Killers, coffee, last dying words: Columbia Pictures Film Noir on DVD

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Volume One collects five fascinating studies—four of them previously unavailable, each on its own separate disc—in how this thing we call noir developed throughout the 1950s, when the style/genre/sensibility was first named and catalogued. It was also the decade that saw the end of the classic noir cycle, partially as an inevitable effect of its newfound self-consciousness.

The Sniper (1952) opens with Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) carefully assembling his rifle and taking aim from his bedroom window at a woman as she climbs the stairs across the lane. No rounds are fired. For now, Eddie’s still satisfied with rehearsal. But how long before Eddie snaps, before he needs to release his charge, before some poor singer had to die, her stricken body shattering the glass that encased the poster announcing her gig? Eddie’s a walking time bomb, and the chilling thing about this picture, among the first to attempt a serious portrayal of a serial killer, is that Eddie’s the protagonist.

Women really piss this guy off. Everywhere he goes they torment him with their mere presence, even little girls. It’s painful to watch Eddie attempt to chat up pretty ladies in bars or in their homes when he delivers their laundry. He’s upset when a strange woman doesn’t believe that he’s an engineer and that he built a bridge between two Hawaiian islands. He’s tormented and lonesome, yet, in one of the film’s little masterstrokes of social critique—this was an early Stanley Kramer production—the ostensibly normal men and women who might offer consolation consistently express this casual misogyny that only confirms the acceptability of Eddie’s vilest compulsions.

Edward Dmytryk directs with ingenious economy throughout, a superb example of his approach being that scene where a hot burner illuminates the ceiling and is overshadowed by Eddie’s hand as he presses his palm against the burning coil—a pretty awkward cry for help. Yet The Sniper’s most memorable imagery comes from Dmytryk’s dramatic use of San Francisco—unnamed yet unmistakable—whose vertical, maze-like topography feels eerily aligned to Eddie’s agitated psyche. The disc features a commentary from the “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller (not Miller), a life-long Franciscano and a fountain of knowledge pertaining to both the film and its location.

Glenn Ford plays a rogue cop trying to annul a marriage between city officials and organized crime in The Big Heat (53). He has the moral high ground, his single-mindedness is transfixing, yet what of the fact that his crusade results in the torture and killing of three innocent women? It’s a revenge film, but not an unreflexive one. Women are collateral damage, but they’re also the most compelling, most richly detailed, smartest characters in the movie, especially Gloria Grahame, unnervingly sexy and sassy, and finally scarred by lanky Lee Marvin as a marvelously oafish gangster with a child’s feeling for stupid sadism. Grahame gets him back in the end, and I always wonder if he could smell the coffee boiling before she threw it in his face. Fritz Lang orchestrates scenes with restrained menace, the camera hanging back and then pouncing like a cat.

5 Against the House (55) finds college boys planning a prank heist in Reno with Kim Novak, here a lounge singer. This “field experiment in psychology” is strictly caper material, with lots of smart alecky gags, some nifty casino insider bits, Novak as luscious eye candy, and one weird-ass robot valet service that deserves its own documentary. Smartly directed by Phil Karlson, it’s consistently entertaining, if somewhat out of place in this collection. The sole noir element comes from Brian Keith’s Korean vet, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, ready to explode, his eyes bulging and body shaking, the hidden, writhing violence lurking beneath this film’s relatively placid surface.

A ship’s porter tosses some luggage into a cab, the cab zooms away, the cops follow, the cabbie’s shot, the car crashes. A cop’s killed in the chaos. No one understands what just happened. That’s the first 60 seconds of The Lineup (58), a San Francisco procedural based on a Dragnet-like TV show. It’s prime Don Siegel: clean, taut, lucid, and bracing. Siegel exemplifies the evaporation of the romantic fatalism of 1940s noir and the emergence of something more visceral and nasty. Less than a third of the way through the bad guys arrive from Florida to collect a shipment of heroin and completely take control of the picture. Eli Wallach plays a killer named Dancer, offing a guy in a bathhouse during a sequence baldly driven by latent homoeroticism. Bodies fall from great heights, limbs a-flopping, one of them onto a skating rink—the old Sutro Baths complex is brilliantly used. Robert Keith plays the dapper chief heavy, rather humorously trying to refine Wallach, and revealing himself to be a collector of people’s last dying words, which strikes me as a pretty apt metaphor for noir in all its emotionality, enigma and morbid fascination.

