CINEMA: THREE L.A. COPS, ONE PHILIP MARLOWE

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Try to imagine this: a mainstream American movie, rife with violent and often murderous behavior, yet so densely plotted, so richly peopled, that you can't summarize it in a sentence. Or a paragraph. Or several of them. Imagine, as well, a film set in the exotic past--Los Angeles in the noirish '50s--that tends to make the mass audience skittish. And imagine too a cast of terrific actors that lacks the reassuring presence of a megastar who can, as they say, open a picture.

Now try to imagine the pitch meeting for this project. Or the nervous marketing meetings that follow. Better still, imagine yourself at the earliest possible showing of L.A. Confidential, watching alchemist-director Curtis Hanson (who shares screenwriting credit with Brian Helgeland) turn pulpmeister James Ellroy's brutal, bustling novel into something like cinematic gold.

To cut to the heart of its intricacy, the film basically follows the misfortunes of three Los Angeles cops as they trace the links among the murder of a corrupt colleague, a pioneer of sleazoid celebrity journalism (Danny DeVito, who brings huge comic relish to the role), a shadowy social climber (David Straithairn), who is enamored of underworld glamour, a call girl (an entrancing Kim Basinger) working for a service whose employees are obliged to imitate movie stars (she's the Veronica Lake look-alike), and, eventually, major players in the Los Angeles law-enforcement hierarchy.

Whew! This is Raymond Chandler's penchant for complex high-low conspiracies writ large. And we haven't even mentioned the police riot, the body decomposing in the basement or the hanging of the D.A. out his office window by his heels in order to elicit information. Nor have we considered the natures of the three lead detectives, who, once they start working in atonal concert, sort of add up to one Philip Marlowe.

This trio includes Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey, never more engagingly slippery), who is the technical adviser to a Dragnet-like TV show and is becoming a celebrity in his own right; Bud White (Australian actor Russell Crowe), who's a sweet, plodding sort of guy unless someone visits violence on women, which turns him into a raging brute; and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce, another Aussie), the departmental priss and spoilsport, thoroughly despised by everyone, as moral centers of amoral enterprises should be--until they turn out to have been right all along.

If you have to spend time in a labyrinth, these are the kind of guys to do it with--tough, canny realists who can follow a tangled thread to daylight. Well, hmmm, daylight. There's not much of that in L.A. Confidential. It's a movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock. But it's no idle exercise in style. The film's look suggests how deep the tradition of police corruption runs. And that, paradoxically, makes it as outrageous (and outraging) as tomorrow's headlines will surely be.

--By Richard Schickel