This new chapter makes a switch on the role of Los Angeles in the movies. Before it was analyzed the roles that places and the major landmarks were playing in the movies. Now it goes a bit in the opposite way: when the city gets out of its anonymity and gets to be a character and not just a set, when movies fictional narratives can tell the city reality’s stories. Andersen points out interesting examples where some are a demonstration of film director’s disdain or even the fascination coming from outsiders.
He begins with Double indemnity (1944), a Hollywood film adapted by Raymond Chandler and the director Billie wilder from James M. Cain’s novel with the same name. Shortly, the novel was based on a true crime that took place a few years earlier in New York, but it seems that this crime cruelty fit better Los Angeles, the city of sin.
Shortly the film tells how a successful insurance salesman, Walter Neff, meets the wife of one of his clients, Phyllis. After this first encounter the two start to get involved romantically and Neff is trap in the criminal plans of Phyllis, who is willing to kill her husband in order to have for herself the insurance money.
[Walter Neff and Phyllis]
Alongside with the movie’s plot the city plays an important role since it “sense of place was so precise” made visible by the narrations of walter Neff, expressing opinions about the city, and by evoking recognizable Los Angeles locations, for example. Double Indemnity wasn’t the only adaptation of James M. Cain novel, there’s was also movie versions of Mildred Pierce (1945) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 and 1981). This films, and the novels as well, made a picture of the 1930s (lower) middle Los Angeles middle class facing the big Depression, reflecting their fears and insecurities leading the drama to tragic ends usually related with crime and murder.
This adaptations were made in the 1940s when Hollywood shows an imagery of a middle class living in suburbias with eclectic and uniformed architecture where numerous families lives having the perfect lifestyle. The apparent social and family order would be easily transformed in disturbing scenarios for trouble teenagers, for instance, like Rebel without a cause (1955).
One of the most significant assays that Thom Andersen makes is this chapter is the definition of lower tourist directors and high tourist directors. According to Andersen they were the one who actually worked more in making Los Angeles a character in the motion picture though, quoting Andersen, “They weren’t interested in what made Los Angeles like a city, they were interested in what made Los Angeles unlike the cities they knew.”
Lower tourist director usually set their films in Los Angeles to express their disdain, like Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977) where you can actually hear his contempt for the city several times “I don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light” , or simply prefer San Francisco as a shooting local, like Alfred Hitchock.
As higher tourist directors are appointed some experimental filmmakers like Roger Corman, Maya Deren or Andy Warhol who discovered the potential of the city to evoke the lost paradise and innocence. Some european filmmakers are also mentioned for their appreciation for Los Angeles like Antonioni in Zabriski Point (1970) sequence and specially for Jacques Demy with Model Shop (1969) where he stands for the city of Los Angeles, though like Andersen points out “Jacques Demy love Los Angeles as only a tourist can, or maybe I should say as only a french tourist can.”
to be continued…
