Article archive / June 1, 2016
Originally published: . Volume 7, No. 6. Source pages: 13.
There are cities that have a kind of spiritual essence, an aura that transcends their geography and feeds the imagination. Thus Paris, especially in the spring, is for lovers, New Orleans is the city that care forgot, New York is the city for bustle that never sleeps—if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
What is it about Los Angeles that makes it a focus for stories of crime? Sgt. Friday, Philip Marlowe, Harry Bosch and scores of Los Angeles ‘tecs have just been joined by Holland Marsh and Jackson Healy in a current film, The Nice Guys. Thinking about the movie might help us see more deeply into the imaginary essence of L.A.
The film is a comedy featuring amusing characters and witty dialogue, which seem to denature the accompanying violence. It opens in 1970 with a porn star, Misty Mountains, being killed in a car crash. Holland Marsh, a bumbling and corrupt private eye, is hired by Misty’s aunt, possessed by the loony conviction that she has seen her niece alive, to find her. Marsh doubts the claim, but is willing to accept the job, and begins looking for Amelia Kutner, another girl who has disappeared, in the belief that she might somehow be involved. Amelia doesn’t want to be tracked down and hires Healy to persuade Marsh to lay off his search, which he does by breaking the detective’s arm. This graphic assault, along with the earlier shots of Misty’s bleeding corpse, initiates the parade of violence that continues through the film.
The next display occurs when a pair of hoods show up in Healy’s apartment demanding that he reveal Amelia’s whereabouts. In the course of being roughed up, Healy manages to scare the duo off by blasting at them with a shotgun.
Healy, who doesn’t know what has become of Amelia, decides to join in a search for the missing girl. This unlikely team discovers that Amelia had been working on a Misty Mountains film combining pornography and investigation of the political corruption involved in L.A.’s failure to control smog—a failure highlighted by L.A.’s status in 1970 as having America’s most polluted air. The film’s angel is Sidney Shattuck, a notorious porn producer. They are told that the film was destroyed in a suspicious fire, and the duo decides to seek Shattuck out for information about Amelia.
The search for Shattuck takes the duo to an extravagant fest where black ties and formal gowns mix with flagrant dissipation and exotic perversion. There they discover Shattuck’s gory body. Various mostly violent complications ensue, including the abduction and rescue of Marsh’s feisty teen-aged daughter, Holly, Healy’s strangling of Holly’s kidnapper, and their discovery of Amelia, whose aunt turns out to be a high place federal agent complicit in the corrupt forestalling of anti- pollution efforts.
It turns out that a copy of the film has been spliced into a promo for pollution spewing autos, and gets shown at the wild party; efforts by various malefactors to destroy it are forestalled by Healy and Marsh.
Amelia herself is killed, but her film survives. Her aunt’s corruption is revealed, but, unabashed, the aunt reminds the dynamic duo that “what is good for Detroit, is good for America”—and presumably Los Angeles. The film closes with Healy and Marsh forming an agency called “Nice Guys.”
So what makes Los Angeles the ideal setting for this movie, and such a frequent locale for tales of crime and detection? The answer is suggested by the city’s sobriquet, “Tinsel Town.” Tinsel is glitter that deceives. L.A. is about dreams that can end in rude awakenings. L.A. is sunshine and smog, beauty, charm and interest, and an underbelly of danger, destitution and pain.
Love and hate, birth and death, beauty and ugliness, virtue and sin are the dualities in which we live and that the City of Angels can personify and on which the film plays.
The Nice Guys is a film that amuses, entertains, diverts—and if you think about it, is troubling.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.