A Film Canon

The strongest of the Bendix-Ladd-Lake noirs, The Blue Dahlia nevertheless falls short of capturing screenwriter Raymond Chandler's distinctive voice, partly as a result of the imposed ending, which transforms what could have been a darker counterpoint to The Best Years Of Our Lives into a validation of the armed services that sits poorly with the claustrophobic, pessmistic atmosphere. Yet even this atmosphere is undercut by the relatively one-dimensional performances of Ladd and Lake, both of whom tend to subsume charisma into physical attractiveness, and so fail to embody their mileu in any memorable way. That said, Chandler's panoramic sensibilities still make for an evocative portrait of (mainly nocturnal) L.A., albeit in a decisively lower middle-class register, rather than the ambiguous cusp between classes that his detectives tend to inhabit. Similarly, the banter is ingenious, if not always well delivered, while the femme fatale (Doris Dowling) condenses Chandler's poetic misogyny into a powerful vision of hysterical, unnatural evil that brims with sexual unavailability, making Lake's playful detachment pale by comparison. As this might suggest, the most memorable moments tend to remain oblique to the central romance, texturing it with a sexual dysfunction that is ultimately identified with the cityscape itself - epitomised by Bendix's show-stealing portrayal of a disturbed veteran, for whom legal and sexual oblivion would, in the original conclusion, have been entirely fused.