AT LONG LAST L.A. NOIRE

The time has come, once again, to speak of video games. We're getting to the point where the title “Movies By Bowes” (™) is a bit of a catchall, covering TV and video games as well, as audiovisual entertainment is spreading its wings, and the formerly disrespected media of television and video games are getting their due as art forms rather than reliquaries of mindless entertainment. As a sophisticated cineaste, I say come on in, y'all, the water's fine. Grab a cocktail at the floating bar.

L.A. Noire was released on the 17th of May. I was delayed a week in buying it due to being away from my trusty PS3, but bought it immediately upon my return home and made up for lost time. I'd been looking forward to the release of L.A. Noire for years: in 2004, before Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had even come out, I heard about L.A. Noire and went “Holy fuck, a film noir video game? Tits! In a fully-reproduced 1940s Los Angeles? Bigger tits!” Then one thing led to another and the existing technology was insufficient to realize the designers' ambitions and San Andreas came out with a pretty-fucking-awesome replication of not only Los Angeles but all of California (well, Narnia California) and San Andreas was tits and then they were waiting for next-gen consoles to have hardware with enough swagger and then a few more years went by and all of a sudden “Holy fuck, L.A. Noire exists and is coming out!”

In honor of another long-awaited, just-released work, Terry Malick's Tree of Life (about which I may write more at some point if I'm feeling pretentious enough), let's flash way the fuck back for an origin story: back in the 80s when I was a much shorter Bowes, I played multiple NESs to death and even managed to be a fairly accomplished PC gamer even though I didn't own a computer (I'm still really fucking pissed that I can't play Bandit Kings of Ancient China, Police Quest, or Leisure Suit Larry on my so-called “modern” computer).

Around junior high school channel 9 started showing The Maltese Falcon nine zillion times a week, and I started watching it every single time it came on. That led to me reading the book, then seeing “oh shit another Humphrey Bogart movie, The Big Sleep, let's see how this one is,” then reading that book, and the next thing you know I was the only 13 year old in the known universe who was a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler fan, and I had progressed to James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, the heads of all the five families, and watched all the movies multiple times each. Then, a few years later, when I was in high school, came James Ellroy.

For those of you who don't know, an explanation, and for those of you who do, an exaltation: James Ellroy is fucking crazy. He's also unfathomably intelligent and possessed of what some might call focus and others, running the opposite direction, call obsession. After several years of writing relatively conventional above-average cop novels, Ellroy broke through to the level of Serious American Novelist with his so-called “L.A. Quartet”: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. These four novels amount to a metafictional secret history of post-war Los Angeles, containing many of the element of classic noir but with greater verisimilitude (many real people appear as characters, too) and—seemingly paradoxically—a breathtakingly epic grandeur. Ellroy's post-WWII Los Angeles is both painstakingly specific and universally American.

It's Ellroy more than classic noir cinema and fiction that influences L.A. Noire. The double entendre of the title makes its intent clear: it alludes to both Los Angeles and noir but literally just means “the black” in French. It's about darkness as specifically found in post-war Los Angeles and the crime fiction set there, but also universally, carrying the idea of moral ambiguity beyond the classically defined parameters of noir. Thus, the writing, plot, graphics, and gameplay attempt a greater naturalism than normally found in noir (a decidedly non-naturalistic form).

And here's where L.A. Noire's ambitions as a game come to the fore: it uses new technology to create human faces that transcend the stereotypically hollow-eyed emotionally blank ones that populate games. Specifically, this comes into play in the interrogation scenes, where as the cop, the player has to figure out whether the interviewee is telling the truth, holding back, or outright lying. Most of the time the difference between “holding back” and “lying” is hard to parse, but in those instances, the player has the advantage of all the collected evidence to date in the given case, so a quick perusal of same should yield the right answer. At worst, it yields some silent-movie-villain broad acting, but silent-movie-villain broad acting is fun. At best, it makes the interrogation scenes feel real.

