After all, I had thoroughly enjoyed Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), adapted by Mr. Hanson and Brian Helgeland from another novel by Mr. Ellroy. And so I was anticipating more of the same melodramatic efficiency and expertise. Instead, I was assailed by a torturously jumbled narrative lacking either coherence or conviction, with strangely unmotivated characters crashing into each other before they have been adequately introduced, to say nothing of a strikingly unreal re-creation of 1947 Los Angeles. This last count should have come as no surprise, since, I learned later from the production notes, much of the movie had been shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, of all places.

Producer Art Linson seems to have relished the very outlandishness of this imposture: “It was great to have a production crew who maintained the control of duplicating Hollywood. You actually see the Hollywood Hills, but they’re really the hills of Sofia.”

What I also learned from the production notes was that Mr. Ellroy had been driven by the unsolved murder of his own loose-living mother, Jean Hilliker, to write his novel about the real-life unsolved murder of a 22-year-old dark-haired party girl and aspiring act­ress named Elizabeth Short. Mr. Ellroy was only 10 years old when his own mother was raped and killed on June 22, 1958, possibly on a date gone wrong. Her murderer, like Betty Short’s, was never caught by the police, so it’s understandable that Mr. Ellroy would have become obsessed with the parallel lives and deaths of the two women.

As he himself notes: “A personal story attends The Black Dahlia, both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged 11 years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life …. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.”

Unfortunately, Mr. De Palma and his collaborators have been unable to translate Mr. Ellroy’s depth of feeling into cinematic equivalents. There is a pervasive disconnection throughout the proceedings, and the trouble begins with the puzzling reconstruction of the infamous Los Angeles zoot-suit riots of 1947. As the riots are staged here, it seems that the antagonists are almost entirely sailors in white and policemen in blue. It was my impression at the time that anti-black or anti-Hispanic racism (or both) was involved in the disorders, but I failed to spot more than one or two of the fabled zoot suits onscreen. Anyway, it is at this riot that we get our first glimpses of the film’s male co-protagonists, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). Both men are former fighters who continue in the ring under the auspices of the LAPD. Shortly thereafter, we are briefly introduced to Lee’s girlfriend, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), with whom Bucky seems to have a reciprocal affinity, though the leads act for the most part as a properly companionable threesome rather than an improperly hot sexual triangle. Still, Kay does get to model some period lingerie in her inconclusive come-ons to the conscience-hobbled Bucky.

In one typically out-of-nowhere scene, Bucky’s mentally defective father, Dolph (James Otis), makes a grotesque entrance shooting pigeons from his upstairs window. In an impromptu voice-over that is always a bad sign in a screenplay, Bucky confides to the audience that he is throwing an LAPD-sponsored fight with his buddy, Lee, so that he can put his demented dad in a nursing home. When what ensues is a bone-crushing, tooth-shattering bloodfest between the two “buddies,” all I could do was sit there, puzzled and perplexed. Through all the carnage, Kay looks on in concern for both men with an expression that remains insipidly anguished to the very end of the picture.

Belatedly, it seemed to me, the two detectives are assigned to the Black Dahlia case, and here the story veers backward and forward in time, dragging in a bewildering array of new characters, each contributing a dollop of decadence to the De Palma-Friedman-Ellroy conception of 1947 Los Angeles as a hellhole of political and police corruption, organized crime and pansexual perversion. A dazzling display of crypto-lesbian chorines cavorts down an ornate nightclub staircase to a rendition of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (sung, for good measure, by K.D. Lang). This was reportedly the last scene shot in Sofia, and the zest of the Bulgarian extras involved in the number made me wonder if the world has actually become too decadent to self-destruct.

In the end, both Bucky and Lee are consumed by the case, Lee fatally, but don’t ask me how or why. My guess is that the screenplay covered too many of the book’s many tangents without properly preparing the audience for these dizzying shifts of focus.

Ms. Johansson remains becalmed in a pallid part, in contrast to the overcooked temptress of Hilary Swank’s Madeleine Linscott, who projects both a heterosexual hubris with Bucky and a lesbian libido with the reluctant murder victim, Betty Short, played winningly by Mia Kirshner. As it happens, Ms. Kirshner is the only performer in the cast that I considered more than adequate, despite what would normally be the insurmountable task of evoking a Vivien Leigh– or Hedy Lamarr–style brunette beauty in her screen test and stag film.

As for Madeleine’s snooty-rich and crazy parents, Ramona and Emmett Linscott (Fiona Shaw and John Kavanagh), they are so far over the top, both as characters and performers, that they evoked widespread giggles of disbelief. Mr. Eckhart, usually a superlative presence, was handicapped here by not being a more dominant figure. He wasn’t free to explain his own bizarre behavior without being perpetually prejudged by both Bucky and Kay.

Yet as I watched the film during its late, confusing climactic sections, I was strangely moved by the musical score, not so much for its aptness in the film as for its evocation of another De Palma movie, The Untouchables (1987), with music by the great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone—specifically, the haunting trumpet melody mourning the murders of the T-men played by Sean Connery and Charles Martin Smith. For all I know, jazz trumpeter and composer Mark Isham, who composed the music for The Black Dahlia, may have played for Mr. Morricone on that occasion. But nothing in The Black Dahlia moved me as much as those two deaths in The Untouchables, which still resonates in my memory after almost 20 years. I have to give Mr. De Palma some credit for that. And while we’re talking about Ms. Kirshner, her luminous performance in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) still lingers like music in my memory as well. As for Mr. Hartnett, he is, as always, merely O.K., as is Ms. Swank.

The media mavens of the 40’s exploited the “Black Dahlia” tag in their headlines after a popular noir movie, The Blue Dahlia, was released in 1946, just before the gruesome Betty Short murder. The movie starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake and was directed by George Marshall, with a screenplay by the redoubtable Raymond Chandler—but aside from the (far more comparatively tame) murder of an oversexed party girl that gets the plot going, the movie has no thematic resemblance to The Black Dahlia.

Super Ben

Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland, from a screenplay by Paul Bernbaum, works much better than it should because of Ben Affleck’s stirring reincarnation of the ill-fated George Reeves, whose pathetic claim to showbiz fame was his brief 50’s vogue, especially among the kiddies and their parents, in television’s The Adventures of Superman. Hollywoodland gets a few laughs from the show’s cheesy Ed Wood–like production effects, but the dignity and sobriety that Mr. Affleck projects as Reeves keeps the sheer ridiculousness of his limited career options from ever becoming too campy. Indeed, the most startling moments in the movie arrive unexpectedly, such as in a scene where Reeves is doing a promotional appearance as Superman. Suddenly a little boy steps out of the crowd with a real loaded pistol in his hand and asks Superman if he can shoot him so that he can watch the bullets bounce off his chest. Mr. Affleck manages a masterly blend of steely-eyed fear and vocal calm to persuade the boy to let Superman have his gun so that the bouncing bullets don’t hurt anyone in the crowd. A strategic close-up of the pistol reminds us that Mr. Coulter, though making his theatrical-film debut in Hollywoodland, has sharpened his directorial skills with some of the most impressive episodes of such excellent cable-television series as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Sex and the City. Hence, Mr. Coulter’s direction isn’t long on scenic grandeur and crowd scenes, but it is very adept with dramatic confrontations and revelatory insights from the actors. On the other hand, Mr. Bernbaum’s screenplay has been roundly condemned for its rigorous alternation of episodes from the past, leading up to Mr. Reeves’ supposed suicide in the 50’s, and the bitter aftermath, centered on an investigator named Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) who is trying to reopen the case and prove that Reeves was actually murdered.

As the movie plays out its improbable premises, I am far from convinced that the adverse criticism is at all justified. In these situations, as in the much-cited Citizen Kane, the past is usually more compelling than the present—but somehow, I don’t think that the misadventures of George Reeves in Hollywood were substantial enough to carry the movie on their own. His liaisons with the bountiful older wife of a movie executive, and his last days with a conniving younger woman, are best taken intermittently and in small doses. This cautionary dictum applies even though both Diane Lane as his generous mistress, and Robin Tunney as his bitchy last fling, give a great deal extra to their parts to avoid facile stereotyping.

For his part, Mr. Brody invests his seemingly thankless role of a troublemaking loser with so much underdog indestructibility that he keeps the movie going even as the Reeves character is sinking deeper and deeper into the slough of despond. Without the would-be sleuth’s always engaging life force, the dismal story of George Reeves would have nowhere to go except straight into the trash heap of broken Hollywood dreams. It helps that the movie is also enhanced by the sterling contributions of an exemplary supporting cast headed by Bob Hoskins as studio honcho Eddie Mannix, the patient husband of Reeves’ mistress; Lois Smith as Reeves’ calculating mother; Jeffrey DeMunn as Reeves’ poignantly loyal agent; and Joe Spano as studio trouble-shooter Howard Strickling, who gives Mr. Brody’s private eye the most trouble in his efforts to upset the peace of mind of the Hollywood powers-that-be. Simo winds up not only abandoned by his wife Laurie (Molly Parker) but also rebuffed by his little boy Evan (Zach Mills)—who, ironically, is inconsolable over the death of Superman. Take my word for it: Hollywoodland is well worth seeing.

Dillon’s Song

Bent Hamer’s Factotum, from a screenplay by Mr. Hamer and producer Jim Stark, is based on the novel by Charles Bukowski, as well as excerpts from his books The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, and The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. The boozy, bohemian world of Bukowski (1920-1994) has been cinematically celebrated before, most notably in Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, with a screenplay by Bukowski himself. Factotum is right up there with Barfly as a distillation of Bukowskian badinage, despite the current film’s sketchier provenance. The main reason for this is the deadpan resilience of the splendid cast, headed by an interestingly maturing Matt Dillon, a luminously lyrical Lili Taylor and a casually sensual Marisa Tomei. Their Hank, Jan and Laura, respectively, provide the self-indulgent Bukowski with more selfless humanity than I think he deserves. Mine may be an unfashionable opinion, but after I applaud the actors, I sit on my hands when the author takes his bow—and I mean Bukowski, not Mr. Hamer nor Mr. Stark. They are budding authors.

After all, I had thoroughly enjoyed Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), adapted by Mr. Hanson and Brian Helgeland from another novel by Mr. Ellroy. And so I was anticipating more of the same melodramatic efficiency and expertise. Instead, I was assailed by a torturously jumbled narrative lacking either coherence or conviction, with strangely unmotivated characters crashing into each other before they have been adequately introduced, to say nothing of a strikingly unreal re-creation of 1947 Los Angeles. This last count should have come as no surprise, since, I learned later from the production notes, much of the movie had been shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, of all places.

Producer Art Linson seems to have relished the very outlandishness of this imposture: “It was great to have a production crew who maintained the control of duplicating Hollywood. You actually see the Hollywood Hills, but they’re really the hills of Sofia.”

What I also learned from the production notes was that Mr. Ellroy had been driven by the unsolved murder of his own loose-living mother, Jean Hilliker, to write his novel about the real-life unsolved murder of a 22-year-old dark-haired party girl and aspiring act­ress named Elizabeth Short. Mr. Ellroy was only 10 years old when his own mother was raped and killed on June 22, 1958, possibly on a date gone wrong. Her murderer, like Betty Short’s, was never caught by the police, so it’s understandable that Mr. Ellroy would have become obsessed with the parallel lives and deaths of the two women.

As he himself notes: “A personal story attends The Black Dahlia, both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged 11 years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life …. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.”

Unfortunately, Mr. De Palma and his collaborators have been unable to translate Mr. Ellroy’s depth of feeling into cinematic equivalents. There is a pervasive disconnection throughout the proceedings, and the trouble begins with the puzzling reconstruction of the infamous Los Angeles zoot-suit riots of 1947. As the riots are staged here, it seems that the antagonists are almost entirely sailors in white and policemen in blue. It was my impression at the time that anti-black or anti-Hispanic racism (or both) was involved in the disorders, but I failed to spot more than one or two of the fabled zoot suits onscreen. Anyway, it is at this riot that we get our first glimpses of the film’s male co-protagonists, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). Both men are former fighters who continue in the ring under the auspices of the LAPD. Shortly thereafter, we are briefly introduced to Lee’s girlfriend, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), with whom Bucky seems to have a reciprocal affinity, though the leads act for the most part as a properly companionable threesome rather than an improperly hot sexual triangle. Still, Kay does get to model some period lingerie in her inconclusive come-ons to the conscience-hobbled Bucky.

In one typically out-of-nowhere scene, Bucky’s mentally defective father, Dolph (James Otis), makes a grotesque entrance shooting pigeons from his upstairs window. In an impromptu voice-over that is always a bad sign in a screenplay, Bucky confides to the audience that he is throwing an LAPD-sponsored fight with his buddy, Lee, so that he can put his demented dad in a nursing home. When what ensues is a bone-crushing, tooth-shattering bloodfest between the two “buddies,” all I could do was sit there, puzzled and perplexed. Through all the carnage, Kay looks on in concern for both men with an expression that remains insipidly anguished to the very end of the picture.

Belatedly, it seemed to me, the two detectives are assigned to the Black Dahlia case, and here the story veers backward and forward in time, dragging in a bewildering array of new characters, each contributing a dollop of decadence to the De Palma-Friedman-Ellroy conception of 1947 Los Angeles as a hellhole of political and police corruption, organized crime and pansexual perversion. A dazzling display of crypto-lesbian chorines cavorts down an ornate nightclub staircase to a rendition of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” (sung, for good measure, by K.D. Lang). This was reportedly the last scene shot in Sofia, and the zest of the Bulgarian extras involved in the number made me wonder if the world has actually become too decadent to self-destruct.

In the end, both Bucky and Lee are consumed by the case, Lee fatally, but don’t ask me how or why. My guess is that the screenplay covered too many of the book’s many tangents without properly preparing the audience for these dizzying shifts of focus.

Ms. Johansson remains becalmed in a pallid part, in contrast to the overcooked temptress of Hilary Swank’s Madeleine Linscott, who projects both a heterosexual hubris with Bucky and a lesbian libido with the reluctant murder victim, Betty Short, played winningly by Mia Kirshner. As it happens, Ms. Kirshner is the only performer in the cast that I considered more than adequate, despite what would normally be the insurmountable task of evoking a Vivien Leigh– or Hedy Lamarr–style brunette beauty in her screen test and stag film.

As for Madeleine’s snooty-rich and crazy parents, Ramona and Emmett Linscott (Fiona Shaw and John Kavanagh), they are so far over the top, both as characters and performers, that they evoked widespread giggles of disbelief. Mr. Eckhart, usually a superlative presence, was handicapped here by not being a more dominant figure. He wasn’t free to explain his own bizarre behavior without being perpetually prejudged by both Bucky and Kay.

Yet as I watched the film during its late, confusing climactic sections, I was strangely moved by the musical score, not so much for its aptness in the film as for its evocation of another De Palma movie, The Untouchables (1987), with music by the great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone—specifically, the haunting trumpet melody mourning the murders of the T-men played by Sean Connery and Charles Martin Smith. For all I know, jazz trumpeter and composer Mark Isham, who composed the music for The Black Dahlia, may have played for Mr. Morricone on that occasion. But nothing in The Black Dahlia moved me as much as those two deaths in The Untouchables, which still resonates in my memory after almost 20 years. I have to give Mr. De Palma some credit for that. And while we’re talking about Ms. Kirshner, her luminous performance in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) still lingers like music in my memory as well. As for Mr. Hartnett, he is, as always, merely O.K., as is Ms. Swank.

The media mavens of the 40’s exploited the “Black Dahlia” tag in their headlines after a popular noir movie, The Blue Dahlia, was released in 1946, just before the gruesome Betty Short murder. The movie starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake and was directed by George Marshall, with a screenplay by the redoubtable Raymond Chandler—but aside from the (far more comparatively tame) murder of an oversexed party girl that gets the plot going, the movie has no thematic resemblance to The Black Dahlia.

Super Ben

Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland, from a screenplay by Paul Bernbaum, works much better than it should because of Ben Affleck’s stirring reincarnation of the ill-fated George Reeves, whose pathetic claim to showbiz fame was his brief 50’s vogue, especially among the kiddies and their parents, in television’s The Adventures of Superman. Hollywoodland gets a few laughs from the show’s cheesy Ed Wood–like production effects, but the dignity and sobriety that Mr. Affleck projects as Reeves keeps the sheer ridiculousness of his limited career options from ever becoming too campy. Indeed, the most startling moments in the movie arrive unexpectedly, such as in a scene where Reeves is doing a promotional appearance as Superman. Suddenly a little boy steps out of the crowd with a real loaded pistol in his hand and asks Superman if he can shoot him so that he can watch the bullets bounce off his chest. Mr. Affleck manages a masterly blend of steely-eyed fear and vocal calm to persuade the boy to let Superman have his gun so that the bouncing bullets don’t hurt anyone in the crowd. A strategic close-up of the pistol reminds us that Mr. Coulter, though making his theatrical-film debut in Hollywoodland, has sharpened his directorial skills with some of the most impressive episodes of such excellent cable-television series as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Sex and the City. Hence, Mr. Coulter’s direction isn’t long on scenic grandeur and crowd scenes, but it is very adept with dramatic confrontations and revelatory insights from the actors. On the other hand, Mr. Bernbaum’s screenplay has been roundly condemned for its rigorous alternation of episodes from the past, leading up to Mr. Reeves’ supposed suicide in the 50’s, and the bitter aftermath, centered on an investigator named Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) who is trying to reopen the case and prove that Reeves was actually murdered.

As the movie plays out its improbable premises, I am far from convinced that the adverse criticism is at all justified. In these situations, as in the much-cited Citizen Kane, the past is usually more compelling than the present—but somehow, I don’t think that the misadventures of George Reeves in Hollywood were substantial enough to carry the movie on their own. His liaisons with the bountiful older wife of a movie executive, and his last days with a conniving younger woman, are best taken intermittently and in small doses. This cautionary dictum applies even though both Diane Lane as his generous mistress, and Robin Tunney as his bitchy last fling, give a great deal extra to their parts to avoid facile stereotyping.

For his part, Mr. Brody invests his seemingly thankless role of a troublemaking loser with so much underdog indestructibility that he keeps the movie going even as the Reeves character is sinking deeper and deeper into the slough of despond. Without the would-be sleuth’s always engaging life force, the dismal story of George Reeves would have nowhere to go except straight into the trash heap of broken Hollywood dreams. It helps that the movie is also enhanced by the sterling contributions of an exemplary supporting cast headed by Bob Hoskins as studio honcho Eddie Mannix, the patient husband of Reeves’ mistress; Lois Smith as Reeves’ calculating mother; Jeffrey DeMunn as Reeves’ poignantly loyal agent; and Joe Spano as studio trouble-shooter Howard Strickling, who gives Mr. Brody’s private eye the most trouble in his efforts to upset the peace of mind of the Hollywood powers-that-be. Simo winds up not only abandoned by his wife Laurie (Molly Parker) but also rebuffed by his little boy Evan (Zach Mills)—who, ironically, is inconsolable over the death of Superman. Take my word for it: Hollywoodland is well worth seeing.

Dillon’s Song

Bent Hamer’s Factotum, from a screenplay by Mr. Hamer and producer Jim Stark, is based on the novel by Charles Bukowski, as well as excerpts from his books The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, and The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. The boozy, bohemian world of Bukowski (1920-1994) has been cinematically celebrated before, most notably in Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, with a screenplay by Bukowski himself. Factotum is right up there with Barfly as a distillation of Bukowskian badinage, despite the current film’s sketchier provenance. The main reason for this is the deadpan resilience of the splendid cast, headed by an interestingly maturing Matt Dillon, a luminously lyrical Lili Taylor and a casually sensual Marisa Tomei. Their Hank, Jan and Laura, respectively, provide the self-indulgent Bukowski with more selfless humanity than I think he deserves. Mine may be an unfashionable opinion, but after I applaud the actors, I sit on my hands when the author takes his bow—and I mean Bukowski, not Mr. Hamer nor Mr. Stark. They are budding authors.

Like Macbeth, Superman may be a role that is always jinxed. (See Christopher Reeve.) But the downfall and lurid death of George Reeves, who to millions of kids growing up in the 1950’s was an action-hero comic-book icon, was creepy even by Hollywood standards, forever tainted by a special kind of tabloid poison. After playing one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors in Gone with the Wind, the promising career he banked on never ignited. And after changing from mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent into the corny caped crusader from Krypton in thousands of convenient phone booths in 104 cheesy episodes of the Superman TV show, Reeves was depressed, disillusioned and down for the count. One June night in 1959, his naked body was found dead of a single gunshot wound in the upstairs bedroom of his Hollywood home, a Hollywood has-been at 45. It went down as an apparent suicide, but many criminal theories have been floating around for nearly 50 years, and this impressively researched movie explores them all.

Like parallel lines, director Allen Coulter (The Sopranos) and writer Paul Bernbaum blend the facts of Reeves’ life with the investigation of a fictional gumshoe named Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) and find enough illuminating similarities to make a film that sizzles like bacon in a hot skillet. On the TV screen, Reeves was a big, overgrown Boy Scout, coming out of his bulging tights in all the wrong places, working for truth, justice and the American Way in black and white. In reality, he was not loyal, trustworthy, brave, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty or a straight shooter. He was broken, troubled, sleazy and desperate—not a player, not even close enough to the Hollywood action to be an observer.

Simo, as tough as Bogart, is a deadbeat dad working out of a seedy motel room, feeding off the scraps that respectable cops wouldn’t touch. When Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) refuses to believe her son was a suicide, Simo smells a murder case that will make him a star. And there is evidence that he might be onto something. The real detective, Jerry Geisler, died before he could prove anything, but the movie doesn’t hide from name-dropping. Among the suspects: Reeves’ jealous longtime lover, Toni Mannix (Diane Lane, luscious even with bags and dewlaps); her dangerous husband, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), ex-mobster and MGM executive; Reeves’ fiancée, Lenore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), who was inside the house when the gun went off; and tough MGM publicist Howard Strickling (Joe Spano), who “fixed” every scandal in town for a price. With so many colorful suspects, variable motives, contradictory clues, and period sets and costumes dripping with florid 50’s details, the setup for a perfect crime thriller is guaranteed. With Rita Hayworth dancing at Ciro’s and the Saturday-afternoon cowboy serials so cheap that everyone on the set rode the same horse, Hollywoodland evokes some of the same scuzzy glamour as L.A. Confidential.

In the end, the struggling actor, flying through the air in his Superman tights but getting nowhere, and the seedy investigator, hungry for publicity, money and self-respect while digging his own grave, merge into one hopeless footnote to Hollywood infamy. A terrific cast pumps suspense into the nervous system of this movie like adrenalin. No one is what he seems. Even the mother has a hidden agenda, pretending to preserve George’s integrity but driven by greed to hold onto the spillover from his klieg light as long as she can. The whole movie is a dour comment on the dark side of make-believe.

Who killed Superman? If it was suicide, why was one fatal shot fired from his revolver, with three bullets found near the body and no fingerprints on the gun? The mystery continues. Regardless of my own theory, I will always be left with the final wrenching shot of George Reeves himself, played with pain and sympathy by Ben Affleck—leaving his guests and wearily climbing the stairs alone to his death in a bathrobe, wearing the encroaching ravages of the aging process like scars.

Big Bust

If Bill Paxton had already charged his battery with the career-making leap to stardom he’s now enjoying as the hunky, harassed, overextended and Viagra-chomping polygamist in the HBO series Big Love, I bet he would never have said “yes” to an empty and moribund little item called Haven. But to be fair, this forgettable indie-prod—from the Cayman Islands, of all places, and directed by a native Caymanian named Frank Flowers—was in the can long before the versatile and underrated Mr. Paxton ever read the first script for Big Love. Introduced (to no applause) at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival, it was given up for dead. But here it is, riding in on the crest of Mr. Paxton’s fresh popularity as television’s most oversexed new leading man. In Haven, he doesn’t do anything wrong; he’s just wasted.

