The Blue Dahlia (1946) is a story of betrayal. Alan Ladd is a
returning war vet in this film noir who arrives in Los Angeles fresh off the
bus with his two war buddies, played by Hugh Beaumont and William Bendix. Ladd
is the hero of the piece, if one can term the chief protagonist of a film noir
a hero, but his pals are as important to rounding out his character and even
driving the plot.
This is our entry in the Classic Movie Blog Association blogathon: Femme/Homme Fatales of Film Noir.
Ladd is not so much an
homme fatale in this film as would be, say, Howard Da Silva, who plays a
charming and venial nightclub owner, because Da Silva is the only person in the
film with the mystique, not just the brutish quality, of evil. Ladd is more a
victim who plods his way blindly through a web of betrayal until by the end of
the movie, we really don’t see him as much a hero as just the last man
standing. But the studio banked on his mystique when paired with Veronica Lake,
who is not so much a femme fatale here as another survivor on a dark journey, though
perhaps better equipped by nature for survival.
The three war buddies part
company early in the film and we are not given the indication that they will
see much of each other in postwar life, though Hugh Beaumont and William Bendix
will be joined at the hip because Bendix has suffered a serious head wound
which has left him fresh out of the VA hospital with headaches, confusion, and memory
loss. Hugh Beaumont, the steadier, responsible, quiet member of the group has
taken it upon himself to take charge of Bendix and be his keeper. It is a
thankless job as any caretaker can tell you, and just why he feels a sense of
responsibility towards Bendix we are never told but it is probably the only
example of self-sacrifice in a movie that is so rife with betrayal.
The only other example
of altruism is perhaps found in the character played by Veronica Lake, who
meets Alan Ladd when he is in trouble.
She is, we assume, attracted to him but keeps at a levelheaded distance
partly because she is still entangled with a mobster husband and partly because
Alan Ladd wants it that way. It is a kind of sacrifice. Later, she will
confront Howard Da Silva, her mobster husband from whom she is estranged, for
Ladd’s sake.
Veronica Lake does not
get much screen time but she will represent Alan Ladd's future, we, again,
assume, as the movie ends on a happier note that it began, which is certainly
not the norm for film noir
The movie begins on a
truly, inexplicably sad note. The Three Amigos enter the postwar world with a
sense of apprehension. This was common to veterans; we see this in other movies
including The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946), which we've covered in several blog posts, and Till the End of Time
(1946), which we will cover some time, but these fellows do not articulate
the reasons for their sense of doom. Hugh Beaumont has a reason to feel glum,
perhaps he foresees a rough road of responsibility for William Bendix and his
medical troubles and is stealing himself for a life as his guardian. Bendix,
with a hair-trigger temper to boot, is tough to manage. Of the three former
Navy flyers, he alone continues to wear his bomber jacket. The other men are
dressed in suits they somehow managed to find in the postwar clothing shortage.
When they park
themselves at a bar for a parting drink, Bendix remarks to Ladd, "Lucky
stiff, at least you've got a wife to come home to." And we see Hugh Beaumont
try to discreetly shut him up, something Beaumont will have to do several times
during this movie. There is some secret we don’t know.
Alan Ladd says only
"Here's to what was." And when they part, Hugh Beaumont, apparently
the watchman for all of them (no wonder he became Beaver’s dad), asks Ladd,
"Don't you think you ought to call her before you go home?"
Alan Ladd remarks with
a mysterious, defeated smile, "Maybe."
It is a foreshadowing
that Alan Ladd's home life is not all that it should be. We have a great deal of foreshadowing this
movie, it is like bread crumbs scattered in the forest and it helps us to keep
our trail, it helps us to find our way. It is a writer's device to point to whom
he wants us to trust and not to trust. There are no red herrings here or
tricks, but it will take you until the end of the movie to find out who the
real murderer is. There are several plausible witnesses because there is just
so much betrayal. The writer is Raymond Chandler, which is as fine a pedigree a
film noir movie could get.
Alan Ladd goes to his
wife's home, a swank hotel and bungalow complex that seems perhaps a bit more
than his allotment checks could have paid for and he stumbles upon a late
afternoon cocktail party in her apartment. The alcohol is flowing, someone is
playing “Accentuate the Positive” on a piano and people are dressed to the
nines, people with dubious integrity, seemingly without a care in the postwar
world.
