Blue Dahlia
by George Marshall
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Product details
Actor: Alan Ladd, Doris Dowling, Howard Da Silva, Veronica Lake, William BendixDirector: George Marshall
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, HiFi Sound, NTSC
Running Time: 100 minutes
Release Date: 1996-03-26
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Universal Studios
Studio: Universal Studios
VHS Movie Reviews of Blue Dahlia
Movie Review: One of the essential film noirs
Summary: 5 Stars
The Blue Dahlia is a quintessential film noir, one of the great films that defined the genre. Army men return from World War II to find their wives drunk and cheating with scumbag jazz club owners. Whether this film has not been released on DVD in the U.S. is quite curious, considering almost every film noir has been burned onto DVD in various collections of the genre. My guess is that Turner owns the film, and hopes to air it only on TCM, or the potentially racist comment in the film has people worried. There were racists in the 1940s, and denying it by not releasing a film is pretty silly.Movie Review: BLUE DAHLIA AND BLUE ME TOO!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes I'm as blue as the Dahlia when i cant get this on DVD even though the last release was 12 years ago! Hey! Wake up! We dont by VHS anymore! Its been DVD for most of us for some 10 years now! Why dont you guys catch up and give us what we want. We would love to buy Veronica Lake movies if they were only available to us!Movie Review: "Blue Dahlia (1946) ... Alan Ladd ... Paramount Pictures Film Noir"
Summary: 4 Stars
Paramount Pictures present "BLUE DAHLIA" (1946) (100 mins/B&W) (Dolby digitally remastered) --- Starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix, Howard da Silva, Doris Dowling & Hugh Beaumont --- Directed by George Marshalland released in April 19, 1946, our story line and film, Ex-bomber pilot Johnny Morrison and his buddies George and Buzz (who, with a metal plate in his head, can't stand "monkey music"), return from the war to their home town, Hollywood ... In a rude homecoming, Johnny finds his wife Helen behaving like a tramp with oily nightclub owner Eddie Harwood. His marriage over, Johnny wanders off into the night, leaving his gun behind...and someone uses it to murder Helen ... Dodging cops and seeking the real killer, Johnny is aided by blonde Joyce, who just happens to be the estranged wife of Eddie Harwood ... Bendix gets in the top billing with stars Ladd and Lake because he's also a radio star because of the Life of Riley Show ... Bendix shows signs of post traumatic stress at a time when that diagnosis had not been invented --- tidy film noir utilizing the only film script Raymond Chandler wrote directly for the screen - a script for which he earned an Academy Award Nomination --- Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake made 7 films together, "The Blue Dahlia" (1946), "Duffy's Tavern" (1945), "The Glass Key" (1942), "Saigon" (1948), "Star Spangled Rhythm" (1942), "This Gun for Hire" (1942) and "Variety Girl" (1947). "In Variety Girl" (1947), "Star Spangled Rhythm" (1942) and "Duffy's Tavern" (1945) they appear as themselves.
Under George Marshall (Director / Producer), John Houseman (Producer), Raymond Chandler (Screenwriter), Lionel Lindon (Cinematographer), Victor Young (Musical Direction/Supervision / Composer (Music Score), Arthur P. Schmidt (Editor), Hans Dreier (Art Director), Walter Tyler (Art Director), Sam Comer (Set Designer), Jimmy Walter (Set Designer), James M. Walters (Set Designer), Edith Head (Costume Designer), Gene Merritt (Sound/Sound Designer), Joel Moss (Sound/Sound Designer), Wally Westmore (Makeup) - - - - the cast includes Alan Ladd (Johnny Morrison), Veronica Lake (Joyce Harwood), William Bendix (Buzz Wanchek), Howard Da Silva (Eddie Harwood), Doris Dowling (Helen Morrison), Tom Powers (Capt. Hendrickson), Hugh Beaumont (George Copeland), Howard Freeman (Corelli), Don Costello (Leo), Will Wright (Dad Newell), Frank Faylen (The Man), Walter Sande (Heath, Gangster), Dick Winslow (Piano Player at Party), Harry Tyler (Clerk in Bus Station), Franklin Parker (Police Stenographer), Noel Neill (Hatcheck Girl), Anthony Caruso (Marine Corporal) - - - - - Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe Hollywood crime dramas that set their protagonists in a world perceived as inherently corrupt and unsympathetic...Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hard-boiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression...the term film noir (French for "black film"), first applied to Hollywood movies by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, was unknown to most of the American filmmakers and actors while they were creating the classic film noirs..the canon of film noir was defined in retrospect by film historians and critics; many of those involved in the making of film noir later professed to be unaware at the time of having created a distinctive type of film ... featuring top performances from the '40s and '50s with outstanding drama and screenplays, along with a wonderful cast and supporting actors to bring it all together ... another winner from the vaults of almost forgotten film noir gems