The Lineup also features a commentary track with Eddie Miller, but Miller spends most of his time fending off James Ellroy, who repeatedly goes rabid and indulges some of his most incoherent, far-right, pro-police brutality pet topics. Ellroy has been a welcome contributor to commentary tracks on the Zodiac (07) special edition and the recent Crime Wave (54) DVD, but here he proves far less illuminating and far too easily distracted.

Was Murder By Contract (58) already neo-noir? It certainly exudes a sly knowingness about noir convention and, being the story of a guy who becomes a hitman so he can buy himself a nice house on the Ohio River, it lends itself to being read as consumerist satire. It is in any case a low-budget wonder, brimming with brilliantly quirky characterizations and scenes in which killer Claude (Vince Edwards) kills time playing mini-golf, deep sea fishing, and going to the fucking zoo when he’s supposed to be killing a woman set to testify in a high profile trial. When he’s informed that his target is female he recoils, not because he’s squeamish about having to murder a woman but because he should have charged double—women, he claims, make undependable marks. At one point Claude embarks on a nihilist rant when a waiter brings him a coffee cup with a lipstick stain. But he’s most of the time Zen-like, obsessed with efficiency, and doesn’t like guns—he’s the evil version of a Jim Jarmusch protagonist.

Elegantly photographed with the barest of resources by Lucien Ballard, who’d later collaborate with Sam Peckinpah, smoothly directed by Irving Lerner, and enveloped in a quiet, insistent, all-guitar score by Perry Botkin Jr., Murder By Contract is deeply creepy, darkly funny, and totally engrossing, perhaps the premiere discovery from what’s looking like the best multi-title DVD release of the year.

Vulgarian, historian, voyeur, exhibitionist: the one and only James Ellroy

He mounts the stage to applause lustier than what greets most sexagenarian novelists, but still he demands more, waiting silently for the claps and cheers to whither before gesturing with feigned impatience to keep it coming. We comply, and he soaks up our squeezed adulation with Mussoliniesque stoicism. James Ellroy has arrived. He’s in Toronto to promote Blood’s a Rover. His opening speech rallies against “the internet invasion,” invokes Elliot, Sexton, and Houseman—supplier of his new novel’s title—before paying tribute to Knopf, his publisher, rendered in this bat-shit reverie as a prophet dog who came to Ellroy moments after his birth—his parents had slipped out for a drink—and deigns Ellroy the savior of literature, author of a string of future masterpieces, decrying that in the year 2009 he’ll publish a book that will single-handedly reverse the downturn in the global economy. Ellroy then promises an afterlife of divine promiscuity to everyone in he audience who purchases ten copies. He’s quite insistent that we each buy ten copies. As though storing up for the Apocalypse.

Blood’s a Rover’s the final installment of Ellroy’s ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It picks up where The Cold Six Thousand left off, covering 1968 through 1972. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. Black militancy is on the rise. Organized crime’s setting up house in the Dominican Republic. “I wanted to tell the story of the unsung leg-breakers of history,” says Ellroy. “Bad men in love with strong women.” The bad men include Dwight Holly, muscle for J. Edgar Hoover, Wayne Tedrow, ex-cop and drug-runner, and Donald Crutchfield, a kid with a penchant for peeping who becomes swept up in a tsunami of lethal clandestine activity. Prominent among the women is Joan Rosen Klein, an enigmatic, sexually ambivalent, leftist shadow figure. There’s also a gay, black undercover LAPD cop who easily constitutes one of Ellroy’s most intriguing and sympathetic creations. The novel runs over 600 pages. It’s dogged and ambitious, a labyrinth of conspiracy and conjecture through which Crutchfield functions as our sole convoy. It is at times almost comically grotesque—the cameos from Hoover and Howard Hughes especially—yet it also features some of the most emotionally textured interactions Ellroy’s ever penned.

Ellroy’s most famous for his ‘L.A. Quartet,’ which includes the novels The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, though I’d argue his real masterwork is his 1996 memoir My Dark Places, in which Ellroy traces the investigation into his mother’s unsolved 1958 murder with chilling clinical detachment, describes his own desperately lonesome youth of window-peeping, drug addiction, Oedipal fixation and homelessness, and chronicles the re-opening of his mother’s case in partnership with Detective Bill Stoner, whose portrait is crafted with such elegance and compassion as to anticipate the most compelling of Ellroy’s later protagonists. My Dark Places is so astonishingly frank, its author’s public persona so shameless in every sense of the word, that Ellroy would seem every interviewer’s dream subject—you can ask this guy anything. But Ellroy’s also the emphatic architect of his own image. Descended from a long line of Scottish preachers, empowered by his considerable height, he holds court more easily than he converses. He's a practiced showman. He is also however a perfect gentleman, inquisitive, playful, observant, hilarious, and endearingly unabashed about his neediness. I truly enjoyed his company. I met him at Random House’s Toronto offices the morning after his triumphant Harbourfront Centre reading in early October.


