Swank, who puts some Katharine Hepburn into her voice and just as much conviction into the rest of her performance, delivers the goods. Fire: Josh Hartnett, left, and Aaron Eckhart. There’s craziness in this book: it feels as if it were written by a man possessed. Confidential,” made into a 1997 film by Curtis Hanson, “The Black Dahlia” hurtles along, propelled by that obsession and by rage. Like the other books in the quartet, including “L. His mother’s unsolved murder haunted him, and it led to an early, obsessive interest in Betty Short. He was just 10 in 1958 when she was murdered, and her body dumped, like that of Betty Short, by the side of the road as if it were garbage. Quartet,” a series of pulpy page-turners that begin in the early 1940’s and end more than a decade later, his “Black Dahlia” is dedicated to his mother, Geneva. Hammy would be more fitting.) When not chasing leads, Bucky and Lee like to play house with Lee’s girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett Johansson), a plush blonde with a throaty laugh and battle scars. Fire, respectively, for their wildly different temperaments.

In the boxing ring where they mix it up on behalf of their superiors, the men are called Mr.

You meet Betty Short (Mia Kirshner), or at least an idea of her, only briefly in “The Black Dahlia.” Like the James Ellroy novel on which the film is based, the story mostly turns on the violent ups and downs of two detectives hot on the case, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). It was the kind of moniker that later looked particularly striking emblazoned in newspaper headlines. She was restless and broke, and wore her hair and clothes black, which is how she earned her nickname. What she found was nice weather and lots of men who were probably hoping for more than a smile in exchange for a hot meal. Betty, as she was often called, had moved from Massachusetts to Southern California to look for work and to meet her absent father. This waxy white shape was the neatly severed body of a 22-year-old woman named Elizabeth Short. 15, 1947, a housewife pushing a baby carriage saw what she thought was a store mannequin lying in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles. In “The Black Dahlia,” though, that life has been drained from the filmmaking, much as the blood was drained from the victim’s body. Blood runs through his work, but so does juicy life. At their finest, his films are marvels of virtuosity, alive to the contradictory, at times disreputable pleasures of the movies. De Palma has a flair for the frenzy of violence, specifically when visited on the female body, which makes him seem an ideal fit for this spectacularly cruel crime. THE union of Brian De Palma and the murdered woman known as the Black Dahlia should have been a marriage made in movie heaven or, preferably, hell.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy