Each of the different strands that make up film noir would all come together in Los Angeles, a town, that had grown at a spectacular rate; a little thanks to a phenomenon known as petroleum, and then there was the aviation industry, that didn't maim much either and oh yes - what about the pictures! In the year 1900, Los Angeles' population was clocked in at just over one-hundred thousand, only four decades later that figure expanded to nearly two million. The boom years of the early twentieth century were accompanied by a mythos of L.A. - and Southern California generally - as a healthy, sun-laden land of opportunity. The reality was a far cry different, what with the forceful land grabbers and the other old chestnut - the class war. Spurred on by the Depression, and L.A.'s increasingly polarized politics,the collective works of author Nathaniel West and the pulp novels of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett would help cultivate the anti-myth of Southern California - a seemingly misanthropic vision that provided one of the main ingredients of film noir. Whether writing on the subjects of a disgruntled middle class or the criminal underclass, these were writers who made little bones about the capitalism that was spiraling well out of control.
This critique of Los Angeles as the symbol of a degenerate business culture was often emboldened in it's translation onto film, simply by virtue of fact that several key noir writers and directors either leaned fervently toward the far left or were European emigres. The latter did indubitably bring their 'old world' perspective to the table of American life and were particularly scathing about what they estimated to be a less than culturally refined L.A., with its suburban sprawl and its spurious urbanity. Paradoxically, these imported academes were - whether they hailed from Europe or New York for that matter - were there solely in spite of Los Angeles institutions (the California Institute of Technology as well as Hollywood) who in turn were the ones signing their paychecks.
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| I found my thrill ....on Bunker Hill |
And there is yet deeper irony in the fact that studio bosses soon were hip to the trick of the commercial potential of noir material (even though they weren't calling it that at the time), even permitting such self-lacerating films in the likes of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Vincente Minelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Suffice to say, not all noir of the early years functions as criticism. The studio system insured that a wide range of writers and directors of different tenets and ideologies might be allocated a crime film. It is also true that many films noir were set in other atmospheric cities, such as New York and San Francisco. But Los Angeles is the paradigm for the dream city that inevitably morphs into a Brechtian nightmare, and it has continued to fire the imaginations of various filmmakers to this very day.
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| Hardboiled on the Hudson too. |