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Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson star in Black Dahlia.

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The Black Dahlia
****
Venice Film Festival

Venice likes Brian De Palma. The Black Dahlia is his fifth premiere at the world's oldest, and some say grandest, film festival. But considering the veteran director's last movie, Femme Fatale, went straight to video in the UK, it was a bit of a risk opening the 63rd edition with this adaptation of James Ellroy's bestseller.

The evening, however, turned out to be the kind of triumph Cannes didn't get when it opened with the lumbering The Da Vinci Code. This is De Palma back to something like his best. It's a superbly shot and at times controversial thriller which may not quite measure up to the film of Ellroy's LA Confidential but is certainly in the same class.

The book and the film are based on the true story of the brutal murder of Elizabeth "Betty" Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress from the East Coast who came to LA like so many other pretty girls to knock on Hollywood's door. On 15 January, 1947, she was discovered brutally murdered in a vacant lot near Leimert Park.

She was naked, cut in half at the waist and her mouth was slit from ear to ear in a clownish grin. Photographs taken at the time were kept from the public and, despite false accusations and spurious confessions, the killing remained one of the most famous unsolved homicides in the history of the City of Angels.

Betty, however, was no angel. She was a girl about town who was probably a prostitute on the side and acted in pornographic movies when other parts failed to materialise.

Ellroy hoped his book about her would exorcise his own demons. His mother was strangled in 1958. It's certainly fertile territory for De Palma who creates, mostly in Europe, a swirling picture of boomtown LA in which corrupt policemen, venal property developers, ambitious film producers and hopeful starlets mixed with the immigrants trying to earn an honest living.

As one of the most cynical as well as one of the best directors working in America today, De Palma casts as tough an eye as Ellroy did on the incipient greed and depravity of the time.

His chief characters are two young policemen, both ex-boxers, who are called to investigate the murder. They are played by Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett.

While Eckhart's Blanchard is so obsessed with the case that his relationship with Scarlett Johansson's Kay is threatened, Hartnett's German-born Bleichert pursues an affair with Hilary Swank's enigmatic Madeleine, the rich daughter of one of the city's most prominent families.

Bleichert discovers a pornographic tape which proves that Madeleine and Betty (Mia Kirshner) were competing friends. The trap is thus sprung, and both fall into it.

Shot in style by Vilmos Zsigmond and designed by Dante Ferretti, the film has everything it takes to allow De Palma some of those virtuoso tricks that light up the screen in his best works and prove that he knows his movies backwards.

There are reminders of Hitchcock's Vertigo in one remarkable death scene as a half-strangled man falls to his end over high banisters.

But Josh Friedman's screenplay is notable too, so that the cast have every opportunity to spread their wings. Hartnett and Swank are particularly good. But it is De Palma's film. Perhaps the drama becomes melodrama at times. He never lets go of a weird moment. But, warts and all, this is the best American thriller for some time.

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