The same ratio between ambition and realization is maintained throughout the game. L.A. Noire has its problems—the gameplay is a little repetitive, and I for one didn't even notice there was an overarching narrative until a little over halfway into the game—but overall its flaws are outweighed by its successes. For one, it looks fucking incredible. The people look like people, and really well-dressed people at that. The large-ish navigable chunk of Los Angeles at the player's disposal not only looks exactly like photographs of the period, it looks and feels like a living city. Sure, the traffic is laughably light for Los Angeles (which had its first massive traffic jam approximately five minutes after the invention of the automobile), and the people on the street one encounters outside of cutscenes seem to only know two sentences, one of which is “Hey, isn't that the cop from the papers?” But these are minor distractions. The awesome outweighs the problematic, throughout.

Once it becomes clear that there's one story unifying the whole thing, that story is a real grabber. I'm about to spoil the fuck out of it, so I'll put this here first:




You play for the vast majority of the game as policeman Cole Phelps, a decorated WWII veteran with a wife and kids. Cole's a Stanford grad prone to quoting Shakespeare; this erudition comes in handy later when a clue involving Percy Shelley leads to the discovery of a murderer. Starting as a patrolman (which basically serves as an introduction to the gameplay mechanics), Cole quickly rises up the ranks, first to plainclothes traffic duty, then quickly to homicide. Cole's cases in traffic serve to give him—and the player—experience with police work, and also to reveal his ambition as a character.

Upon being promoted to Homicide, Cole and his drunk I-don't-give-a-fuck fat guy partner (who, for obvious reasons, I loved) stumble upon what initially appear to be Black Dahlia copycat killings. The murdered women all kind of sort of resemble Elizabeth Short, and in each instance a very neat trail of evidence leads to a killer with a plausible motive. After about four of these, you start noticing a couple things: one, the evidence against the killers, no matter how solid, is circumstantial. Two, the narrative asides provided by newspapers one can find at various places throughout the game relate directly to Cole, his WWII tour, and the men he served with. Three, one dude is killing all the women and framing patsies each time.

Far-fetched? Sure. But that's noir for you. A little melodrama never hurt anyone except civilians. It turns out that all these Black Dahlia copycat killings are being done by the fucking Dahlia perp. This plot arc concludes with the Dahlia killer leading Cole and the fat man on a grand tour of Los Angeles landmarks, many of which are booby-trapped in some way—my personal favorites were when you lay waste to the chandelier in the Hall of Records, that apparently they repair in like five minutes and never bust your balls about it at all, and a straight-up no-bullshit labyrinth I totally had to cheat to get through because, well, put it this way, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when they talk about Marcus getting lost in his own museum, I was like, “finally, my people are represented in cinema”—and which ultimately lead you to a confrontation with the killer, who in classic movie psycho tradition is all on this “I'm smarter than the cops, so much so that I can give them clues that will lead them right to me because there's no way they're smart enough to figure this out.” And this is why bad guys are fucking stupid: if you're capable of committing a series of murders and successfully framing dudes for each one, why the hell would you lead a trail of breadcrumbs for the cops to nosh? Also, I mean, come on dude, if you really were an erudite urbane man of culture you could pick someone less banal than Shelley to use for your poetry clues. Fuck's wrong with Gerard Manley Hopkins, fancypants?

Anyway, once the killer—whom you've encountered a few murders ago as a bartender—announces his master plan, you chase him through the spooky catacombs of this abandoned church and you have to light his ass up before he blows you in half with his shotgun. Upon successfully sending the killer to the great freshman English class in the sky, Cole's Irish-accented superior officer (h/t Dudley Smith) shows up to tell the detectives, who are expecting commendations up the yin-yang and celebrity status and all that jazz, that the dead guy has massive political connections (just like the real Black Dahlia killer, who was never officially identified, and Jack the Ripper, among others; of course, non-civilians know that Jack the Ripper did the Black Dahlia, but that's a matter for after James Lock & Co. send me my new tinfoil hat). And because the dead guy was Earl Warren's nephew or whatever, the case is buried, all the framed perps are going to quietly get off on technicalities, and Cole is getting a lateral transfer to Administrative Vice.

