns, and while the "seedy underbelly of (whatever)" is often shown in a grittier way I thought it was a good decision not to remove the shine of sunny Los Angeles because the underworld isn't always literally underground. It made for a nice juxtaposition that was more about the knowing than the showing.
It seems that the more recent Hollywood productions have lost this art, and gritty realism needs to be hammered home with an unnatural bleak blue-ish colour palette.
And that really doesn't compare to the grittiness of 60s and 70s cinema because it those films it simply captures the zeitgeist which made it almost impossible to do it otherwise. Even the happiest, eye-popping 70s film has some "grit" in it.

And in my imaginary, made in the era it was set film

Could have been, but "neo-" is an art in itself. It's a big part of the challenge, and fun for the audience.

She's acceptable-good in the role, but it's kind of an actress proof part

You're probably right, but isn't it the result that counts?

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

When the movie was released in 1997, author James Ellroy was effusive in his praise of it, marveling at how Curtis Hanson managed to take his incredibly dense novel and achieve a coherent cinematic narrative out of it which captured the spirit and core threads of the book. And Ellroy maintained that praise for years after.

But when Hanson died 20 years later, Hanson changed his tune and said he thought the film was awful.

 

[Snarky Oracle!]