Shining like a beacon over it all was Hollywood, the ultimate dream-maker, whose toxic underbelly began erupting to the surface in sensational headlines. Between 19 the city’s population doubled, flooded by romantics hoping to make their mark-as well as the con artists and self-styled religious gurus who descended to take advantage of their naïveté. Hughes and Ross MacDonald, partially arose from the local tabloid journalism of the 1920s and ’30s, which highlighted the city’s enticing dualities.ĭuring that time, Los Angeles was spun as a place of dreams, a wide-open landscape both literally and figuratively, where your greatest desires could become reality. The hardboiled fiction of Cain, Chandler, and other Los Angeles-based authors, such as Dorothy B. Notably, two of the movies Frank wrote about- Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, based on novels by Cain and Chandler, respectively-were set in Los Angeles, a city whose glamorous reputation became laced with stories of crime, scandal, and corruption. The films in question grew out of the hardboiled detective genre birthed by novelists like Dashiell Hammett, James M. “They are essentially psychological narratives with the action-however violent or fast-paced-less significant than faces, gestures, words-than the truth of the characters.” “These ‘noir’ films no longer have anything in common with the usual kind of police reel,” Frank wrote. The term “film noir” is typically credited to French critic Nino Frank, who apparently coined it in a 1946 essay published in the magazine L’Écran français to describe four American crime films: John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Otto Preminger’s Laura, and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet. How did the City of Angels become ground zero for the form? The evocative image, brought to popular attention in the book Dark City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, perfectly distills the macabre allure of the much-heralded cinematic and literary style that added a seductive, psychologically complex dimension to the procedurals and gangster films that preceded it: Noir. Afghanistan, American Samoa, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Azerbaijan Republic, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Fiji, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Gabon Republic, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Macau, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Micronesia, Mongolia, Montserrat, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Republic of the Congo, Reunion, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.S.There’s a black-and-white photograph taken in 1953 that shows a crowd of enraptured onlookers staring through the bullet-riddled windows of a Los Angeles diner, one woman cocking a painted fingernail at something unseen on the other side of the glass.
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