Ellroy fans know what Ad Vice means: dope, hookers, and lots and lots of jazz. Cole and his sleazy, heavily-connected new partner investigate some OD deaths caused by too-pure morphine, being sold out of a popcorn stand called Black Caesar's (one of my favorite touches in the game is that the stand's sign totally fucking says SPQR, which is fucking awesome, and that's that). A bit of investigating, and proper adherence to the Law of Evil White Guys In Suits (“Behind every crime is a white man waiting for his cut.” —Chris Tucker) reveals the connection between the parallel narrative we've been piecing together through the newspapers and Cole's cases. It looks like the dudes in his old unit stole a fuckton of military-issue morphine and tried to sell it to Mickey Cohen, only Mickey's dipshit brother-in-law fucked everything up. Cole finds all this out as he succumbs to temptation and shtups the mysterious German jazz singer he's been crushing on since almost the beginning of the game. Of course, once Cole's investigation leads him too close to the actual evil white guys in suits, his extramarital cocksmanship is plastered all over the newspapers, and his ass is booted right the fuck out of Ad Vice.

In disgrace, Cole is shunted over to arson investigation, where he's partnered with the game's narrator (voiced by the one and only Keith Szarabajka, whom the anointed remember from being awesome as Mickey on The Equalizer, speaking of great TV shows from the 80s) and quickly stumbles onto a massive eminent domain scheme involving many of the richest and most powerful Evil White Guys In Suits Los Angeles has to offer, which is also tied into the drug business in which the guys in Cole's old unit are involved. It's a criminal conspiracy to make James Ellroy proud, dwarfing even the admittedly epic one concocted by Robert Towne in Chinatown. Shit, there are even shades of Judge Doom's “fuck the world and everyone in it” scheme in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The parallel narrative gets really interesting around this time, as we start seeing enough stuff from WWII to see that Cole didn't really do all that great a job and got his Silver Star under slightly false pretenses. And, on top of that, we see that supporting player Jack Kelso, who came up with Cole through OCS before flunking out, rises to sergeant via field commission and actually fucking totally owns and is awesome and a paragon of stubborn rectitude and all kinds of interesting shit.

Right when you realize Kelso is actually a good guy and Cole is kind of a dick, the game shifts and you start playing as Kelso. Cole sends his German jazz singer girlfriend—with whom he's now living since his wife 86'd him post-scandal—to go be Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and convince Kelso to be Fred MacMurray, only without the whole getting him to kill people thing. Kelso does a little digging into the case and soon realizes “Holy fucking shit, evil white guys in suits are having people killed so they can make millions of dollars building a freeway!” and throws in with the good Fräulein, and Cole, though he's fucking pissed at Cole for not having the stones to just be like “Hey, Jack, help me take on the evil white guys.”

Kelso and Cole team up to take on the evil white guys, and there's a massive action climax where the evil white guys kidnap the German girlfriend (and oh hell yes a love triangle has formed; this story puts both m's in melodrama) and, because it's really dramatic and Rockstar Games has developed a massive boner for downer endings over the last few years (cases in point: Grand Theft Auto IV where you either have your cousin or your girlfriend die, and Red Dead Redemption where the protagonist lets the evil white guys in suits kill him so his family can escape), Cole sacrifices himself to save Kelso and the German girlfriend. The whole last mission, it's been raining like hell (because it's noir and subtlety is for limpdicks) and Cole drowns in a flooded tunnel after lifting Kelso to safety. He's given a modest funeral, but when the sleazy Ad Vice partner (who's up to his neck in the conspiracy) starts eulogizing smarmily, the German girlfriend calls him out and dramatically stomps out, leaving Kelso to muse on the inscrutability of man. Then, post-credits, there's a cinematic cutscene that clarifies the WWII morphine conspiracy and Kelso's non-role in the whole affair, tying the whole plot up neatly.

Once the totality of it becomes apparent, the story's a knockout. It invites replays, during which a lot more things will make sense. The first time through, things only really start to cohere in retrospect, which is a function of the narrative being a little clunky and opaque at first. Like I said earlier, I didn't even realize the game had a story beyond the individual cases until way late; I don't think it even fully dawned on me until Cole was in Ad Vice, and that was way over halfway through. Needless to say, that's a problem. If the game's going to have a story, it'd be nice to let the player in on it, especially when it's as interesting as this one. The cutscenes are all gorgeously composed and edited, and well-acted; those new-school facial expressions add a lot.

