The Blue Dahlia

The Blue Dahlia is a Raymond Chandler mystery without Philip Marlowe, unfolding in a corner of tawdry Los Angeles away from the watchful gaze of that tarnished knight. And that makes it kind of awesome! Athens and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the copout of an ending. Alan Ladd is heroic flyer Johnny Morrison, returning home from the war to find an unfaithful wife who, worse, confesses that she killed their son while driving drunk. Johnny decides his wife isn’t worth killing, but somebody else thinks she is. The only people who believe he’s innocent of the murder are war buddies William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont (!) and Veronica Lake, the estranged wife of nightclub owner Howard da Silva, Johnny’s wife’s lover and Johnny’s main suspect in her murder.

The Blue Dahlia came out in 1946, the same year as The Best Years of Our Lives, and it’s the Chandleresque dark mirror to that classic. Like Dana Andrews in Best Years, Ladd’s Johnny also comes home to a crumbling marriage; and like multiple amputee Harold Russell, William Bendix’s Buzz comes back an irrevocably changed man—in Buzz’s case, with a plate in his head that leaves him prone to fits of rage, particularly when there’s “monkey music” (that crazy big-band swing!) playing on the jukebox. Athens and I are reminded, as with others of the movies we watch here at the Athens Film Festival, that the war and its aftermath is always a subtext of film noir’s morally askew, fatalistic, violent vision of the world.

I mentioned a copout, and without giving away too much, I’ll just observe that The Blue Dahlia goes to absurd lengths to exonerate poor, demented Buzz of the murder, despite clearly heading in that direction. Somewhere I read that Chandler had intended him to be the killer but that it was decided that a disabled returning vet couldn’t have done it. (By the 1960s, of course, the crazy-returning-vet-killer would be a cliché.) Instead, the murder has more venal, but in context slightly less plausible, origins than the madness of war.

Still and all, The Blue Dahlia is one of the highlights of the AFF so far, with nice chemistry between Ladd and the doll-like Veronica Lake, great villainous turns from da Silva and Don Costello, and pungent LA atmosphere. Athens and I would be remiss not to mention Will Wright, Scroogey old Ben Weaver from The Andy Griffith Show’s Christmas episode, who’s been in several other AFF features: All the King’s Men, as the crooked sheriff and Willie Stark’s first political rival, and Act of Violence, another fine thriller that engages the moral morass of the postwar era, in which he has a small (but memorable) part as “Boat Rental Man at Redwood Lake.” The Blue Dahlia has to be one of the standouts of his movie career, as corrupt, passive-aggressive house detective “Dad” Newell. House detectives—this is such a hard-boiled concept to me. With all due respect to the honest, hard-working house detectives out there, what possible function could this person have other than to cover up crimes that occur in a hotel, and then blackmail the guests involved?