JB: With Blood’s a Rover your fiction begins creeping into a period that you actually lived through as an adult. Does having personal memories of history change how you write about it?

James Ellroy: I was ten when this trilogy begins, 24 when it ends. So it’s my youthful cognizance. But frankly I was bombed. I was very self-absorbed. I recall history bopping around on the margins of my consciousness, but I didn’t care particularly.

JB: You expressed antipathy toward Martin Luther King when you were young.

JE: I was a dipshit kid. Now I revere Martin Luther King. He is in every way the moral voice of the trilogy. You live, you learn.

JB: You’ve endowed the character of Donald Crutchfield with an awful lot of the young James Ellroy—he lost his mother at ten, takes Dexedrine, does B&Es. Would you say this overlapping of characteristics your method of entry into the story?

JE: Crutchfield’s a real man. He’s a security consultant. He was a wheelman back in the ’50s and ’60s. He’s ten years younger in the book than he is in real life. We share certain passions. We interested in crime. We both love boxing, particularly the lower-weight, Latin fighters. He told me about the wheelman world and I thought this was something I couldn’t have invented. So I cut him in for some proceeds of the book and he gave me access to history I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

JB: But, for example, him mom being from Wisconsin, like yours?

JE: That’s all made-up.

JB: So was it important for you to give him some of your own history, neuroses and experiences?

JE: I was out to attack the iconography of my own life in a way that I’d never done before in fiction. He’s very much me. He’s a genius. He’s indefatigable. I did not go to the Dominican Republic and eat herbs and kill people. Or invade Cuba. Or disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I didn’t do those things. Did Crutch? Ask him. I think he’d probably avoid the question. He was a way in, and I began to see the viability of the construction early on because I’ve never written a dipshit kid. He’s impressionable. He’s malleable. I never say it in the book, but he’s never been laid.


JB: Crutch’s also a voyeur, as you once were. Voyeurism permeates the book. I think the dominant characteristic that you nurture in your depiction of J. Edgar Hoover’s also a deeply entrenched voyeurism.

JE: Hoover was a celibate homosexual. I swear to you I don’t think he ever had sex with man, woman, or beast. Or centipede. The idea that he would show up at the Waldorf Astoria in drag is preposterous. He was much too repressed. Much too circumspect. He liked to bullshit with big, rugged, good-looking men. But the idea of being a identified as homosexual would have been repugnant to them.

JB: To get back to voyeurism, do you find that by channeling this aspect of your persona into varied points in your story it enables you to rocket forward into a new kind of writing? Because in many ways Blood’s a Rover is departure from your earlier work.

JE: It is a departure, and I’m glad you mention it. It’s about the women. About women with children. It’s about the lost boy finding his way to some women who disperse and cut him loose in the end. The women are smarter than the men, stronger-willed, undeterred.

JB: So maybe what you’re doing is surpassing voyeurism. These female characters are more sculpted than you’d expect when the author’s viewpoint is that of an outsider looking in. Last night you spoke about how part of what accounts for the eight-year gap between The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover has to do with recent tumult in your personal life, and the role that women played in your recovery.

JE: I had a crack-up. You think I’m skinny now. I was 20 pounds lighter. I couldn’t sleep. I’d been working way too hard for too many years. I’d neglected my marriage. I went on a book tour for five months. I went to five European countries and 32 cities in the US and Canada. I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, and I’m just going full-boar, performing every night. I was losing it baaad. I was out to dinner with a colleague in Chicago, and I went to the bathroom and I forgot where I was. I thought I was in Toronto. I passed out in the Pfister Hotel the next day in Milwaukee. Meanwhile my marriage tanked, and damned if there wasn’t a woman named Joan, and damned if there wasn’t a woman named Cathy, who I changed to Karen in the book. I dug as deep as I could into my own life. Helen Knode, my ex-wife and best friend, said Cold Six Thousand was too rigorous in its presentation of a very complex text. Go back to your art. So this is a much more heartfelt book than the two that preceded it.

JB: There’s a tenderness that recalls moments in your early novels, but it seems conveyed with more conviction, complexity and vulnerability here.

JE: I’ve learned a lot about myself, and put everything I could into this.

