This sparkling adaptation of crime master James Ellroy’s pulp fiction novel touches on countless pieces of old Tinseltown lore: the Robert Mitchum marijuana bust, a supposed brothel of movie star lookalikes, and a notorious level of LAPD collusion with studio bosses and mobsters.
The setting is early 1950s Los Angeles, a growing young city eager to run with the big boys. The orange groves still stretch for miles, but the nightclubs and the mansions and the movie stars are moving in fast. And curdling beneath the surface is a tawdry underworld of small-time vice and big-time corruption.
LAPD Detective Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a dapper cop who is also the technical advisor for a television show called Badge of Honor (that looks a lot like Dragnet).
Vincennes is also up for a little minor graft, usually paid by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), a sleazy reporter for trash-peddling Hush-Hush magazine (which looks a lot like the old 1950s Confidential magazine), whose information is always “off the record, on the QT and very hush-hush”.
Detective Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a little on the psychotic side when it comes to crimes against women. White is more than willing to accommodate the department’s relaxed ethics and will work over any man he finds mistreating a woman.
And finally, there’s Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), the boy scout of the LAPD – a straight arrow in rimless glasses and an ambitious careerist who wants to do the right thing as long as it benefits him politically.
His captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell, who was the kindly farmer in Babe) – a father figure who runs his ship with common sense and quiet force – helpfully explains that an officer must be prepared to lie, cheat and steal – all in the name, of course, of being sure the guilty go to jail.
None of the three detectives is all good or all bad. Each one is flawed, but capable of rising to the occasion when needed.
The three cops are each trying in their own way to get to the truth behind a brutal mass murder in the Nite Owl coffee shop and to work out where millionaire pornographer Pierce Patchett (David Straithairn) and a blonde Veronica Lake-lookalike hooker named Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) fit in.
Patchett runs a high-class call girl operation in which aspiring young actresses are given plastic surgery to make them resemble movie stars.
Looking to avoid stale mimicry, director Curtis Hanson asked the cast to study a host of films starring Sterling Hayden and Humphrey Bogart. The aim was for the actors to inhabit the physicality and mood of those films rather than to blindly copycat.
The plot is labyrinthine, but the twists are always clear because the characters are so sharply drawn, and Hanson and his co-writer, Brian Helgeland, pull all the strands together. Along the way, there’s an unlikely alliance between two cops who begin as enemies.
One of the best scenes takes place in the Formosa Cafe, a restaurant much frequented in the 1940s by unlikely boothfellows. Cops turn up to question Johnny Stompanato (Paolo Seganti), a hood who may know something about the killings. His date gives them some lip.
“A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker,” one of them tells her. But Jack Vincennes knows better: “She is Lana Turner!”, he says with vast amusement.
Jack Vincennes
Kevin Spacey Wendell ‘Bud’ White
Russell Crowe Edmund ‘Ed’ Exley
Guy Pearce Captain Dudley Smith
James Cromwell Morehouse Pierce Patchett
David Strathairn Lynn Bracken
Kim Basinger Sid Hudgens
Danny DeVito Officer Richard (Dick) Stensland
Graham Beckel Matt Reynolds
Simon Baker Brett Chase
Matt McCoy Mickey Cohen
Paul Guilfoyle DA Ellis Loew
Ron Rifkin Johnny Stompanato
Paolo Seganti Karen
Symba Smith Bobby
Bob Clendenin Susan Lefferts
Amber Smith Leland ‘Buzz’ Meeks
Darrell Sandeen Tammy Jordan
Shawnee Free Jones Officer Michael Breuning
Tomas Arana Officer William Carlisle
Michael McCleery Mrs Lefferts
Gwenda Deacon Sugar Ray Collins
Jeremiah Birkett Louis Fontaine
Salim Grant Ty Jones
Kareem Washington Inez Soto
Marisol Padilla Sanchez Sylvester Fitch
Jeff Sanders Roland Navarette
Steve Lambert Lana Turner
Brenda Bakke
Director
Curtis Hanson
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None of the three detectives is all good or all bad. Each one is flawed, but capable of rising to the occasion when needed.
