the same time, he made typically evocative, almost panoramic use of Los Angeles, and he managed to include mordant commentary on postwar America. In keeping with the spirit of his novels, Paramount photographed the exterior scenes in locales such as the Sunset Strip, Malibu, Griffith Park Observatory, the Hollywood bus terminal, and 'canteen row' on Cahunega Boulevard. An uncredited writer named ''R. McGowan' also worked briefly on the script, but the completed picture is marked by Chandler's distinctive settings and verbal style; it is, in fact, his only original screenplay (not counting the unfilmed Playback), and it won him his second Academy Award nomination. Almost from the beginning, however, The Blue Dahlia was a troubled project, subject to major revisions and fraught with real danger for its author.
The chief problem, according to producer John Houseman, was Chandler himself, who almost died trying to complete his assignment. In Front and Center, the second volume of his charmingly urbane memoirs, Houseman claims that sometime during the last days of 1944, the frail, nearly burnt-out Chandler showed him 120 pages of an incomplete novel that could easily be turned into a film script. Houseman and co- producer Joseph Sistrom immediately persuaded Paramount to buy the property for Alan Ladd, who was only months away from being reinducted into the army. Chandler was given the job of screenwriter, and production began within forty-eight hours of the purchase. Houseman recalls that Chandler 'delivered the first half of his scriptabout forty-five minutes of filmin under three weeks, at the rate of four or five pages a day' (137). The job of casting went smoothly, and shooting was soon underway, moving along at a much faster rate than expected. As time passed, the only difficulty was Chandler's slow progress with the second half of the screenplay. 'Ray's problem with the script (as with the book),' Houseman writes, 'was a simple one: he had no ending'' (139).
Houseman recalls that during story conferences, Chandler 'seemed only half there, nodding his head, saying little' (140). Finally, the studio's general manager, Henry Ginsberg, arranged a private meeting in which he announced to Chandler that the entire future of Paramount Pictures was at stake. Ginsberg offered a large bonus for the completed script, but this only shook Chandler's already fragile self-confidence and made him feel that Houseman, whom he regarded as a 'fellow Public School man' (141), was being betrayed. Chandler offered to resign. Not long afterward, however, he came to Houseman with a bizarre proposal: he would finish the script if he could arrange to drink whiskey under supervised conditions.
Amazingly, Houseman agreed. He and Chandler went out to a posh restaurant, where the writer downed three double martinis and three double stingers. The studio then posted two limousines, six secretaries, a nurse, and a doctor at Chandler's home, where the inebriated author worked on the script for eight days, never eating solid food but always keeping a glass of bourbon at hand. He completed the story, but he also seriously damaged his health. (Significantly, the final script begins with three characters walking into a bar and ordering 'bourbon with a bourbon chaser,' and it ends with one of them asking, 'Did somebody say something about a drink of bourbon?')
This anecdote is even more harrowing and suspenseful than the similar one Houseman tells in the first volume of his memoirs, where he recalls nursing the alcoholic Herman Mankiewicz through the writing of Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, neither story is completely true. Houseman seems to have forgotten that Orson Welles was the coauthor of the Kane screenplay, just as he forgets that Raymond Chandler had a perfectly good ending for The Blue Dahlia from the moment the film went into production. Chandler's problem was not a writer's block, but the United States Navy, which refused to clear the project because the killer was a mentally disturbed ex-serviceman (played in the completed picture by William Bendix). Because of the navy's objections, Paramount Pictures rejected the closing scenes as they were originally written. In other words, Houseman was collaborating in a process of censorship that required Chandler to change his script and compromise his basic idea. No wonder Chandler became so detached, uninspired, and thirsty.
Houseman's account has been only slightly modified by subsequent historians, even when they acknowledge that Chandler wanted to make a returning naval veteran into an unwitting killer. 18 But records in the Motion Picture Academy Library show that a complete treatment of The Blue Dahlia, including suggested dialogue for the closing scene, was submitted by Chandler on January 18, 1945, only a few weeks after he signed an agreement to write the screenplay. This treatment was unusually downbeat and socially realistic, rather like a noir version of The Best Years of Our Lives; and although it was written in haste, there is every indication that Chandler was excited by the possibilities it offered. 'In less than two weeks I wrote an original story of 90 pages,' he told Charles Morton of The Atlantic Monthly. 'It was an experiment and for a guy subject from early childhood to plot-constipation, it was rather a revelation. Some of the stuff is good, some very much not' (quoted in Mac-Shane, Life of Raymond Chandler, 115).
