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“The rough beast that is film noir . . . slouched toward Los Angeles to be born,” Alain Silver and James Ursini declare in L.A. Noir: The City as Character.1 Los Angeles provided “the quintessential dramatic ground of film noir,”“the essential elements in the invocation of the noir mood,” not because it was darker, meaner, or more hellish than other urban areas but because of its chameleon nature: its ability to combine, as Raymond Chandler himself encapsulated, “mean streets” with “a special brand of sunshine,” natural fecundity with a “wet emptiness,” a “beatific Our Lady Queen of Angels” with the city as femme fatale—indeed, “the most alluring femme fatale imaginable.”2 The dialectic of opposites—light/dark, good/evil, reality/nightmare—which distinguishes film noir from the gardenvariety gangster or crime film, found its apotheosis in this “bright and guilty place.”3 Historical developments in the film industry, Los Angeles, and the world at large primed the pump for L.A. noir as well. In Hollywood a brief loosening of movie censorship in the early 1930s, before the founding of the Production Code Administration in 1934, sanctioned a cycle of gangster and “fallen-woman” films that foreshadowed the classical noir cycle of the 1940s and 1950s. In Los Angeles as a whole, “something happened in the 1930s,” Kevin Starr suggests. “A sense of brooding evil just beneath the movie-tone surface of Southern California life . . . rushed in upon the American consciousness . . . a feeling of moral depravity and unending doom . . . a mood of excess and disaster, strange and sinister, like flowers rotting from too much sunshine, pervaded the city.”4 If the “rush” began in the 1930s, the pall had begun to spread some years before. The oil-boom-fueled Great Los Angeles Bubble of the 1920s, whose bursting in 1927 preceded the Wall Street Crash, blew the boosters’ cover and epitomized the “excess and disaster” of the Roaring Twenties. Two high-profile murder cases of the early 1930s, connected to the oil swindle, capped the city’s decade-long descent into moral turpitude, violence, and death. And Hollywood was embroiled in both the financial and homicidal crimes. Besides its ties to 105 c h a p t e r 5  Bright and Guilty Place 106 L.A. Noir the city’s interlocking business, political, and underworld elites, the overblown oil venture, concocted by Canadian huckster C. C. Julian, counted among its investors some of Hollywood’s crème de la crème, including director Cecil B. DeMille, producer David O. Selznick, and mogul Louis B. Mayer. The two main murder victims—top banker Motley Flint (“a Santa Claus to Los Angeles”) and mob kingpin Charlie Crawford (L.A.’s Al Capone)—also combined starring roles in the oil scandal with supporting roles in Hollywood.5 Flint, as president of Los Angeles’s First National Bank, had organized the Cinema Finance Company in 1917, one of the chief financial backers of Hollywood at a time when Wall Street firms remained at arm’s length from the Jewishdominated industry. Flint later formed “a close personal relationship with Jack Warner,” helping Warner’s then-struggling studio avert bankruptcy in 1920.6 The trial at which Flint was shot point-blank by a disgruntled small-time investor, Frank Keaton, revolved around a suit brought against First National Bank by then RKO chief David Selznick. The Hollywood connection for Crawford, whose casinos and bordellos were favored haunts of the rich and famous, was largely posthumous. His shooting by “movie-star-handsome” Dave Clark, a rising-star prosecutor, “would inspire pulp fiction,”“replace L.A.’s reckless optimism with a new cynicism,” and provide true-crime underpinning for the hard-boiled stories that hard-wired film noir.7 Far from belying its sunny-side-up aspect, the gangster -tinged scandals of the 1920s and 1930s, like those of the movie stars, only heightened the larger city’s all-or-nothing image as a place where sunshine and klieg lights both illuminated and blinded, and the high life cloaked a netherworld of corruption and murder. Turbulent international events also played into a noir sensibility. Though the artistic benefit in no way compensates for the cost in human lives and suffering, the Nazi terror proved an unexpected boon for American cinema, and film noir in particular. The treasure trove of European artists and intellectuals who escaped to Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s included an extraordinary cache of émigré filmmakers. Unlike the aforementioned...

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