SPECIAL FEATURES BIOS:
1. Alan Walbridge Ladd
Date of Birth: 3 September 1913 - Hot Springs, Arkansas
Date of Death: 29 January 1964 - Palm Springs, California
2. Veronica Lake (aka: Constance Frances Marie Ockelman)
Date of Birth: 14 November 1919 - Brooklyn, New York
Date of Death: 7 July 1973 - Burlington, Vermont
3. William Bendix
Date of Birth: 14 January 1906 - New York, New York
Date of Death: 14 December 1964 - Los Angeles, California
4. George Marshall (Director)
Date of Birth: 29 December 1891 - Chicago, Illinois
Date of Death: 17 February 1975 - Los Angeles, California
Hats off and thanks to Les Adams (collector/guideslines for character identification), Chuck Anderson (Webmaster: The Old Corral/B-Westerns.Com), Boyd Magers (Western Clippings), Bobby J. Copeland (author of "Trail Talk"), Rhonda Lemons (Empire Publishing Inc), Bob Nareau (author of "The Real Bob Steele") and Trevor Scott (Down Under Com) as they have rekindled my interest once again for Film Noir, B-Westerns and Serials --- looking forward to more high quality releases from the vintage serial era of the '20s, '30s & '40s and B-Westerns ... order your copy now from Amazon where there are plenty of copies available on VHS, stay tuned once again for top notch action mixed with deadly adventure --- if you enjoyed this title, why not check out VCI Entertainment where they are experts in releasing B-Westerns and Serials --- all my heroes have been cowboys!
Total Time: 100 min on VHS ~ Universal Home Video ~ (3/26/1996)
Movie Review: A Great Los Angeles Oriented Film Noir
Summary: 4 Stars
Appropriately compared and contrasted to "Double Indemnity" (1944), Raymond Chandler's other great Los Angeles oriented film noir screenplay, "The Blue Dahlia" (1946) shows a part of Los Angeles a bit further down on the socio-economic peeking order. Lower middle class LA is a world of "neighborhood bars and bungalow courts". Post war Los Angeles is not sunny California but a shadowy labyrinth whose denizens are in love with the night. The title character is not a reference to Elizabeth Short, who would have seen the film from which she picked up her "Black Dahlia" nickname, but a low-grade nightclub on Sunset Blvd.
Recently discharged USN officers, Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd), Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix) and George Copeland (Hugh Beaumont-I think Ward Cleaver was actually a Seabee) return to Los Angeles with some service connected problems. Buzz has a metal plate in his head and some mental damage; George's eyesight has gone bad; and Johnny is trying to adjust to his new hero status.
While Buzz and George set up together (in what some have speculated is a funny relationship) Johnny gets busy finding out what his wife Helen (Doris Dowling) did during the war. To his disgust he discovers that she is the mistress of a draft-dodging hood named Eddie Harwood (the owner of the title character). Helen then confesses that her drunk driving was responsible for the death of their son.
Helen is murdered that night with the primary suspects being Johnny, Eddie, and Buzz (who had already managed to become Helen's drinking buddy). Enter the beautiful Veronica Lake as Joyce Harwood, who picks up Johnny while he is wandering around in the rain. It turns out that there is a reason she and Eddie have the same last names.
The plot gets complicated after this, with Johnny and Joyce running around in a Phillip Marlowe way attempting to solve the murder and encountering a wide range of Chandler's bizarre and nasty people.
Chandler's original idea was for Helen's murderer to be a battle fatigued veteran, but the Navy pressured the studio to change the story. Like Viet Nam there was a growing fear that many of the returning veterans were violent and unstable.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
Movie Review: A Reel Picture of 40's Los Angeles: A Historical Gem.
Summary: 5 Stars
The Blue Dahlia is on my top ten list of greatest American films ever made. The superb cast is so close in age and demographic to the tenor of the times that every line written by Chandler is delivered with an almost exacting reality of both mythical movie America and the very real horror of men dealing with postwar paranoia in the real world. The villains are ugly sleazy men who run the city of L.A. and were draft dodgers for whom WWII was nonexistent. In this Noir landscape they stumble around an L.A.
that to this day if you drive around at 2a.m.you might still see the ghosts of Johnny and Buzz and that gorgeous Veronica Lake making their way back to the Blue Dahlia for one nightcap, one song before the credits roll.
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