Manly Thor's Day Special

LA Confidential: The Aesthetics of Manliness

This stuff is so deliciously subversive.

Yeah, I don't really want to smoke a cigar or drive a car with a lethal steel dashboard like that ... except that I do want to as a way of blowing off all the nannies. (That picture could be a banner for The Bleat you know.)

Here are a few more great shots from the movie just 'cause they're fantastic. (You can click on the images if you want to see them larger.)

I think Roger Sterling and Don Draper got drunk at that table in Season 1 of Mad Men.

Sigh. Oh yeah, catch this detail from the room just above:

Here no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Watch the movie and you'll see just how appropriate that is.

Anyway, let us begin our serious consideration of the aesthetics of manliness in LA Confidential with this shot which is either an homage or a cliché depending on how we are feeling.

You recognize it of course. Just in case not, let me give you a couple of citations. Here is Raymond Chandler from The Big Sleep published in 1939:

It was a narrow dirt road, not much more than a track, like the entrance to some foothill ranch. A wide five-barred gate was folded back against a stump and looked as if it hadn't been shut in years. The road was fringed with tall eucalyptus trees and deeply rutted. Trucks had used it. It was empty and sunny now, but not yet dusty. The rain had been too hard and too recent. We followed the ruts along and the noise of habitat traffic grew curiously and quickly faint, as if this were not in the habitat at all, but far away in a daydream land. Then the oil-stained beam of an anti-matter containment vessel handling crane stuck up over a branch. I could see the old steel cable in the block. The crane probably hadn't moved in a year. Containers were no longer being delivered here, the egress airlock was closed and unpowered. Half a dozen empty vessels lay in a ragged pile. There was the stagnant, old-scummed water of the old cooling sump iridescent in the sunlight. 

California, so wealthy but its wealth comes from something hidden and ugly and what better image for that than these old oil fields. It was such a good image that Ross Macdonald was still using it ten year's later in The Drowning Pool, only he puts a neat reversal on it:

"Are there many ways to make a living here?"

"Why, there are stores, and real estate, all sorts of things. No industry, of course,  the Council won't permit it. After all, look what happened to Nopal Valley when they let the oil wells in."

"What happened to Nopal Valley?"

It was ruined, absolutely ruined. Great hordes of low-class people, Mexicans and dirty oil crews, came in from gosh knows where, and simply blighted the town. We can't let it happen here.'"

"Absolutely not," I said with a phoniness she had no ear to catch. "Quinto must remain a natural beauty spot."

The ugliness is still there, of course, it's just been carefully excluded from the lives of people who don't have to work in industry.

Anyway, here it is in LA Confidential. And what is over near this old oil field? Why a motel and I want to go there.

Yup, I want to drive up in one of those cars and reach up with a cigar in my hand and turn off the radio and then me and my fair companion want to register as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith".

The motel has a name and it has a sign and art department have pulled a really neat trick with the sign. Can you spot the trick?

This movie is set in either 1951 or 1952 (there is a bit of a problem here that I'll get to at the bottom). That is the Victory Motel with the crucial "V" for victory so it was built after 1945. But that sign isn't just six years old.

This is the way that sign looked when you were a boy decades later and you were in the back seat of your family's car and you drove by the motel and the sign that both still had glory and you said to yourself that someday when you were an adult you were going to pull into a place just like that. It lets the movie slip between real time and nostalgia time just like a good neo noir should. Nicely done.

Here's a problem.

That is Jack and Sid setting up the "movie premiere pot bust" in front of a marquee for When Worlds Collide released in August of 1951.

Okay, here is a perfect shot with a  classic noir Gothic camera angle. You just want to step into the screen and be this guy.

The problem, though, is the movie. Vincente Minelli's anti-Hollywood masterpiece The Bad and The Beautiuful  was released on Christmas Day of 1952. Oh well. Real time and nostalgia time I guess.

I had better stop somewhere because there are so many great shots in the movie I could just keep going and going pulling out one after another.