A meandering crime drama about murder and money-laundering in the tax-free Caymans, the film is woven from the interconnected stories of Americans, British expatriates and local island inhabitants, told at a snail’s pace through a confusing snarl of flashbacks and flash-forwards that keep you wondering where you are and why. Mr. Paxton plays an unscrupulous Miami businessman who flees to the palm-fringed paradise to avoid federal prosecution, with his precocious 18-year-old daughter Pippa (Agnes Bruckner) and a million dollars in tow. While she’s getting sick from sampling the local drugs, her path crosses those of a shady lawyer (Stephen Dillane) and a local junior G-man (Victor Rasuk) who are both planning to steal the undeclared fortune her father is hiding illegally. The film’s muddled emotional center, however, is the passionate and forbidden sex between a vicious thug’s beautiful daughter (Zoe Saldana) and a pouting fisherman, played by the mystifyingly overexposed and undeniably untalented Orlando Bloom. Their ill-fated secret affair leads to anger, vengeance, revenge, betrayals and a crime so violent that the parrots fly screaming into the banana trees while the audience heads for the exit doors.

In a tiresome attempt to emulate Traffic and Crash, the film jumps around in time, with some scenes repeated for no reason, but even when a lot seems to be going on at once, there’s no serious stab at characterization or plot development. Not that it matters: Most of the characters speak in such a bland patois that you can’t decipher what they’re saying anyway. Employing a docudrama style, writer-director Flowers tries to show the evil lurking beneath the surface tranquility of beautiful beaches, exotic cocktails and vacation villas with ocean views. According to Haven, the Caymans are bouncing off the coral reefs with drug problems, racial hypocrisy, domestic beatings and vehicular homicides, and everyone comes to a bad end there. For protection, you obviously need more than coconut-oil suntan lotion. I don’t think you’d want a timeshare.

Some of the performances are vivid—especially Bill Paxton, who convincingly balances the roles of white-collar criminal and doting, clueless father, and Stephen Dillane, whose calm and genial attorney demeanor masks a savage cruelty. Appearing in one flop after another, the allure of Orlando Bloom is wearing out fast. With the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to keep him alive, his teenage glam appeal seems incurable, but with any luck, his work in Haven as a brooding beachcomber Heathcliff could finally provide the antidote.

Like Macbeth, Superman may be a role that is always jinxed. (See Christopher Reeve.) But the downfall and lurid death of George Reeves, who to millions of kids growing up in the 1950’s was an action-hero comic-book icon, was creepy even by Hollywood standards, forever tainted by a special kind of tabloid poison. After playing one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors in Gone with the Wind, the promising career he banked on never ignited. And after changing from mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent into the corny caped crusader from Krypton in thousands of convenient phone booths in 104 cheesy episodes of the Superman TV show, Reeves was depressed, disillusioned and down for the count. One June night in 1959, his naked body was found dead of a single gunshot wound in the upstairs bedroom of his Hollywood home, a Hollywood has-been at 45. It went down as an apparent suicide, but many criminal theories have been floating around for nearly 50 years, and this impressively researched movie explores them all.

Like parallel lines, director Allen Coulter ( The Sopranos) and writer Paul Bernbaum blend the facts of Reeves’ life with the investigation of a fictional gumshoe named Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) and find enough illuminating similarities to make a film that sizzles like bacon in a hot skillet. On the TV screen, Reeves was a big, overgrown Boy Scout, coming out of his bulging tights in all the wrong places, working for truth, justice and the American Way in black and white. In reality, he was not loyal, trustworthy, brave, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty or a straight shooter. He was broken, troubled, sleazy and desperate—not a player, not even close enough to the Hollywood action to be an observer.

Simo, as tough as Bogart, is a deadbeat dad working out of a seedy motel room, feeding off the scraps that respectable cops wouldn’t touch. When Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) refuses to believe her son was a suicide, Simo smells a murder case that will make him a star. And there is evidence that he might be onto something. The real detective, Jerry Geisler, died before he could prove anything, but the movie doesn’t hide from name-dropping. Among the suspects: Reeves’ jealous longtime lover, Toni Mannix (Diane Lane, luscious even with bags and dewlaps); her dangerous husband, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), ex-mobster and MGM executive; Reeves’ fiancée, Lenore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), who was inside the house when the gun went off; and tough MGM publicist Howard Strickling (Joe Spano), who “fixed” every scandal in town for a price. With so many colorful suspects, variable motives, contradictory clues, and period sets and costumes dripping with florid 50’s details, the setup for a perfect crime thriller is guaranteed. With Rita Hayworth dancing at Ciro’s and the Saturday-afternoon cowboy serials so cheap that everyone on the set rode the same horse, Hollywoodland evokes some of the same scuzzy glamour as L.A. Confidential.

