#1
Posted: 5/20/13 at 11:28am
Is City of Angels based upon or strongly influenced by any particular pieces of classic cinema from Hollywood's golden age?
City of Angels- influences from classic cinema?
#2
Posted: 5/20/13 at 11:36am
It has a basis in the film noir of the 1940s and 1950.
If anyone ever tells you that you put too much Parmesan cheese on your pasta, stop talking to them. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life.
#3
Posted: 5/20/13 at 5:10pm
As GothamPC said, it's more a genre than any particular film, but Stone is clearly inspired by hard-boiled "famous shamus"es, Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), both indelibly played by Humphrey Bogart. Marlowe was played by other actors as well: most notably Robert Montgomery in "Lady in the Lake," Dick Powell in "Murder, My Sweet," and in late 1960's-70s neo-noirs by James Garner ("Marlowe"), Robert Mitchum ("Farewell My Lovely") and Elliott Gould (Altman's updated take on the genre, "The Long Goodbye")
Stine very (!) loosely suggests Spade's and Marlowe's respective creators Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, each of whom were beloved novelists who also worked as Hollywood screenwriters and were confronted with all the games that such a career shift implied. And all the disappointments.
Billy Wilder's great "Double Indemnity" (screenplay by Chandler based on a James M. Cain novel) is spicily referenced in Stone and Alaura's relationship (although "Double Indemnity" involves an insurance agent (Fred MacMurray) rather than a detective entangled with a horny (or is she?) well-married femme fatale (there Barbara Stanwyck)). "The Postman Always Rings Twice (also from a Cain novel) might also be a pseudo-source for the antihero/femme fatale coupling, albeit a less on-the-mark one. Alaura suggests a great many film noir women, often married to the antihero's client or employer, who are a whole lot of trouble (in addition to Lana Turner's Cora (Jessica Lange in the remake) in "Postman," Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and Kathleen Turner as a neo-noir Matty (or is she?) in "Body Heat" ).
Oolie might be inspired by Lee Patrick as Sam's secretary Effie in "The Maltese Falcon".
Mallory, the lost girl, is an archetypal noir role (the sexy missing woman is a natural fit for a sleuth): Bridget O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) hires Sam Spade to find her sister in "The Maltese Falcon". Other examples include Kathy (Jane Greer) in Jacques Tourneur's brilliant "Out of the Past" (also with Mitchum as p.i. Jeff Markham), Velma (Claire Trevor) in Murder My Sweet and Katherine (Belinda Palmer) whom Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) describes iconically as "my sister/my daughter/my sister/my daughter.... my sister and my daughter..... understand?" in Polanski's 70s neo-noir masterpiece, "Chinatown".
The troubled relationship between Stone and Pancho parallels the complicated and often dynamic histories between a p.i. antihero and the police with whom he once worked, as seen in various noir films.
Stine very (!) loosely suggests Spade's and Marlowe's respective creators Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, each of whom were beloved novelists who also worked as Hollywood screenwriters and were confronted with all the games that such a career shift implied. And all the disappointments.
Billy Wilder's great "Double Indemnity" (screenplay by Chandler based on a James M. Cain novel) is spicily referenced in Stone and Alaura's relationship (although "Double Indemnity" involves an insurance agent (Fred MacMurray) rather than a detective entangled with a horny (or is she?) well-married femme fatale (there Barbara Stanwyck)). "The Postman Always Rings Twice (also from a Cain novel) might also be a pseudo-source for the antihero/femme fatale coupling, albeit a less on-the-mark one. Alaura suggests a great many film noir women, often married to the antihero's client or employer, who are a whole lot of trouble (in addition to Lana Turner's Cora (Jessica Lange in the remake) in "Postman," Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and Kathleen Turner as a neo-noir Matty (or is she?) in "Body Heat" ).
Oolie might be inspired by Lee Patrick as Sam's secretary Effie in "The Maltese Falcon".
Mallory, the lost girl, is an archetypal noir role (the sexy missing woman is a natural fit for a sleuth): Bridget O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) hires Sam Spade to find her sister in "The Maltese Falcon". Other examples include Kathy (Jane Greer) in Jacques Tourneur's brilliant "Out of the Past" (also with Mitchum as p.i. Jeff Markham), Velma (Claire Trevor) in Murder My Sweet and Katherine (Belinda Palmer) whom Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) describes iconically as "my sister/my daughter/my sister/my daughter.... my sister and my daughter..... understand?" in Polanski's 70s neo-noir masterpiece, "Chinatown".
The troubled relationship between Stone and Pancho parallels the complicated and often dynamic histories between a p.i. antihero and the police with whom he once worked, as seen in various noir films.
Updated On: 5/20/13 at 05:10 PM
#4
Posted: 5/20/13 at 5:33pm
Dear Hitch,
In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay—for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity—in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing you mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write—the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera. Of course you must have had your reasons but, to use a phrase once coined by Max Beerbohm, it would take a "far less brilliant mind than mine" to guess what they were.
Regardless of whether or not my name appears on the screen among the credits, I'm not afraid that anybody will think I wrote this stuff. They'll know damn well I didn't. I shouldn't have minded in the least if you had produced a better script—believe me. I shouldn't. But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place? What a waste of money! What a waste of time! It's no answer to say that I was well paid. Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.
(Signed, 'Raymond Chandler')
***
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. - Raymond Chandler
***
"Hammett is one of those good writers who was ruined by Hollywood" F. Scott Fitzgerald
In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay—for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity—in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing you mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write—the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera. Of course you must have had your reasons but, to use a phrase once coined by Max Beerbohm, it would take a "far less brilliant mind than mine" to guess what they were.
Regardless of whether or not my name appears on the screen among the credits, I'm not afraid that anybody will think I wrote this stuff. They'll know damn well I didn't. I shouldn't have minded in the least if you had produced a better script—believe me. I shouldn't. But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place? What a waste of money! What a waste of time! It's no answer to say that I was well paid. Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.
(Signed, 'Raymond Chandler')
***
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. - Raymond Chandler
***
"Hammett is one of those good writers who was ruined by Hollywood" F. Scott Fitzgerald
Updated On: 5/20/13 at 05:33 PM
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