criminal associates, who wears thick eyeglasses:
B-129 CLOSE SHOT JOHNNY
With his arm curved around Leo's neck . . . Johnny's hand comes up with the thumb extended. It goes toward Leo's eye.
B-130 EXTREME CLOSE UP JOHNNY'S FACE
Bending down over Leo. It is savage. The muscles of his face are tense as he j abs his thumb into Leo's eye, out of shot. Leo screams. Johnny lets go. There is a heavy thud as Leo falls. He groans.
Johnny reaches down for his handkerchief and wipes his hand. (iii)
Paramount toned down this action, and elsewhere it omitted several uses of brass knuckles and blackjacks. At the request of the Breen Office, it also cut a scene in which Johnny deliberately sideswipes a sheriff's car, and it dropped a line of dialogue that the PCA felt would be 'resented by the police generally.' The objectionable line involved Johnny's memories of his youth: 'When I was a kid in Chicago, I saw a cop shoot a little white dog to death.' In the completed film, the police are benign, and Johnny seems more conventionally middle class; indeed, Alan Ladd is so well groomed and dressed that he looks the economic equal of his rival, the dapper Eddie Harwood (Howard da Silva).
The loss of Buzz as the killer is even more significant, because it turns The Blue Dahlia into the sort of entertainment Chandler spent his entire literary career attacking: a classic detective story, bringing all the suspects together in a single room and dramatically revealing one of them as the guilty party. The revised concluding scenes also contain a spectacular moment reminiscent of a circus sideshow: Johnny holds a match in his hand and orders Buzz to light it by firing a gun. What Chandler had wanted to write, as he explained to Sandoe, was the story of a man who killed (executed would be a better word) his pal's wife under the stress of a great and legitimate anger, then blanked out and forgot all about it; then with perfect honesty did his best to help the pal get out of a jam, then found himself in a set of circumstances that brought about partial recall. The poor guy remembered enough to make it clear who the murderer was to others, but never realized it himself.' (Quoted in Chandler, Blue Dahlia, 13233)
Alan Ladd and Will Wright in the revised ending of The Blue Dahlia (1946).
When Chandler was eventually forced to abandon this idea, the Breen Office, like the navy, was pleased. Hollywood movies were supposed to avoid ambiguities, providing a neat balance sheet of rewards and punishments. Thus in its May 1945 report, the PCA approved of the completed script for The Blue Dahlia, describing it as a 'murder mystery' of no particular social import and noting that the (civilian) killer was captured and shot by the police. The reviewer also noted, 'We have the feeling Joyce and Johnny will find happiness together someday.'
The resulting film is nevertheless a better-than-average thriller, enhanced by Chandler's stylization of American speech, and redolent of his original themes. Even if Johnny and Buzz are innocent of murder, the war has turned them into potential killers, and life in Los Angeles makes them disoriented, angry, and paranoid. At the end of the picture, when the true culprit is revealed, his identity hardly seems to matter. As if to compensate for what the studio and the navy had done to his script, Chandler pins the crime on one of the most powerless people in the story'Dad' Newell, an elderly house detective at the posh Cavendish Court Hotel. Before he dies, Newell expresses his class resentment, and his parting speech gives a rare opportunity to the underrated character actor Will Wright, who makes the most of it: 'Maybe I could get tired of being pushed around by copsand hotel managersand ritzy dames in bungalows. Maybe I could cost a little something onceeven if I do end up on a slab!'
In the last scene of the film, Detective Captain Henderson (Tom Powers) seems troubled about Newell. 'I must be getting droopy,' he says. 'I felt kind of sorry for the old gent at that.' In a similar fashion, Chandler enables us to feel sympathy for the film's other ostensible villain, Eddie Harwood, who, because of his criminal record, has been able to stay home during the war and acquire money and women. 'I'm not much of a hot shot after all,' Harwood says, and throughout the picture he seems trapped and joyless. Matthew J. Bruccoli has described him as an 'elegant quasi-racketeer,' troubled with guilt over his broken marriage, and continually aware of Johnny's 'moral superiority'' (Chandler, Blue Dahlia: A Screenplay, 132). Leo, his sinister associate, warns him about the dangers of such an attitude: 'Just don't get too complicated, Eddie.'
