LA INCIDENTAL

REVIEWED - THE BLACK DAHLIATHOSE of us who have never particularly appreciated Brian De Palma's particular brand of pretentious, glossy schlock will have approached the prospect of him taking on James Ellroy's extremely gothic Hollywood novel The Black Dahlia with some dread. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to report that, for a large part of this adaptation, De Palma does a fairly good job - before going completely off the rails.

Ellroy's novel fictionalised the true story of the murder of B-list actress Elizabeth Short, dubbed the Black Dahlia by the newspapers because of her raven-coloured hair and the fact that the Alan Ladd movie The Blue Dahlia had been released in 1946, the year before her death. The luridness and savagery of that killing (the 22-year-old was cut in half), and its Hollywood connections, have fed for decades into that strand of popular history which searches out the dark and malevolent currents beneath Los Angeles's sunny surface.

In De Palma's version, the febrile atmosphere of the period and its familiar elements - race riots, political skulduggery, corrupt cops, shady developers - are all present and correct. Here, finding the killer becomes the responsibility of two LAPD detectives, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, excellent) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett, anodyne), former boxers dubbed, respectively, Fire and Ice. In between them comes Scarlett Johansson's femme fatale, Kay Lake, and a bisexual heiress, Madeleine Linscott, played by Hilary Swank, relishing the opportunity to wear a few fancy frocks for a change.

So far, so good, but neither Ellroy nor De Palma are noted for subtlety, which ultimately proves the film's downfall. An early sequence in a decadent lesbian nightclub, with kd lang crooning Love for Sale, just about gets away with it. But an extended danse macabre around a killing on a spiral staircase inevitably recalls the director's hamfisted homage to Sergei Eisenstein in The Untouchables.

But the movie really starts to go ga-ga with the appearance of two of this country's finest actors, John Kavanagh and Fiona Shaw, as Swank's wealthy parents. In a small but pivotal role, Shaw turns in one of the most extraordinarily hysterical (in all senses of the word) performances ever (yes, ever) committed to film. One has to wonder what the hell was going on in rehearsal.

To be fair, De Palma has always faced a problem in maintaining control of this source material. Comparisons with Curtis Hanson's adaptation of Ellroy's LA Confidential are inevitable. What becomes clearer while watching The Black Dahlia is what a good job Hanson did of distilling and imposing discipline on Ellroy's sprawling, nightmarish visions.

It has been reported that The Black Dahlia suffered severe cutting at a late stage of the editing process which, if true, may partly explain why it collapses so disappointingly in its final reel. But it doesn't help, either, that the film's focus narrows increasingly onto the bland and inexpressive Hartnett. Not for the first time, the viewer is left wondering where all the gritty American male leads have gone (Hanson had the answer: Australia).

Despite all this, The Black Dahlia, unlike everything else De Palma has done for the last 20 years, is really not terrible. The great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, now 76, impressively contrasts the sun-bleached landscapes of LA (convincingly impersonated here by Bulgarian locations) with woozy, dreamlike night-time interiors. Costume and design are flawless; if you enjoy the aesthetic of film noir, you'll appreciate all this, along with the well-handled police procedural elements of the plot.

And the platonic menage a trois between Hartnett, Eckhart and Johansson (impressive as usual) is well sustained for as long as it lasts.