L.A. Confidential is a reminder that great noir is hard to beat

Back in the 1990s, when the words "Kevin Spacey" were still a good thing, L.A. Confidential was one of my favorite movies. The last and maybe only time I saw it was probably 1997, when it was released. So I rewatched it recently and can confirm that it still holds up as a classic, 5-out-of-5-stars film. Much like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, L.A. Confidential combines a backdrop of a city that I'm constantly fascinated with and so many elements of noir that hover eternally in the City of Angels.

Rewatching it got me thinking about what makes L.A. Confidential so noir? The term is thrown around a lot and so I wanted to think a little more deeply about why I'm attracted so much to stories that have strong elements of noir and pulp. In general, the sun-soaked palm trees and beaches provide such a gorgeous veneer that when you peel back the layers and see dark things happening, like the Charles Manson murders or the early-Hollywood debauchery projected in Brad Pitt's Babylon, the contrast is striking and compelling. L.A. fools us while it lures us. 

Noir elements of L.A. Confidential include:

• Spacey, Guy Pearce, and Russell Crowe are perfect in their roles as LAPD detectives. They each have their dark sides and very different ways of operarating but the filmmakers succeed in getting the audience to identify with each of them and cheer for each of them in different, disorienting ways.
• Kim Basinger is the prototypical noir temptress, tough and gorgeous and more than willing to mix things up a bit. She's key to encouraging the suspenseful building of tensions between the detectives.
• James Cromwell plays the honorable chief of the police force who is surprisingly pulling the darkest of the dark undercurrents along in the story. Again, where good seems apparent is really where the darkness and decay lie.
• There's a lot of smoking in noir. Sometimes you can only see characters through a haze of cigarette smoke. It's a little different when you're reading pulp, but even then, the smog can sometimes seem to be lifting off the page. That adds to the mystery and characters' hidden motives often prominent in noir writing.
• Along with the fog, it will often be raining at night (after a full day of almost brutal sunshine) as a way to punctuate the lost hopes and dreams around every L.A. corner. I recently stayed one night in a Santa Monica garden apartment that was so depressing it almost felt like a murder had been committed there (or at least an actor had decided to finally thrown in the towel there) within hours of my arrival. 
• Sometimes we get distorted camera angles, or the camera will even tilt, as a way to throw us off the beaten path.
• Darkness, betrayal, and cheating are all elements of L.A. Confidential. It almost leaves the audience with a hopeless sense that there is no escaping society's many corruptions.

All that to say, watch or re-watch it if you can. Noir might just be the best thing around.