The gameplay is of lesser concern to me that the visuals and sound (which is stunning; the music score is great, but the effects, editing and mixing are just terrific), and just as well, because it's a little awkward in places. In any given crime scene, there are a number of clues to be found, and these can be investigated by pressing a button on the controller, which doesn't always respond unless Cole or Kelso is standing in just the right spot. And the interrogations, with their “truth/doubt/lie” trichotomy, don't always lend themselves to the nuance one might like as the player; not to mention anyone who's read L.A. Confidential and remembers the way Ed Exley went to town on motherfuckers can't help but be like, “this is all I get to do?” in places. It must be said, though, that in each of these cases, for every moment where the game reminds you of its limitations, there are several others where you're like, “Yeah, fuck you man, YOU'RE LYING! I CAN PUT YOU AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, SUNSHINE, NOW UNLESS YOU WANT TO HUFF GAS AT QUENTIN I SUGGEST YOU GIVE ME SOME FUCKING ANSWERS!” Cuz, ya know, it's damn easy to get caught up in this world.

And that's what L.A. Noire succeeds, in solid A minus fashion, in doing: creating a world. It's PG-13 James Ellroy (well, with the violence, bad language, and nudity, it's objectively a fairly hard R, but Ellroy sexually violates his murder victims with wolverine teeth, okay? A couple “motherfuckers” is The Muppet Show compared to Ellroy), which is to say it's a great big epic that casts a powerful spell. Considering that I waited seven years for this game, the fact that it exceeded my expectations was a truly pleasant surprise. I'll certainly be replaying this one a lot, even if to just throw it on to hang out in the 40s for a bit. A time when men were men, cars were awesome, and thirty pedestrians in a row say “Hey, isn't that the cop from the papers?”

BOOK TO FILM: L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

Adapting a book into a screenplay is a tricky enterprise. Do you basically transcribe the novel with a few trims, or do you write your own script with a couple occasional nods to the original source material? You have a choice of two subplots, one needs cutting: which one do you cut? Does that cut affect the story as a whole? Will that cut inspire the novel’s pre-existing fan base to say nasty things about your movie on the Internet? How seriously do you have to take the novel’s pre-existing fan base? It’s enough to turn John Wayne into Woody Allen.

Even if the novel in question is, luckily, one without a legion of basement-dwelling fanboys (of any gender), you still face the first couple challenges listed above. Few novels have presented as daunting a challenge as L.A. Confidential. James Ellroy’s 1990 crime saga is an epic in both size and scope, featuring almost a dozen interweaving plot threads, with nonpareil disturbing graphic violence, and a number of events and characters that you need to have read Ellroy’s previous The Big Nowhere (not to mention The Black Dahlia and Clandestine) to fully comprehend. Fortunately, director Curtis Hanson said to himself, “Hmm, a 500 page novel with a bunch of shit I can’t film without being arrested, three main protagonists instead of the industry standard one, and a plot so convoluted Raymond Chandler just shuddered in his grave . . . sure, fuck it, let’s make a movie.”

It helped that he was a fan of Ellroy’s work and thus personally invested in making a proper job of it. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland, also a fan of Ellroy’s, had been lobbying for the job since before he was famous enough to even get a meeting with the studio, and did the first few drafts of the script for free. Ellroy himself was like, “Holy shit, somebody’s trying to film that one? I want to meet these guys, they’re as crazy as I am.” Hanson and Helgeland’s script impressed Ellroy, who has since repeatedly gone on record as saying that the cinematic L.A. Confidential is in the spirit of its literary ancestor.

