`Dahlia' overflows with too much noir

For its sheer gothic horror, handiness as a cautionary tale about broken Hollywood dreams and enduring mystery, the grisly murder of Elizabeth Short, a wannabe starlet whose mutilated body was found cut in half a few inches from the sidewalk on an empty lot in the middle of Los Angeles in 1947, continues to exert a macabre fascination over our psyches. Or maybe it's just all the cross-promotion. Either way, it helps explain why James Ellroy used the story of the Black Dahlia, as she came to be known, as a springboard for a novel, but not quite why he dived from it into a turgid pudding of noir conventions, lurid melodrama, stock characters and more improbably staggered subplots than a Prague cemetery.

Like the book that inspired it, Brian De Palma's "The Black Dahlia" feels a little like a bait and switch -- or, more accurately, a bait and dump. The overripe period detail, doused in thick, glowing amber (is this a movie or a pancake?), has a kitsch waxworks quality to it, complete with the kind of hard-boiled '40s-era voice-over that no doubt made Edward G. Robinson a very popular party guest. The brief glimpses we do get of the Dahlia herself, both as a gruesome corpse in police photos and as a sad lost girl in myriad screen tests, are the most compelling thing about the movie. But even she gets lost in the teeming swarm of morally compromised and terminally obsessive characters, each burdened with a byzantine past and hulls full of florid baggage.

Josh Hartnett, an innocent in an Alfalfa hairstyle, plays Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert, a former boxer turned cop who agrees to participate in a publicity match for the LAPD against another prizefighter turned cop named Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). Bucky is a poor kid from Lincoln Heights, and if he seems too young and too pretty to be so cruelly disillusioned, well, check out his batty father. He shoots pigeons from the window for fun! The much-publicized fight wins Bucky and Lee matching promotions and marks the beginning of their friendship, their professional partnership, their platonic \o7menage\f7 \o7a trois\f7 and their trip down the rabbit hole of pure L.A. gothic.