JB: Was it important to inject a theme of racial reconciliation into Blood’s a Rover?

JE: I recall the times, and I recall a tenuous coming together of whites and blacks because it was cool.

JB: But you’ve got some of the unlikeliest guys imaginable making peace with the black community, with black women in particular. It’s interesting to arrive at a point in your body of work where racial animosity isn’t just a given, something casually accepted.

JE: You’re very deft. PC people want racist to be a defining characteristic, rather than a casual attribute. You’re supposed to like these guys despite their vile sentiments and vile expressions. Dwight Holly’s obsessed with racial invective because he feels guilt over killing Martin Luther King, because he’s a Klansman’s son and he knows it’s wrong. But all these guys need women to show them the way.


JB: Do you think you might be able to attract more female readers with this book?

JE: I don’t know about developing a significant female readership at this point in my career. It’s a very male vision. It’s an American vision. It’s a Protestant, heterosexual vision. Don’t look for me on Oprah. Don’t expect me to be invited to the Obama White House.

JB: Would you like to be invited to the Obama White House?

JE: I’d like to look around. I'd like to ask Obama if being President of the United States the biggest fucking blast on Earth. George W. Bush would laugh like hell. Bush’s dad would laugh like hell. Ronald Regan would love it. Clinton would be beside himself. I think Obama’s a stiff. I don’t think he’d get it. He’s tremendously self-important and he’s humourless. He has an infectious smile. I watch the media so little, so I only get snippets of him.

JB: You’ve often said you don’t read anymore, don’t really keep up with the cultural current, but I know you’ve at least read Don DeLillo. You’ve read Libra.

JE: 20 years ago, yes.

JB: I think it’s interesting that both you and DeLillo have created bodies of work around an idea of Americaness, not really pinpointing it, but circling it continually. When you read Libra, or any other DeLillo, did you feel a certain kinship?

JE: Libra knocked me on my ass. Flat on my ass. I’d never read DeLillo before. He’s very self-conscious. He’s more than a little self-important. He’s much, much more intelligent than me, much more learned. I may be a better writer moment-to-moment because I’m not that self-absorbed. And I am a vulgarian at my core. But that he gave us this portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald as this overachieving, grandiloquent American snoop before me gores my goat. That thesis of his, that the JFK assassination is the world’s most over-glamourized business dispute killing, that Jack mandated his own death by fucking with Castro, unleashing a tidal wave of forces, all of whom were professional killers—organized crime, crazy Cuban exiles, renegade CIA guys—who couldn’t get Castro, who had to kill somebody and it had to be him: it’s astonishingly deft and complex. The best explanation I’ve ever heard. I had a slight correspondence with Mr. DeLillo. We met by accident at an Amsterdam book fair and had breakfast. He’s a difficult man. He’s reserved. He’s very intellectual. He’s almost impenetrable. Yet I’m fond of him.

JB: I was also thinking about the way you evoke these mountains of files in Blood’s a Rover. This also echoes Libra, obsession embodied in paper and ink.

JE: It’s an epistolary novel. The characters are all file hoarders. That’s how you solve crimes: you read files. A shit detective will read a file ten times, a great detective 50. He’ll find something nobody ever found. There’s no postmodernism here. This is not a comment on me. This is just the way it was done then. An interviewer said this is a comment on the death of the analogue age. Beats me, I’m computer illiterate. I will do anything to simplify my life in order to think more efficaciously and live in bygone periods.

JB: I was surprised to learn you don’t do much first-hand research.

JE: I trust myself to extrapolate fictionally. I hire researchers to compile fact sheets and chronologies so I won’t write myself into error. I had a ten-second girlfriend in France the better part of two years ago. She was Spanish-fluent, and we were going to go to the Dominican Republic together. But what is the DR? Shitsville-fucking-USA. What, I want to go to some third-world slum? So I sent a friend of mine who’s an inveterate traveler. She came back with some slides, maps, history. She sat me down with her foldout computer. I looked at it for 45 minutes and said that’s enough. I got it. It’s fiction—you extrapolate. I knew about Joaquín Balaguer. I knew he was this tall.


JB: I was also surprised to learn that you’re a man of faith. Did this spring from your addiction recovery experiences in the ’70s?

JE: I’ve always been a man of faith. I had a Christian upbringing. People are astonished at this. It’s a happy way to live. I’m not a Creationist. I believe in evolution, as do most Christians. Like most Christians I don’t bomb abortion clinics, don’t beat up homosexuals, don’t lynch black people. If you look at my books there is always, however tenuously, a note of redemption struck at the end. Even if it’s a cliffhanger. The books are profoundly moralistic.