That’s especially impressive considering how different the two are. Because making a two hour, fifteen minute movie out of such a massive novel is, to put it mildly, a bit tough, a few changes had to be made:

--A number of cool-sounding character names from the book (Buzz Meeks, Deuce Perkins) were applied to different characters in the movie.
--Inez Soto, the girl the “innocent” Nite Owl Massacre suspects were pimping out and gang-raping instead of murdering everyone at the Nite Owl is a major character in the book, and eventually the lover of both Ed Exley and Bud White (two of the three main protagonists), but in the movie appears in only one scene.
--The third main protagonist, Jack Vincennes, is a technical advisor for a Dragnet-like TV show in both the book and movie, but in the book he has a whole backstory that was cut involving a drug-addled shootout wherein he accidentally killed two tourists, which led to his obsession with prosecuting narcotics offenses, earning him the nickname “Trashcan Jack” by tossing jazz legend Charlie Parker into one during a possession arrest. I always loved the nickname “Trashcan Jack,” not in the least because it led to lines like “Trash could write a good quickie,” referring to the report Jack files after busting the Nite Owl suspects.
--Ed Exley’s father is alive in the book, and is the contractor who builds a thinly fictionalized version of Disneyland (where Inez Soto eventually goes to work), but in the movie Exley’s father is merged with his brother, a policeman who was shot by a purse-snatcher in the line of duty, inspiring Exley to invent the name “Rollo Tamasi” as a catch-all description for “the guy who got away.”
--The book spans the years 1951 to 1958, while the movie takes place over a few months in ’53.
--Bud White’s investigation into a serial killer of prostitutes is completely cut.
--The actual Nite Owl killers are different in the book and the movie, although the mastermind behind them is the same guy.
--(MAJOR SPOILER) Dudley Smith doesn’t get killed in the book.

However, some things change, and some things stay the same. To wit:

(1) Bud White will fuck you up.

Oh you’d better believe it. Here’s an example of the kind of reasons Curtis Hanson managed to make a good—coherent would have been impressive enough—movie out of L.A. Confidential: instead of going for a recognizable American actor with box office pull to play Bud White, Hanson said, “I want the best actor for the part.” By about the middle of his first scene, Russell Crowe became a recognizable actor with box office pull in America. Not only inhabiting the character of Bud White, a not-terribly-cerebral cop with a violent streak a mile wide who fiercely defends and avenges abused women, Russell makes it impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part. And if you even look at a woman funny, Bud White will put his foot so far up your ass his wingtip will chip your teeth.

(2) Captain Dudley Liam Smith for the Nite Owl.

Mickey Cohen: “Not even Hitler is capable of such things. Who could be so brainy and so ruthless?”
Bud White: “Dudley Smith.”
Mickey Cohen:“Oh, Jesus Christ. Him I could believe . . .”

The Irish-accented, charismatic, charming, and terrifyingly corrupt Dudley Smith first appears in a minor role in Ellroy’s first novel, Clandestine. He doesn’t appear in Ellroy’s next period piece, The Black Dahlia, but he’s back and playing a lot bigger part in The Big Nowhere, Ellroy’s Red Scare in Hollywood/Zoot Suit Riot/”psycho killer running around chomping people with dentures made out of wolverine teeth” book; Dudley commits a murder during the Zoot Suit Riot that has repercussions on the larger plot of the novel, and he bodyguards a massive heroin deal between Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna that gets ripped off by reluctant tragic hero Buzz Meeks. This leads us to L.A. Confidential, which opens with Dudley leading a posse that kills Meeks and takes the heroin back.

L.A. Confidential sees Dudley trying to take over organized crime in Los Angeles with Mickey Cohen in prison. A meeting involving a scheme to distribute illicit pornography at the Nite Owl coffee shop ends with three gunmen in Dudley’s employ murdering everyone in the place. Dudley then uses his borderline supernatural pull within the LAPD to manipulate the thrust of the investigation, and if not for Ed Exley being the one man in the whole department who’s as smart and ruthless as Dudley, he probably would have gotten completely away with it, instead of the mere temporary détente at the conclusion of L.A. Confidential.

In White Jazz, the last book in the series, the Exley/Dudley end game plays out. It takes Dave Klein (think a more intelligent Bud White . . . it’s okay to be scared), the book’s narrator, to take Dudley down, and even then he can’t kill him. Dudley Smith lives out his days semi-lucid, missing one eye, charming the nurses in his hospital, and in his coherent moments telling stories about the days when men were men.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, Dudley Smith is one of the greatest villains in the history of literature. When I first heard there was going to be a movie of L.A. Confidential, I absolutely could not think who could play Dudley. There was something unearthly about Dudley’s villainy, something that made it impossible to imagine a mortal actor portraying him with anything remotely approaching success. But Curtis Hanson, in another one of his brilliantly inspired choices, cast James Cromwell.

