© 2008 William Ahearn
Anyone who is a fan of true crime in the US will sooner or later come across the case known as The Black Dahlia. It’s a classic unsolved murder from the 1940s that seemed – looking back – to be a precursor of the horror that would become a road map for other killers of the 20th century. At the same time, it harked back to the Servant Girl Annihilator and Jack the Ripper from times long past in that the killer was never caught or named.
What made the killing of Elizabeth Short – the woman who would posthumously be called The Black Dahlia – different from other serial murders is that Elizabeth Short was a singleton, a lone victim. In her case, it seemed to be personal. Since no similar killings occurred (and the Los Angeles Police Department chased numerous leads to other jurisdictions in hopes of finding a faceless fiend to blame it on), the mystery deepened and centered not on a psychotic killer with a profile or identifiable propensity for murdering brunettes or killing when the moon was full or disfiguring the available and disposable prostitutes of a metropolis, but on the victim herself. Elizabeth Short – a working class girl from Massachusetts – wasn’t an enigma as much as she was a cipher. She was just another dreamy-eyed girl who got off a bus in Hollywood and hoped for the best.
In many ways she’s been continually victimized by those who wish to find some meaning in her death and truth be told I think James Ellroy is pissing on her grave for the sake of a bad novel in The Black Dahlia. Bringing myth to the horrendous or the mundane is the meat and potatoes of a working novelist and I’m the first to raise a glass and wish them well when they illuminate some small, unseen truth that might serve as revelation for the human condition. For the most part, I only write about writers where I find something valuable or at least interesting in their work and in the Books To Film section I either love the book or the movie. In the case of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia and Brain De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia,” both are dreadful works and as much as I would love to blame De Palma, I find the underlying material to be so cynically manipulative, so over-wrought, so rooted in such knee-jerk clichés as to be enraging or laughable depending on my mood.
What Ellroy has constructed in The Black Dahlia is a story about two police officers that become obsessed with The Black Dahlia case. Both are boxers and both are in love with the same woman – who was once involved with a criminal serving time for a bank robbery – but the policeman who lives with the woman has a chaste relationship with her and the other doesn’t want a chaste relationship and for the life of me I can’t figure out why any of the characters are doing what they are doing or why they are obsessed with The Black Dahlia case, even though I can understand my one-time obsession with it.
And under all of that, Ellroy has Elizabeth Short in lesbian relationships, starring in porn movies and working as a prostitute. None of that is true or at least is supported by the known facts of the true life case. The Black Dahlia is very titillating and trashy and geared to the lowest common denominator of crime fiction readers but the purpose it serves – and I’m willing to sacrifice anybody’s good name for a good story – is rendered so off-handedly as to be offensive at best.
Maybe it’s because all of this talk of Short as a prostitute and appearing in porn films (that would lead to the crime scene) had already been covered in a far better novel some thirty years ago. John Gregory Dunne’s 1977 True Confessions covered the Virgin Tramp murder – an obvious allusion to the Black Dahlia case – in a structure alarmingly similar to the Ellroy book. Instead of the Fire and Ice rock ’em, sock ‘em, robo-cops of The Black Dahlia, True Confessions was the story of two brothers, one an up-and-coming priest and the other a homicide detective and how the murder would change their relationship. It also made for a much better film that was released in 1981 with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall.
The resolution of True Confessions is far more satisfying than the ending of The Black Dahlia – which seems to have been “inspired” by the film “A Study In Terror” where Sherlock Holmes finds the upper classes littered with demented royals and then decides to protect the family by not naming the now deceased killer as the Ripper. In one scene in The Black Dahlia, the hero cop is following the false lesbian who has a need to pick up servicemen and have affairs with them in cheap hotels. In one cheap hotel – in a bedroom on the ground floor with a window held open by a bad paint job – she confesses for no apparent reason to a perfect stranger that she killed the hero cop’s partner in Mexico and the hero cop overhears the conversation. This “confession” is then leveraged to force a confession out of the fake lesbian’s mother who admits she killed Elizabeth Short with the deranged uncle who is really the father of the mother’s children. They cut the victim’s face to remind them of an annoying painting.
This is Agatha Christie on crack. For once – with the exception of “Carlito’s Way” – I find myself defending Brian DePalma. Yes, “The Black Dahlia” is a senseless, wretched film. What else could it be? The characters make no sense, the plot is lifted from a golden age mystery, and the solution, such as it is, is so hackneyed and trite as to be the stuff of satire. Oh, yeah, the hero gets the girl who is so complicated by plot devices that we never get a clear picture of her.
This is one of the rare cases where the movie is as bad as the book. The only positive thing to say is that it sent me back to re-acquaint myself with the still intriguing true crime case of The Black Dahlia.