Rather like Leo, Hollywood tried to keep Chandler from getting too complicated. But The Blue Dahlia is not the sort of movie in which criminals can be brought to simple justice and society restored to order. Chandler always wrote about corruption, or about what W. H. Auden called 'the Great Wrong Place.' Despite the star system, the Breen Office, and the United States Navy, there is just enough of this theme left in the film to make questions of individual guilt seem trivial and to suggest Chandler's amusement, anger, and romantic fascination at a world gone bad.
One year after The Blue Dahlia, RKO's Crossfire managed to depict a homicidal U.S. soldier without encountering objections from the armed services. The film was set in Washington, D.C., at the very end of the war, and it made the humid nighttime streets of the nation's capital seem like a limbo or purgatory, teeming with restless military personnel. A civilian character who is about to be murdered (Sam Levene) comments on the mood of the place; as he puts it, the whole country has been intently focused on the 'win-the-war peanut,' but now the peanut is eaten and nobody knows what to do. 'We're too used to fightin'. But we just don't know what to fight. You can feel the tension in the air. A whole lot of fight and hate that doesn't know where to go.'
Crossfire was loosely based on The Brick Foxhole, Richard Brooks's 1945 novel about life in the stateside military, which had been published while Brooks was still a private in the marines at Camp Pendleton, California. Despite the novel's awkward characterizations and sometimes painfully sententious prose, it deals powerfully with many subjects that were taboo in Hollywood. The plot centers on Jeff Mitchell, a former animator of Walt Disney cartoons, who has been drafted and assigned to a signal corps studio just outside Washington. Jeff believes that his wife back in California is having an affair, and in frustration he uses a fifteen-day furlough to go on a wild spree. Along the way, he is accompanied by two sergeants: Peter Keely, a much-decorated liberal correspondent for a military newspaper, and Monty Crawford, a former Chicago cop who seethes with hatred for Jews, blacks, foreigners, and civiliansespecially when they are 4-F. On the first day of the furlough, the three men attend a boxing match, where Monty enjoys watching a Jewish fighter get beaten. On the second day, Jeff reluctantly joins up with Monty and another soldier, a vicious southern bigot named Floyd Bowers, who has been picked up by a wealthy, effeminate civilian known only as 'Mr. Edwards.' When Edwards invites them all to his apartment, Floyd nudges Jeff: 'We're set, buddy. Set. I ain't beaten up a queer in I don't know how long.'
The ensuing events are described from Jeff's drunken perspective, in a kind of hallucinatory internal monologue that suggests the casual humiliations and random violence to which Edwards is subjected. Jeff almost passes out, and just at the point when things are about to turn truly nasty, he leaves Edwards's apartment, assuming that the party is over. On the next day, he wakes up in a prostitute's bedroom, confronted by a strange man who alternately claims to be her husband, her lover, and her pimp. Meanwhile, the police find Floyd Bowers in an alley, strangled with his necktie, and Mr. Edwards in the bathroom of his apartment, beaten to death with the flat porcelain top of a toilet tank.
The reader of The Brick Foxhole has no problem guessing who committed the crimes, but the police suspect Jeff, who goes into hiding while Peter Keely searches for Monty. In a highly allegorical conclusion, the liberal tracks down the fascist, confronting his enemy at night in a closed and darkened military museum. The two men regress to primal hostility, and at the end of a protracted bayonet-swordfight, they kill one another. Soon afterward, the police discover that Monty was the murderer of both Bowers and Edwards, and Jeff is allowed to return to his former life in the army. Although Jeff has been temporarily freed of his sexual paranoia, he
