ITALY: The 63rd annual Venice Film Festival makes an elegant entrance with the world premiere of "Black Dahlia" starring Scarlett Johansson

The Venice Film Festival kicked off on Wednesday (August 30) with the world premiere of "The Black Dahlia", a sepia-tinted throwback to 1940s Hollywood based on a grisly real-life murder that remains unsolved to this day. Starring Scarlett Johansson, two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett, Brian de Palma's heavily stylised adaptation of a James Ellroy novel begins 11 days of movies, stars and parties along the fashionable Lido beach front. Twenty-one year old Johansson wooed fans and paparazzi as she turned out for the evening premiere of Black Dahlia, joined by co-stars Hartnett, Mia Kirshner and Aaron Eckhart. The highly anticipated movie is one of four major U.S. productions in Venice this year that focus on true murder stories from the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The title The Black Dahlia is taken from the nickname given to Elizabeth Short, a young aspiring actress whose grisly death in 1947 gripped Los Angeles. Short's body was discovered naked and cut in half at the waist. Her organs had been removed, blood was drained from her body and the killer had bludgeoned and sodomised her and slit her mouth from ear to ear. Ellroy's novel, which layers fiction on to the factual murder, was the writer's way of coping with his own mother's death by strangulation in 1958 in another unsolved case. The actors in this modern "film noir", much of which was shot on set in Bulgaria, drew inspiration from screen giants from the 1940s and 50s including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Fred MacMurray and Rita Hayworth. The movie is a fitting opening to a festival also featuring competition entrants "Hollywoodland", about the mysterious death of Superman TV star George Reeves in 1959, and "Bobby", about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. Hollywoodland stars Diane Lane, Adrien Brody, Ben Affleck and Bob Hoskins, while Sharon Stone, Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan appear in Emilio Estevez's Bobby. Out of competition is "Infamous", Douglas McGrath's take on the life of crime writer Truman Capote featuring Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig and Gwyneth Paltrow.

ITN Source | August 31, 2006

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