The birth of the mean streets

Los Angeles (pronounce it with a hard G, please) has long been touted as a paradise of sunshine, good health, and fresh starts, but anyone who’s ever seen one of the dozens of classic films noir that are set there or read a novel authored by Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, or a dozen other hardboiled writers knows there’s another side to the City of Angels, that it is, as Chandler wrote, a town “dark with something more than night.”

Every big city (and a good many small ones, too) has its underbelly, of course, but in Los Angeles, we are perhaps more startled when it’s exposed, in large part because of the sunny (in both senses of the word) image the Chamber of Commerce and tourism boards have so long promoted.

In Richard Rayner‘s gripping A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age (the title borrows and alters a line of dialogue uttered by Orson Welles in 1947′s The Lady from Shanghai), a nonfiction account of corruption and crime in the late 1920s and early ’30s, when Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world and the foundation for its status as the dark heart of noir was being laid, he explores how the darkness so widely associated with sunny Los Angeles first began to take hold.

Rayner anchors his account of shadows overtaking a metropolis to events in the lives of two widely forgotten figures — Leslie T. White, a tubercular everyman who found himself quickly swept from his quiet life as a portrait photographer in a small town north of L.A. into a role as one of the first crime scene investigators for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, and Dave Clark, a handsome and athletic golden boy of an attorney who grew up in the city and seemed ever destined for greatness.

Throw in gentleman (and not-so-gentlemanly) gangsters, crooked DA’s, crooked oil magnates, more dames and molls than you could shake a stick at, a flood of biblical proportions, and even Raymond Chandler himself, in his days as an oil executive, and you’ve got a story that proves as gripping as the most suspenseful novel.

We won’t spoil the story for you — and there’s plenty of story — but it’s rare when a nonfiction book proves to be such a page-turner. We found we didn’t want to put Rayner’s book down, and we think you’ll feel the same. We’d love to see a movie made from this book — in the right hands, it could easily match L.A. Confidential, a picture we like a good deal, intrigue for intrigue. Are you listening, Hollywood?

Who best brought Marlowe to life onscreen?

Who’s your ideal Philip Marlowe?

If you’re scratching your head at the question, stop right now and rush out to pick up The Big Sleep, the first in Raymond Chandler‘s series of novels of the adventures of his fictional private detective.

But if you’re already hip to Marlowe, you can cast your vote for the best cinematic rendition of the character at LATimesMagazine.com (there are even clips to help you make up your mind), and read novelist and screenwriter Carol Wolper‘s take on why the ideal Marlowe has yet to be captured on film.

That’s Wolper’s opinion, mind you. For my money, the ideal Marlowe is Robert Mitchum, who played Marlowe twice — once in the 1975 classic Farewell, My Lovely and again three years later in an ill-advised remake of The Big Sleep (in which the story was set in London, not Los Angeles — !!! — and in the then-contemporary 1970s). I wish Mitchum could have played Marlowe at a more appropriate age — he was a bit long in the tooth for the role in 1975 — but he’s so right for Marlowe that he overcomes the age issue with ease. It’s Marlowe’s world-weariness that matters more than his age, and Mitchum had that in spades.

Wolper, who claims to be a Chandler purist, cowrote a never-aired pilot for ABC’s 2006-07 season that, like the Robert Altman’s ridiculous The Long Goodbye (1973) and the aforementioned 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, was set in contemporary Los Angeles, not the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s Chandler depicted in his novels (at least they got the city right). Why filmmakers insist on fixing what isn’t broken, I cannot fathom, but there you are.

Here’s the comment I left following Wolper’s essay:

It’s Mitchum by a mile, even though he was too old for the part by the time he did Farewell, My Lovely. It’s too bad Dick Richards and Eliot Kastner didn’t choose to film The Long Goodbye instead; Mitchum’s age wouldn’t have mattered as much, given the elegiac quality of that novel, and it might have erased the bitter and lingering aftertaste of the Altman/Gould travesty, a picture so ill-conceived as to boggle the mind. The ending, particularly, was as inappropriate and off-the-mark as the tacked-on moralistic finish to Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

If anyone doubts that Mitchum, in his prime, was the perfect Marlowe, just rent Out of the Past (1947), a classic noir in which he plays a very Marlowe-esque detective. Mitchum was thirty in 1947, a perfectly suitable age for the early Marlowe stories, and he exhibits all the qualities one could hope for in a movie Marlowe.

And I must strongly disagree with Carol Wolper that updating the character to the modern era is advisable or even acceptable (not to mention giving him a sidekick — sheesh!). There are plenty of modern-day characters yet to be adapted for the large and small screens. Leave Marlowe in Chandler’s vividly rendered past, or keep your hands off of him altogether. After all, Mad Men has shown us that a series must not have a contemporary setting to resonate with today’s viewers.

For what it’s worth, I rate Humphrey Bogart‘s Marlowe in the original version of The Big Sleep, which was directed by Howard Hawks, second behind Mitchum, with Dick Powell, who broke out of his boy-singer rut in 1944′s Murder, My Sweet (the deep thinkers at RKO thought the title of Chandler’s second novel, Farewell, My Lovely, suggested a romance, not a hardboiled mystery — hence the title change)

Fun facts to know and tell

Did you know? In order to remain afloat during Prohibition, the Blatz Brewing Co. — then one of the Big Four Milwaukee breweries, along with Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz — marketed juice, near beer and even chewing gum. The gum, sold under the brand name “Val,” was grape-flavored.

Blatz was also the first Milwaukee brewery to distribute its beer nationwide.

Also, it was on this day in 1959 that Raymond Chandler, the greatest of of all hardboiled mystery writers and creator of the immortal shamus Philip Marlowe, died at age 71.

Raymond Chandler, Revisited

The great hardboiled author Raymond Chandler is a big favorite of ours here at Cladrite Radio, and if you’re a fan, too, you’ll want to avail yourself of the stream of the Symphony Space’s recent panel discussion of Chandler and his debut 1939 novel, The Big Sleep.

It’s an intriguing, enlightening discussion that suggested some new ways for us to look at the great man’s work.

The participants were Jonathan Lethem, whose first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was, he openly admits, fully intended to be Chandler-esque; Judith Freeman, author of The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and The Woman He Loved (a volume we highly recommend); and Rich Cohen, author of Sweet and Low: A Family Story, and each brings interesting insights to the table.