Wise casting director say: when in doubt, cast one of the best character actors of his generation. Not only is James Cromwell a terrific actor, the fact that he’s six-foot-seven made for a terrific visual dynamic wherein his Dudley—a little older and more outwardly frail than he appears in the books—is enough taller than everyone else in the movie that he is always the superior in every interaction, just like Dudley Smith in the book. And with that one, tiny, possibly unintentional (though Curtis Hanson is smart enough it might have been totally on purpose) touch, movie Dudley lives up to book Dudley.

(On a sad, spoilery note, the fact that Exley shotguns Dudley in the back at the end of the movie means we can never have a movie version of White Jazz that’s worth a shit. Joe Carnahan was working on an adaptation that he wrote with his brother where Exley and Dudley had different names, but without the blood feud between the two developed over the course of L.A. Confidential the dynamic has nothing whatsoever motivating it . . . oh, well. It was almost worth it to have L.A. Confidential be that good, and they did justify it by having Exley finally punish “the guy who gets away with it,” avenging his father.)

(3) With the exception of Kim Basinger, the whole movie is perfectly cast.

And she’s very well cast. The fact that she’s about 20 years older than her character is in the book lends her a bit of world-weary gravitas that not many younger actresses would have been able to pull off.

We already talked about why Russell was so awesome. Guy Pearce is Ed Exley: the fastidiousness, the movie-long journey growing into his physical presence, the intelligence, the hidden ruthlessness and ambition.









Kevin Spacey looks like he’s barely lifting a finger as “Don’t Call Me Trashcan, That Subplot Was Cut” Jack Vincennes, but that’s only because he’s doing such a terrific job of portraying a man who labors so hard to evince effortless cool. When the consequences of Jack’s actions finally hit him a ways into the movie, Spacey blasts the screen with Jack’s existential confusion and despair, before redeeming himself in death by springing a booby trap for the treacherous Dudley, telling him the name of Exley’s boogeyman Rollo Tamasi. The scene when Dudley fucks up and mentions that name to Exley made me clench my fist and say “Nicely done, Trashcan,” because, I’m sorry, he’ll always be Trashcan Jack to me.

At some point in this blog, I’ll go into greater detail about why David Straithairn is God, but for our purposes here suffice to say that as high-end pimp/pornographer Pierce Patchett he’s both a) completely different from the way Patchett is in the book and b) better. I’ve never seen David Straithairn in anything where he didn’t absolutely fucking rule, but as an intelligent, debonair bad guy he might be at his absolute best. I say might, because he’s great at everything, but he knocked me on my ass as Patchett, someone else I couldn’t cast in my head before seeing the movie.

(4) Cinematically, form and content are one harmonious whole.

Hanson resisted the temptation to go too over-the-top with noir cinematics, instead choosing, with DP Dante Spinotti, to light more naturalistically, but due to Hanson’s (and production designer Jeannine Oppewall’s) attention to period detail, the whole picture feels like a noir picture from the 50s (In a Lonely Place and/or Kiss Me Deadly in color). Even the framing and deep focus (i.e. the awesome shot when Bud White first shows up at Patchett’s house, and Patchett’s lining up a golf shot with Bud on the balcony over his shoulder about 20 feet away) are straight up 50s. Sirk, Minnelli, Siegel, and Nick Ray would smile.


L.A. Confidential, unfortunately, got steamrolled by Titanic at the ’97 Oscars, which is partly why it’s been on my mind of late, since Jim Cameron’s latest might very well steamroll The Hurt Locker this year. But Oscars aren’t everything. L.A. Confidential is a top 3 decade, Titanic “didn’t suck.” L.A. Confidential wins style points for, on so many levels, pulling off something so brutally fucking difficult and making it look effortless. Most importantly, though, it satisfied the rabid fanboys, which in this case means me. Cranky internet shitheads are tough to please.