Review of L.A. Confidential (1997)
The script isn’t as smart as Chinatown (1974), but this James Ellroy adaptation is a good update on the dark myths of historical L.A. The abuse of power is central to both films. Here it isn’t Noah Cross’ private power or Mulholland/Mulwray’s profound human-ecological “water and power”. Instead it’s about the LAPD’s public power in 1953, the era of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (1959).
The film touches on sexism. Ellroy’s premise, that prostitutes are being surgically altered to resemble movie stars, is often summarized in dialogue, but underdeveloped compared to Ellroy’s original. A more rounded female character would have helped. It’s the same with racism: People of colour are included, as they were not in Chinatown, and the script is careful to humanize them, but nothing really comes of it. Instead, the movie acquires the bulk of its subtext by association with the later history of the LAPD.
In reality, almost two decades after the fictional plot of this film, the paramilitary SWAT division of the LAPD would be formalized in 1971. Daryl Gates, who had proposed SWAT, became Chief of the LAPD in 1978. He was mentored much earlier by William H. Parker who is the Chief in this movie, played by John Mahon. Gates would sustain a tradition of racist violence exhibited in L.A. Confidential. In 1985, Gates would ride an APC, acquired for nominal “crowd control” in the 1984 Olympics, on a failed no-knock drug raid. Virtually impossible for the city council to fire, Gates would resign over the Rodney King beating and the 1992 riots, but in early 1997, just months before the release of L.A. Confidential, the institution of SWAT which Gates had created would fight a battle on the streets of North Hollywood, against two heavily armed bank robbers, not entirely unlike the climax of this movie.
I don’t know whether Daryl Gates and the general militarization of US law enforcement really played into the writing of this film, but it’s an attractive subtext, and a likely one. Gates’s program of media outreach had an enormous influence on Hollywood’s “cop shows” like Dragnet, which is probably why the character of Jack Vincennes works in TV. Gates’s shadow helps reinforce the many dips from neo-noir intrigue into daylight and the ensemble-cast action genre. However, the plot is not efficiently symbolic of what the LAPD was or would become. The idea of Dudley Smith taking over organized crime under Parker makes as little sense as his bad Irish accent, or the way Stensland dumps Meeks, wallet and all, in Mrs. Lefferts’s basement.
Most importantly, in the conclusion of the climactic siege, Ed Exley adopts Smith’s attitude to law enforcement insofar as he carries out an extrajudicial killing that is not in self-defence, of a man he personally knows to be guilty, just as Smith often asked him to do. Exley is celebrated for this choice, both intradiegetically and extradiegetically. He is not Gates; he has not been visibly corrupted by adopting the credo of the villain, but has simply come of age. Symbolically, this means that extrajudicial killing is justified, so that whatever is wrong with the LAPD and by extension with Gates et al., it isn’t their illegal use of force. This symbolism is warped in a way that Chinatown isn’t. It makes for a fun movie, but it’s a missed opportunity to do something smarter involving mass incarceration, the real forces of police corruption, or the dark side of Hollywood.
References here: The Batman (2022).