We receive more
telegraphing of clues when Alan Ladd goes to the desk clerk and asks for his
wife's apartment and we see the bellhops and the desk clerk exchange arch
expressions as if they did not know that his wife was married and we may assume
that she has been carrying on with others. Alan Ladd knows nothing of this and
walks into the party. His wife, played by Doris Dowling in her fourth film, is
completely surprised, prickly, jittery, not knowing how to welcome him,
especially when she has her lover in the apartment, Howard Da Silva.
Da Silva is as smooth
and articulate a bad guy as ever graced a film noir. He runs a local nightclub
called the Blue Dahlia and his calling card is to present guests and lady loves
with massive arrangements of the large blue flowers. When Alan Ladd from behind
a door sees his wife with her arms around Da Silva, kissing him, Ladd
interrupts and slaps Da Silva across the mouth. Da Silva graciously backs down
and leaves. We will later discover, as he discusses with his partner in his
club, that he is perfectly willing to let Alan Ladd's wife return to her husband
because he is tired of her.
It’s easy to get tired
of the demanding, constantly angry, constantly drinking Doris Dowling. She
taunts Alan Ladd for striking Howard Da Silva, "You’re a hero. A hero can
get away with anything."
There is an inference
of self-entitlement which would still go against the grain of the newly postwar
country. Ladd, who plays scenes with a great deal of control and an appropriate
sense of weariness, retreats to the bedroom where he has only just begun to
unpack and he sees two photos in a double frame. One is his service photo and on the other is
a portrait of their deceased son, Dickie. Dickie died while still a baby. He
contemplates the photo; she had never sent him one.
When the guests leave,
hustled out, they are alone and Ladd tries to get her to put down her drink,
which seems to be attached her hand, so that they can talk. Her fit of temper
returns and she announces in a flippant manner that she is her own woman, that
she can do what she wants and see who she wants. He becomes angry and she
replies I could tell you something that would hurt you plenty. She regrets
immediately saying it but he presses her and in another fit of temper she
confesses that their son did not die of diphtheria as she had written to him
but that he was killed in a car crash. She had brought the baby to a party
because she did not want to stay home; she was drunk and wrecked the car and
Dickie died.
Ladd needs no more
info. He takes the photos and prepares to leave her for good, but for one
moment he pulls out his service revolver and she thinks he's going to kill her
but he says that she is not worth it and he tosses it to the couch and he
leaves in the pouring film noir Los Angeles rain.
The story is told with
a great deal of cutting back and forth between different characters and action
occurring simultaneously that is fast-paced and this is what makes the movie
successful. There are only so many ways you can tell a story, even something as
complicated and intriguing as a murder mystery, but for film noir it is not so
much the story but how stylistically it is told that makes the genre unique and
memorable.
We have a reference to
the postwar housing shortage when Bendix phones and relates that he and
Beaumont scored an apartment ahead of nineteen other guys because it is
Beaumont’s old apartment and the landlady liked him. See? Having good manners and being responsible pays
off.
Doris Dowling will
later phone Bendix at their new flat and confess Ladd has walked out on her. Why
this bothers her is unknown, as she seemed pretty well through with Ladd, but
Bendix, who is emotional and impulsive, leaves in the rain and shows up at her
swank hotel and bungalow complex to talk with her, and waits in the bar. She is there, but neither knows who the other
is or that they had just spoken to each other on the phone, and we have the
beginnings of a pickup.
The rain continues to
pound down, and during the evening, Bendix, as well as Da Silva will show up at
Dowling’s apartment. The house detective
played by Will Wright is always lurking around, spying on the action, so we
know what he knows.
It is more
foreshadowing, for when a murder has been committed, we see there are several
suspects, but the only thing we're sure of is that it wasn't Alan Llad because
when he left, she was still alive.
William Bendix
eventually returns home to the apartment he shares with Hugh Beaumont, soaked
to the skin from the rain, dazed, clearly troubled and doesn't remember much of
what he's done in the past couple of hours.
Meanwhile Alan Ladd
hitchhikes and gets picked up by Veronica Lake. We get a little bit of
foreshadowing about Veronica Lake, too. Her portrait is at Howard Da Silva's
nightclub and we are told that the they split up not because of a woman but
because she didn't like his shady dealings, and Da Silva’s the partner
confesses that she's evidently a wonderful woman and both agree that she is far
too good for Howard Da Silva. So by the time we meet Veronica Lake we are
already disposed to understand she is no gun moll. She is true blue and maybe
this is the first bit of good luck Alan Ladd runs across. However, there is no
romance. They say goodbye, they meet again, they say goodbye, and both discover
separately that the police are after Ladd for murder.
The movie is successful
at keeping us off balance and what is going to happen and who was going to end
up with who. We only know for sure that Alan Ladd is not a murderer and that
Veronica Lake is a nice person. As Hugh Beaumont says of him, "Whatever's the right thing to do, Johnny'll do it."