JB: I’m fascinated that you spend so much time in the very dark, frequently grotesque world of your books and still maintain faith in some cosmic order.

JE: I believe in love. I believe in the conjunction of men and women. I am as fuck-struck and sex-crazed as I was when I was 20. I just met an extraordinary woman who I think will be the love of my life and it’s an amazing experience. I blundered around a lot. I’m very fit at 61, and I’m back where I was at 14—obsessed with classical music and women. I don’t think about much else.

JB: What do you think about when you lie awake at night? Or have you beat the insomnia?

JE: I’ve gotten over my fear of death. I’ve largely gotten over panic attacks. Faith helps. It’s just suppressed emotions, repressed sexuality. It’s all that crazy shit that accumulates in your body. Although I’m not a freak, I have chased women compulsively for many years. But I always had the crazy idea that I’ll meet a woman one day and that’ll be it. And damned if it didn’t happen. Just when I thought it’s my karma to lie around in the dark waiting for women to call and then go out like a pitbull and attack the female race, it happened.

JB: When My Dark Places came out you were often quoted as saying that you don’t believe in closure. Has that changed?

JE: No. I think life is open-ended. I think the cosmos is open-ended. Of course, I could be wrong. We’ll see.

Changeling: the kid strays in the picture... as does the sense of purpose

Single mother Christine Collins comes home from work one day in the spring of 1931 to find her house empty and her little boy Walter vanished. The ensuing search yields nothing, the case is taken up by the press, continuing a trend of bad PR for the apparently ineffective LAPD. Then, months later, a boy abandoned in a truck stop in Indiana is identified as Walter. He’s scrubbed up and rushed back to Los Angeles and the arms of his long-suffering mother. But when the boy gets off the train, as the press snaps the celebratory photos, Christine tells Captain Jones, head of LAPD’s juvenile investigation unit, that they found the wrong boy. Jones tells her to take a second look, maybe the boy’s changed, maybe, he implies, Christine’s not quite right in the head, a side effect of so much worry and dread. Christine takes the boy home, is no more convinced than before, but LAPD, it seems, will have none of it. Case closed.

The set-up, verging on the surreal, is so wonderfully mysterious, yet something seems off. The wrong things are emphasized. Clues are conspicuously dropped. The misleadingly titled Changeling begins with Christine promising to follow a distinguished line of memorable movie characters—Simone Simon in Cat People, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, Nicole Kidman in Birth, the entire cast of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—immersed in some tale of deep unease where no one will listen to reason and the condescending patriarchy bear down with the weight of our readiness to dismiss yet another hysterical woman. But this story, scripted by TV veteran J. Michael Straczynski, directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring that famed mother of five (and counting) Angelina Jolie, has another agenda altogether, one that will render Christine far less intriguing and far more akin to Erik Brokovich than to the heroine of any brooding tale of paranoia. It comes as a disappointment, but what can you do? It’s a true story.

So Christine becomes a crusader, and, while Jolie’s curls and big eyes look marvelous under a cloche, character development consequently evaporates in the heat of a great cause, namely, exposing levels of police corruption so appalling as to speculate collaboration with the worst criminals. The bad guys and really bad and the good guys really good, which is pretty hard to swallow when you’ve got one supremely pissed off John Malkovich playing the humourless pastor and radio personality who scoops Christine up in his flamboyant campaign to bring down LAPD. The history here is absolutely fascinating stuff and right up James Ellroy’s alley, involving a demented Canadian child killer, fiendish mental institutions trigger drunk with the EST treatments, death by hanging, and telephone operators on roller skates. But how to manage it all, how to bring out the movie in it? I’m not sure that Straczynski ever found a real focal point, or that Eastwood saw the meatier possibilities behind the script’s highly sellable mix of sordidness and triumph, Chinatown with a saintly protagonist and a happy ending. (Sort of.) Changeling is uneven, always essentially interesting, and terribly long. Some of the child performances are unspeakably bad. Most of the adults simply have only one note to play (to get an inkling of Jolie's, please see the accompanying photos, especially the first and last). It might have been much more, or, better yet, something completely different. Clint, 78 and on fire these days, is too busy to care much, I guess. Trailers for his next movie are already circulating. In fact I saw one pasted onto the top of Changeling.

