Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The Blue Dahlia Starring Alan Ladd

This 1946 film noir has a lot going for it. Raymond Chandler wrote the script, his only one, that was sharp enough to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The third pairing of the popular Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake were the marquee stars. The title is pretty cool, the name of the nightclub where much of the action occurs. But I thought it was a little too slow-paced, and I got a bit lost in the plot. On the other hand, I liked the snappy dialogue (street slang like "frog march" is included), and William Bendix (always underrated) turns in a top-notch job playing a shell-shocked war vet with a metal plate in his skull. Ladd as a hardboiled Navy flyer is fine, but I'm a big fan since he made the classic Western film Shane. I probably was expecting more, and The Blue Dahlia failed to live up to my high expectations. At any rate, I'd like the see the other Ladd-Lake paired films at some point. IMDb.com gives The Blue Dahlia 7.1/10.0 which seems fair to me.