Brian De Palma’s immensely stylish film noir The Black Dahlia hinges on a true-life scandal that seared itself on the public imagination. On January 15, 1947, a 22-year-old B-movie actress named Elizabeth Short was discovered, dismembered, in a vacant lot in downtown Los Angeles. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of this grisly murder, or the lifestyle of the damaged “heroine”, who seemed to have walked off the pulpy edge of a Raymond Chandler novel.

De Palma has adapted James Ellroy’s book about the mystery into a fiendishly complicated thriller that poisons everyone it touches. But he left most of the logic on the cutting room floor to flatter his own lavish cinematic effects.

Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett are a pair of amateur boxers who’ve signed up as cops with the LAPD. They are tough, dashing poster-boys with a string of high-profile busts under their belts. Hartnett — the narrator and the moral voice of reason in these harsh times — is infatuated by his suspiciously wealthy partner and his ludicrously glamorous girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson), a sizzling Monroe tease who spends most of the film rolling a phantom marble around her plump red mouth while chomping on a cigarette holder.

The lopsided loyalty duly unravels when Eckhart becomes fixated on the crime. You could boil eggs on the witty candour of the script, but the plot is a brutal and badly signposted mess. The film is full of De Palma’s staple ingredients: wonderful camera lifts, body doubles, women dressed to kill, period pornography, and references to Hitchcock that will make film buffs squeal. The director even casts himself in an off-camera role as a seedy director whose black and white audition tapes with the doomed Black Dahlia (Mia Kirshner) are as voyeuristic as they are chilly.

There’s something monstrously corny about the referential orgy, but De Palma’s incestuous Addams family villains are a crooked joy, particularly John Kavanagh as a wealthy and unscrupulous art-collecting mogul, and his drunk and deranged artistocratic wife (Fiona Shaw). Their daughter (Hilary Swank) steals the film as the privileged prime suspect and deadpan femme fatale, morbidly drawn to Hartnett like a spider to a fly.

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

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