The case file as art: Zodiac on DVD

Watching Zodiac in its director’s cut nearly a year after the original version’s theatrical release, it feels that much more remarkable, that much more singular, this film so haunted by the unknowable, so unapologetically embracing of tracing the intricacies of laboring toward uncertainty. While seeing the film in the theatre with a captive audience unsure as to what to expect was for me at least an exhilarating happening, Warner/Paramount’s new two-disc special edition somehow completes the Zodiac experience: presenting a movie driven by obsession in a package so brimming with commentary, supplementary data and contradictory opinions, invites the viewer to obsess right along with Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the cartoonist-turned one-man investigatory team whose exhaustive books on the unsolved Zodiac murders provide the story’s foundation.

The material added by director David Fincher only fortifies the film’s slow building of character, period and engagingly banal procedural detail –not to mention humour. The scene in which Captain Lee (Dermot Mulroney) and Inspectors Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) lay out their grounds for a search warrant not to a living person but a tiny speakerphone simultaneously mounts anticipation of a new break in the case and feels vaguely like borrowed shtick from Charlie’s Angels.

Yet it’s the same details you saw the first time around that really deepen the chilling evocation of these otherwise disparate events linked only by shared trauma: the brief exchanges, alluding to complicated, intimate relationship histories, and even an unexplained sense of imminent danger, between the Zodiac’s victims at Blue Rock Springs and Lake Barryessa; the frequency with which we see Toschi eat, this man who’s life becomes consumed by Zodiac in turn seeking to comfort himself through consumption; the hysterical woman who claims to have been abducted by Zodiac (Ione Skye), hiding her baby in some bushes off the side of the highway at night; the sheer amount of time that passes while memories fade and research accumulates and gets filed away, sucked into multi-jurisdictional limbo. Just as no single member of the tremendous ensemble cast passes through Zodiac without making some distinct impression, everything in the film becomes equally absorbing, boggling the mind with the promise of some grand interconnectedness that may not truly exist.

Fincher’s commentary track is illuminating both technically (he seems, perhaps to a fault, a perfectionist of the first order) and with regards to the director’s own emotional involvement with the film, tied to his growing up in San Francisco during the Zodiac’s heyday. It’s fascinating how a project that mightn’t seem all that personal can finally become a filmmaker’s richest, finest, most idiosyncratic and humane work, and it’s revealing to hear how Fincher himself made a concentrated effort to avoid any kind of formal flourish that would detract from the clearest possible observance of character and action. This lack of flash becomes a vision in itself, and renders everything else in Fincher’s oeuvre, from the genuinely creepy if over-adorned Seven to the rather tedious Panic Room, a mere warm-up for the more serious filmmaking displayed here.

A second commentary track trades off between a laid-back Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., who are consistently amusing if not especially insightful (and Gyllenhaal kind of embarrasses himself by going on this long spiel about Raymond Carver when I’m pretty sure he means Raymond Chandler), and the power team of screenwriter James Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and, most welcome of all, novelist James Ellroy. In sly deadpan, Ellroy boldly introduces himself as “James Ellroy, King of American crime fiction… acknowledging that this film is one of the half-dozen greatest American crime films.” Now that’s how you kick-off a commentary! (Makes you wonder what the other five films are.) Vanderbilt and Fischer speak eloquently about all the varied choices that sprung from their resolve not to show anything that didn’t have a surviving eyewitness. They also discuss the sheer weirdness of the possibility that Zodiac murdered cabbie Paul Stine, then stole his glasses, put them on his face and walked away from the crime as though disguised as his victim. Ellroy meanwhile interjects with articulate reverie over the film and some terrific non-sequiturs, such as his bizarre anecdote that illustrates why he hates Donovan or what he considers to be the moral of Moby Dick.

The second disc features a nicely put-together making-of featurette that provides a sense of the strange balance between fact-based minutia and pure creativity that went into every aspect of the production. There’s also an extended documentary on each of the murders and all the particulars surrounding them, and, maybe best of all, a shorter doc solely about Arthur Leigh Allen, the deeply enigmatic prime suspect who died just before he was to meet with police one last time back in 1992. New interviews with the pivotal Don Cheney and several others who knew Allen alternate between strengthening the case against him and poking still more holes in it. Criminology experts make a convincing plea for a practice of fitting the evidence to a suspect instead of trying to fit a suspect to the evidence, yet even if certain aspects don’t fit the profile for Zodiac, Allen remains a compelling scapegoat even in death. His long, ovular face stares at us from a handful of obscure photographs, giving away precious little, ready to have whatever foul notions projected upon it, still the centre of a mystery that’s been arduously compacted into what is finally one of the great films of our age.