HUAS77502 - L.A. Noir

Course Description

This course focuses on the First City of Noir, Los Angeles. While two of the films were shot on sound stages and studio backlots, most of these films use city locations almost as secondary characters: the Angels Flight funicular train up to Bunker Hill; City Hall, once the home of the LAPD; the Gasworks; the Bradley Building. This is still the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, only here after another devastating World War. The men who fought are more cynical and disheartened by what they witnessed; the woman who waited for them or lost them more fatal and deadly. The Los Angeles noir shows the dark side of paradise, the dead-end of the westward expansion, the place where dreams more frequently die than flourish. In the shadow of the Hollywood sign, so close to its dream factories, was a city of greed and lethal dangers that would be the province of the LA Film Noir.