Movies · TV

Hardboiled and Hardcore: Detective Movies Love Diving Into the Porn Industry

By  · Published on May 19th, 2016

A long tradition adhered to by Shane Black’s The Nice Guys.

Shane Black’s The Nice Guys centers around a missing girl (Margaret Qualley). When a private eye (Ryan Gosling) and hired enforcer (Russell Crowe) team up to find her, the investigation of course leads them straight to the porn industry. After all, this is a detective movie set in Los Angeles during the 1970s. What other seedy setting would do?

There’s a long tradition of this genre involving that business, and it seems to have begun – though probably did not – with the work of iconic crime fiction author Raymond Chandler. Even before his classic 1939 Philip Marlowe novel “The Big Sleep,” he originated much of its plot with the short story “Killer in the Rain,” which deals with the murder of a blackmailing pornographer.

Because of the Hays Code, when the novel was turned into the famous Bogart and Bacall movie in 1946, the pornography element was only slightly alluded to. Similarly, Elizabeth Sanxay-Holding’s novel “The Blank Wall” was first adapted as the 1949 film noir The Reckless Moment, which changed a major character’s profession from pornographer to art dealer.

Although not without scrutiny over claims of obscenity, pulp novels got away with a lot more than their cinematic counterpoints did through the 1940s and 1950s. But both page and screen versions of the detective genre liked to incorporate at least hint of the porn trade as just one of the ways to attract audiences with salacious subject matter.

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During that time, television also stepped up to the plate with the 1954 Dragnet episode “The Big Producer,” which has Sergeant Friday (Joe Webb) investigating the distribution of pornography in high schools by a former silent film producer. In the case of the small screen, though, a plot like this wasn’t so much to titillate as address the fears of its viewers.

Fitting, then, that almost a decade later, the censorship advocacy group Citizens for Decent Literature made an infamous Dragnet-like propaganda short called Pages of Death that deals with “smut” peddlers, a missing girl, and a local political figure’s link to the industry – all of which actually makes it a cheesy precursor to The Nice Guys.

That “education” film shares stock music with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, which is interesting since Wood also made his own poorly produced detective movie involving the porn industry around the same time. Sinister Urge came out at the start of the 1960s, which saw a loosening of censorship. And combined intentions of exploitation and caution with the crime genre.

Ten years later, Wood also made a straight-up Marlowe movie wannabe in Take It Out in Trade, a sex comedy about a detective investigating a missing girl who turns up in a brothel, which is close enough that it sort of bridges porn-set noir with actual pornography, on a soft-core level anyway. Then in 1971, the early Troma film Cry Uncle!, directed by Rocky’s Roger Avildsen, also offered soft-core porn noir with a plot actually involving a porno film.

Hardcore pornographic cinema exploded in popularity in the 1970s, but it was still taboo enough that to be good fodder for hardboiled crime film plots, especially for also being one of a few vices common to the genre that was still considered taboo by many Americans. Hence the rise of the modern noir and its constant dipping into the contemporary porn industry for plots.

Among those movies of this era where porn is important to an investigation narrative are Get Carter (1971), The Newman Shame (1977), Hardcore (1979), and of course the remake of The Big Sleep (1978), which is more explicit with a few things censored in the earlier version. Plus there’s the genuine hardboiled hardcore porn classic The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, released in 1974.

Meanwhile, police procedural TV shows such as Police Woman, Columbo, and Dragnet (again) took on cases involving the porn industry from the late 1960s through the next couple decades. Examples continued on the big screen, as well, including Body Double (1984), True Confessions (1981), 52 Pick-Up (1986) and Hammett (1982), an homage to iconic detective Sam Spade creator Dashiell Hammett.

The 1990s brought two very important movies on this track leading right to The Nice Guys. Also a comedy and a pastiche of a certain time period (the earlier part of its own decade rather than the 1970s), The Big Lebowski doesn’t feature an actual detective, but its protagonist, “The Dude,” goes down a somewhat familiar noir-esque odyssey involving the investigation of a missing girl and a convoluted story of adult filmmakers.

L.A. Confidential, released six months earlier, is the other, and it’s especially relevant to Black’s new movie in that it also stars both Crowe and Kim Basinger. But its seedy settings deal more in prostitution than porn. With that movie taking place in the noir-heavy era of the 1950s, The Nice Guys gets to link and pay tribute to an even earlier time than its own period setting.

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Other movies linking private dicks to the world of exposed privates have come in the last 20 years, including Lost Highway, Freeway, Mulholland Falls, 8mm, The Black Dahlia, and Harry Brown (surprisingly the second adaptation of “The Blank Wall,” The Deep End, also kept the pornographer part out). And surely a lot more TV series have gone there, one of them being True Detective. Of course, there’s also Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

But while The Nice Guys is therefore just the latest in this long history of similar-scenario movies, it primarily harkens back to the 1970s, often feeling like it’s actually from there, in terms of production not just setting, and that’s perfect because that era remains the peak of where the hardboiled and hardcore met in proper fashion.

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Christopher Campbell began writing film criticism and covering film festivals for a zine called Read, back when a zine could actually get you Sundance press credentials. He's now a Senior Editor at FSR and the founding editor of our sister site Nonfics. He also regularly contributes to Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and is the President of the Critics Choice Association's Documentary Branch.