Alan Ladd's journey
through this movie is pretty much based on how other people react to him. His
wife does not want a life with him. When he discovers is wanted by the police,
he runs into a couple of petty thieves who take him to a flophouse to hide out
for a fee and they stab him in the back as does the fellow who runs the
flophouse played by Howard Freeman. Freeman betrays Ladd by going through his
belongings and asks for shakedown money to hide him from the cops.
Will Wright keeps
coming back and he shakes down everybody he can: Howard Da Silva, William
Bendix and Hugh Beaumont. Everybody
betrays everybody: When Howard Da
Silva's partner and another thug kidnap Alan Ladd, beat him up and take him to
a cabin in the woods, the bad guys betray each other. Interestingly, Doris
Dowling provides an ironic bit of wifely fealty by writing on the back of the
portrait of their baby some secret info about Howard Da Silva (betraying her
lover posthumously, quite a parlor trick).
Alan Ladd has seen
enough by half of the movie that when he runs into Veronica Lake again, he confesses his suspicion of her
and how "your timing’s good." She tells him "you'll have to
trust me." But, of course, he can't he can't trust anybody, not in this
movie.
Alan Ladd, in one sense,
is even betrayed by his old buddies. He goes to their apartment and they want
to hide him. Bendix wants to take it on the lam with Ladd, and Beaumont, who
was an attorney before the war, suggests turning himself in. Alan Ladd is
shocked to realize both his buddies think he actually did commit murder. He is
angered by that sense of betrayal. How could they know him so well and yet
think he would stoop to murder?!
The loose ends come
together when the police captain, played by Tom Powers, interrogates all and
sundry at Da Silva’s office in his night club. Bendix recalls the events he had
forgotten on the rainy night of his blackout, and now he thinks he’s the murderer.
Will Wright is suspected because he was always lurking around, he had
opportunity – though motive is never made clear to us.
At the movie’s
beginning, Mr. Wright takes a role similar to many he held over his long career
– a cantankerous and possibly shifty coot, but as the movie progresses, we see
it is the role of a lifetime for him. He is treated as over the hill and past
his prime by the cops and others, a has-been from the word go, but we are told
he is 57 years old and for those of us in that neighborhood, it is a bit
stinging to think that could have been seen as over the hill, especially since
he looks much older. In real life, Mr. Wright was actually 52 years old at the
time. Ouch.
Alan Ladd returns,
performs an irrelevant party trick to clear William Bendix from the charge of
murder, and we realize the cops have already cleared Ladd and found their
man. I’ll give you a break for once and
not spoil it, but it’s hardly a shock.
We're not sure what's
going to happen with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. They meet warily one last
time by her convertible waiting to say goodbye again (check out the B gasoline ration sticker and our previous post on the subject here), and the only
signpost we are given that it might not be goodbye permanently this time is
because William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont, who are waiting for him, give up and
walk away to the nearest bar. Alan Ladd may or may not catch up with them
later.
Neither Alan Ladd nor
Veronica Lake may be ready for a relationship at this time but unlike most film
noir movies, this movie ends with the hope of a new life of something better. Much
has been written about Lake’s and Ladd's screen partnership and I actually
preferred them in other roles in other movies. I think Veronica Lake was
brilliant in Sullivan's Travels (1941)
and in I Married a Witch (1942), discussed here, and So Proudly We Hail (1943) here. I think Alan Ladd was brilliant
in Shane (1951), discussed here. I don't think they
reached their full potential with each other.
I wouldn't say they
were a case of being mismatched, it isn't that. They were interesting to watch
as a pair but I think the reticence their characters showed each other in this
movie is something of a metaphor for their ability to connect with each other
as actors. Their meetings were always intriguing, their goodbyes were less than
dramatic. Film noir had a way of making the main characters somehow distant and
inaccessible and mystery was part of the genre. We weren't really supposed to
know them that well. They weren't supposed to be people with whom we could feel
entirely comfortable. Alan Ladd, with all his ambivalence and aloofness came to
be well-known as a film noir hero. Like
the character he plays in this movie, Ladd was more or less thrown into it and
stuck with it and he had to endure it until something else came along.
The most burdened
person, and most unexplained and therefore mysterious, in The Blue Dahlia, for my
money, is Hugh Beaumont. There should have been a Veronica Lake for him.
Be sure to check out
the other terrific blogs and their entries in the Classic Movie Blog Association blogathon: Femme/Homme Fatales of Film Noir.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.
