Los Angeles Noir

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is a picture perfect example of a traditional noir film. Complete with a femme fatale, manipulation of light and shadows, and a morally flexible narrator.

Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress and  Roman Polanski’s Chinatown are neo-noir films. They share similarities with classic noirs, like Double Indemnity, but adapted for a new time. The three films all share a male lead who gets involved in something much bigger than he anticipated, a female character directly related to the case, and there is plenty of corruption to go around.

Once one looks past the overarching similarities, the films are very different from one another. Unlike Double Indemnity, Devil in a Blue Dress deals with racism as a central plotline. The protagonist, Easy, is an African-American who has made mistakes in his past, but moved to Los Angeles for a fresh start. In various scenes of the movie, audiences see average citizens and policemen harass him, but Easy perseveres through. His underlying goal throughout the film is to be a homeowner. The home is a symbol of his freedom and stability in his new life.

Chinatown shares Double Indemnity’s cynicism and dark ending. Double Indemnity ends with criminals Phyllis dying and Walter’s implied doom, but Chinatown’s ending is much darker. Chinatown implies no consequences will come to the criminals and a mother is killed with her daughter in the car seat beside her. While Double Indemnity feels like a dark, twisted story for entertainment, Chinatown comes across as a criticism of the corruption of the powerful that goes unchecked.

Los Angeles is a key character in Double Indemnity, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Chinatown. Due to the previously mentioned films and many others, Los Angeles has become a crime hub in films. It is portrayed as a city that fosters more wrong than right. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis and Walter use a back road to kill Phyllis’s husband and they use nearby train tracks to place his body. Meanwhile, Easy’s Los Angeles is one unable to surpass its prejudices in a mostly divided-by-race city. The Los Angeles in Chinatown is incredibly dark and unforgiving with the ending tragedy being swept away with a simple, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”