A noir that shows a City of Angels built on appearances, LA Confidential is still stunning to Matt Glasby. Here he reminisces about the film’s Old Hollywood mystique for its 25th anniversary.
When I first saw Curtis Hanson’s peerless James Ellroy adaptation in the cinema in 1997, it was everything my overheated teenage brain could hope for. Conflicted, shotgun-wielding cops, Golden Age movie stars, Mike from Neighbours—what more could you want?
Watching it back today, the film still works beautifully because it operates on two levels, allowing us to enjoy the glamour of noir-era Hollywood and the grit underneath. “Life is good in Los Angeles, it’s paradise on Earth,” says tabloid hack Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito). Then he lets out that dirty DeVito laugh. “That’s what they tell you, anyway.”
As we will see, LA is a city obsessed with appearances. Violence just has to look like justice to be justice, sex workers have plastic surgery to resemble famous actresses, and even studious super-cop Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) takes his glasses off for photographs.
It’s 1953 in the City of Angels and mobster Mickey Cohen has gone to prison, leaving his crime network wide open. After an embarrassing incident of police brutality, called “Bloody Christmas” by the press, the LAPD is looking to clean shop, favouring the likes of Exley over brutes such as Bud White (Russell Crowe) and grifters like Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). Pulling the strings is Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), an old-timer with effective if unethical methods. But when bent cop Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) is killed at the Nite Owl diner, it opens a can of worms for everybody.
The appearance/reality dichotomy adds depth to each of the characters. Despite his spotless record, Exley uses other cops’ failings to advance his own career. When he’s not advising on TV’s Badge of Honor, Vincennes makes real celebrity arrests for Sid Hudgens’ Hush-Hush magazine. White, meanwhile, is a heavy who deplores domestic violence yet beats confessions out of suspects for Captain Smith.
Throughout the film, these opposing sides co-exist like reflections in a two-way mirror. Somehow, Hanson and Brian Helgeland’s Oscar-winning script manages to keep all the plates spinning, using an array of tricks, from voiceover to newspaper headlines, to mimic Ellroy’s ratatat prose. Though the Antipode-heavy casting was controversial—apparently, when Ellroy told an Australian audience that local boys Crowe and Pearce would be starring, they thought he was joking—today it looks way ahead of its time. The film also marks the big-screen debut of The Mentalist’s Simon Baker, another Aussie boy done good.
The set-pieces are still jaw-dropping. A particular standout is the scene in which Exley interrogates a group of young African-Americans, playing them snippets of each other’s confessions like a radio drama. At one point you can actually see a vein bulging out of Pearce’s forehead, not something you’d normally encounter on Neighbours. At the scene’s climax, White goes memorably ballistic, snapping a chair back with his bare hands. Whether you’re team White or team Exley, it’s a thrilling piece of cinema.
But even in the calmer moments, it’s an alluring world in which to immerse yourself. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti chose to shoot in Super 35 widescreen, using spherical lenses to make each image look like a still photograph come to life. The costumes and sets are immaculate, but kept in the background so they never overpower the narrative.
Twenty-five years on, LA Confidential may not have changed, but the world certainly has. Through the film touches on themes of toxic masculinity, particularly through Bud White, it doesn’t get very far. Indeed, its two main female characters are a sexual assault survivor and a sex worker who looks like Veronica Lake. Played with slinky sensitivity by Kim Basinger, hooker-with-a-heart Lynn Bracken is little more than a plot device. She falls for White, then sleeps with Exley, causing them to fight before they finally join forces.
In the film’s darkest moment, White attacks her in a jealous rage when he learns of her “infidelity”. Depressingly, she forgives him, and they drive off into the sunset together. Though Basinger won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her troubles, it’s hard to imagine the Academy rewarding such a reductive role today.
But the strangest thing about LA Confidential’s legacy is that, despite the film’s undimmed excellence, it represents a dead end. Ellroy adaptations fizzled out with Brian De Palma’s disastrous Black Dahlia (2006), and several attempts to bring this story to the small screen—including one starring Kiefer Sutherland as Vincennes and Melissa George (yet another Aussie) as Bracken—failed.
In 2020, the death of Chadwick Boseman put paid to a 1974-set sequel that would have starred the late Black Panther actor alongside Pearce and Crowe. And, for now, that seems to be it. Perhaps Ellroy was right when, after watching the film, he said, “I understood in 40 minutes or so that it is a work of art on its own level.” Unfortunately for the rest of us, that’s the shelf on which it has stayed.