In the end, the struggling actor, flying through the air in his Superman tights but getting nowhere, and the seedy investigator, hungry for publicity, money and self-respect while digging his own grave, merge into one hopeless footnote to Hollywood infamy. A terrific cast pumps suspense into the nervous system of this movie like adrenalin. No one is what he seems. Even the mother has a hidden agenda, pretending to preserve George’s integrity but driven by greed to hold onto the spillover from his klieg light as long as she can. The whole movie is a dour comment on the dark side of make-believe.

Who killed Superman? If it was suicide, why was one fatal shot fired from his revolver, with three bullets found near the body and no fingerprints on the gun? The mystery continues. Regardless of my own theory, I will always be left with the final wrenching shot of George Reeves himself, played with pain and sympathy by Ben Affleck—leaving his guests and wearily climbing the stairs alone to his death in a bathrobe, wearing the encroaching ravages of the aging process like scars.

Big Bust

If Bill Paxton had already charged his battery with the career-making leap to stardom he’s now enjoying as the hunky, harassed, overextended and Viagra-chomping polygamist in the HBO series Big Love, I bet he would never have said “yes” to an empty and moribund little item called Haven. But to be fair, this forgettable indie-prod—from the Cayman Islands, of all places, and directed by a native Caymanian named Frank Flowers—was in the can long before the versatile and underrated Mr. Paxton ever read the first script for Big Love. Introduced (to no applause) at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival, it was given up for dead. But here it is, riding in on the crest of Mr. Paxton’s fresh popularity as television’s most oversexed new leading man. In Haven, he doesn’t do anything wrong; he’s just wasted.

A meandering crime drama about murder and money-laundering in the tax-free Caymans, the film is woven from the interconnected stories of Americans, British expatriates and local island inhabitants, told at a snail’s pace through a confusing snarl of flashbacks and flash-forwards that keep you wondering where you are and why. Mr. Paxton plays an unscrupulous Miami businessman who flees to the palm-fringed paradise to avoid federal prosecution, with his precocious 18-year-old daughter Pippa (Agnes Bruckner) and a million dollars in tow. While she’s getting sick from sampling the local drugs, her path crosses those of a shady lawyer (Stephen Dillane) and a local junior G-man (Victor Rasuk) who are both planning to steal the undeclared fortune her father is hiding illegally. The film’s muddled emotional center, however, is the passionate and forbidden sex between a vicious thug’s beautiful daughter (Zoe Saldana) and a pouting fisherman, played by the mystifyingly overexposed and undeniably untalented Orlando Bloom. Their ill-fated secret affair leads to anger, vengeance, revenge, betrayals and a crime so violent that the parrots fly screaming into the banana trees while the audience heads for the exit doors.

In a tiresome attempt to emulate Traffic and Crash, the film jumps around in time, with some scenes repeated for no reason, but even when a lot seems to be going on at once, there’s no serious stab at characterization or plot development. Not that it matters: Most of the characters speak in such a bland patois that you can’t decipher what they’re saying anyway. Employing a docudrama style, writer-director Flowers tries to show the evil lurking beneath the surface tranquility of beautiful beaches, exotic cocktails and vacation villas with ocean views. According to Haven, the Caymans are bouncing off the coral reefs with drug problems, racial hypocrisy, domestic beatings and vehicular homicides, and everyone comes to a bad end there. For protection, you obviously need more than coconut-oil suntan lotion. I don’t think you’d want a timeshare.

Some of the performances are vivid—especially Bill Paxton, who convincingly balances the roles of white-collar criminal and doting, clueless father, and Stephen Dillane, whose calm and genial attorney demeanor masks a savage cruelty. Appearing in one flop after another, the allure of Orlando Bloom is wearing out fast. With the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to keep him alive, his teenage glam appeal seems incurable, but with any luck, his work in Haven as a brooding beachcomber Heathcliff could finally provide the antidote.