In the opening pages of the treatment, Chandler describes The Blue Dahlia as the story of Johnny, George, and Buzzthree returning veterans who represent the sort of cross section of social classes we find in most World War II combat films. The three men are 'the last survivors of a bomber crew that made too many missions,' and they have been given early discharges because of wounds or stress. Johnny's eyesight is failing, George finds it impossible to concentrate, and Buzz has a silver plate in his skull that gives him headaches and blackouts. To make things worse, the world they return to is hardly better than the one they have left overseas. Before the war, Johnny was a 'tester' for a Southern California oil company, living with his wife and child in a five- room house; while he was away, the child died of diphtheria and the wife sold the house and moved to Los Angeles, where she became the occasional lover of a gangster who owns a Sunset Strip nightclub. George was a practicing lawyer, but he was neither well educated nor successful, and his girl has left him. Buzz, the most proletarian of the three, has come home only to discover that his alcoholic father has abandoned his mother, who lives in abject poverty.
The plot Chandler outlines in the original treatment is roughly similar to the one in the completed film, except that Buzz murders Johnny's wife and then suffers a blackout, completely forgetting the incident. Chandler clearly intended to write a Hitchcockian 'wrong man' picture, involving an exchange of guilt between Johnny and Buzz; in other ways, however, he was attempting to make all the leading characters seem like scapegoats for a pervasive social malaise. At the end, the nightclub owner, Eddie Ansell (Eddie Harwood in the film), makes a false confession to the murder and allows himself to be shot by the policeall this in order to protect his estranged wife, Joyce, who has already made a false confession to protect Johnny. After Ansell's death, the police close the case, and there is a brief love scene between Johnny and Joyce. On the next day, we see Buzz and George in their apartment, where the sound of a loud radio next door begins to trouble Buzz. Johnny and Joyce arrive; she is wearing one of Ansell's trademark blue dahlias 'as a sort of gesture,' and as they talk, she picks at the blossom. Seeing this, Buzz grows increasingly distracted. Suddenly he breaks into a crazed monologue and lies down on the couch, rather like a patient under analysis. As his friends watch, he seems to hallucinate the murder scene, ultimately falling into an exhausted sleep. The treatment concludes with the grim reactions of his two wartime buddies:
They sit watching him. His eyes close and he begins to breathe deeply.
Johnny: (To George) Wellthat's it. I hope he never remembers it.
George: He wanted to get his own mother out here and make a home for her. He wanted a lot of things. Now he'll have to live in a room with a barred window.
Johnny: (Quietly) I hope he never remembers.
THE END 19
'What the Navy Department did to the story,' Chandler told James Sandoe, 'was a little thing like making me change the murderer and hence make a routine whodunit out of a fairly original idea' (quoted in Mac-Shane, Life of Raymond Chandler, 117). But the navy was not the only censor. The Breen Office was concerned because Chandler depicted Johnny, the character played by Alan Ladd, as a 'double' for Buzzthat is, as a trained killer who, under stress, is prone to manic brutality. At one point in the final draft of the script, Chandler carefully describes a beating that Johnny administers to Corelli (Howard Freeman), the night manager of a sleazy Santa Monica hotel. Johnny puts a cigarette out on the back of Corelli's hand, punches him ''a staggering blow' in the windpipe, and then 'swarms all over him' with a gun. A close-up shows Corelli's face as the gun strikes his nose and cheeks: 'Blood spurts.
Corelli's eyes glaze. The gun smashes the side of his jaw. Corelli sinks down out of the shot. There is a thud as he hits the floor' (Chandler, Blue Dahlia: A Screenplay, 90). In a later scene, after being knocked out and taken to a deserted farmhouse, Johnny overpowers Leo (Don Costello), one of Harwood's
