Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles by by Jon Lewis (review)

The images evoked by marilyn monroe usually include the blonde bombshell scandalously standing above a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch or the sex icon provocatively biting her pinky nail. But the glitz and glamour most often represented by Monroe is a curated surface image, which Jon Lewis thoroughly investigates and deconstructs in Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles. While Monroe's tragic death is well remembered, Lewis demonstrates that her death, in the grand scheme of things, was just another example of a woman killed by the "real" Hollywood. The work for this project began in a course Lewis taught on noir, but the book moves well beyond the noir products produced by Hollywood to explore an industry in transition. Lewis presents a history of post–World War II Hollywood, both the geographic site and the "notional construct—built upon stories of the fallen, the stricken, the dismissed, discarded, and exiled."¹

This "alternative history" of a Hollywood entrenched in growing pains is divided into four chapters, organized largely thematically. The first of these begins with the murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia. For Lewis, Short as the Black Dahlia is "less a person than a character or construct . . . a metonymy for a generation of young women whose dreams were dashed on the streets of the city."² He effectively summarizes transformational industry events, such as the Paramount decision, before tracing the evolution of Los Angeles from purely a movie-company town to a city that attracted an array of urban subcultures. Whereas LA had once presented hope for social and economic transcendence, Lewis details the dozens of unsolved cases involving murdered women and provides a picture of the horrific underworld that emerged due to rapid growth and increased population.

Chapter 2 focuses on Mob activity in Hollywood, including the Mob's involvement in the organization of the movie industry's labor force, in addition to the ways in which the postwar cult of celebrity normalized and romanticized the interactions between movie people and gangsters. Lewis details how, as the studio system ended, the path to fame rested on "meeting the right people at the right places."³ Unfortunately for many of the women who punctuate this book, the "right" people were not always the safest or kindest. He focuses on Jean Spangler as a case study, a movie extra who went missing after kissing her daughter goodbye to spend "an evening at the bars and nightclubs drinking, meeting men, and hopefully making connections."⁴ Her story, unfortunately, was not a unique one. The dynamics at play between industry personnel and the Mob lead nicely into chapter 3, in which Lewis moves to the role and influence of the gossip columnists of the day.

Beginning with Hedda Hopper's cameo in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), in this third chapter Lewis explores the impact and power of gossip columnists, including Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Walter Winchell. As the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its investigations, the gossip columnists "inserted themselves into this ideological struggle and in doing so made everyone's private politics public."⁵ The impact these columnists had cannot be underestimated. For example, after 1947, both Hopper and Parsons would have regular contact with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In this chapter Lewis contributes a unique perspective to the HUAC discussion. Acknowledging that most writings on the Blacklist focus on "two sets of players: martyrs and rats," he goes on to talk about another category that is frequently left out of the discussion: "film-industry professionals in-between these two poles . . . folks who pursued their careers without making or facing accusations of un-American conduct."⁶ To this end, he utilizes Frank Sinatra to explore a figure in the middle of these two poles. While Sinatra was not free of involvement, he was neither a martyr nor a rat...