Few eras continue to obsess moviemakers like the Los Angeles boom years after World War II, a time when Hollywood made some of its greatest movies and filmmakers would have you believe the city was filled with noble gumshoes, women in trouble and glamour tempered only by despair.

The noir tradition continues this month with the release of “Hollywoodland” and “The Black Dahlia.” While the first film dramatizes the death of “Superman” star George Reeves, the “The Black Dahlia” revisits the brutal murder and bisection of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose death bred decades of investigation and false confessions.

The noir fixation doesn't just persist in film: Round-toed heels fill women's shoe racks. Pinup girls and burlesque are all the risque rage. Christina Aguilera has dropped the “Dirrty” act for a vampy noir-influenced personae, and “The Black Dahlia” star Scarlett Johansson often seems delivered to red carpets by time machine.

But he and 1947project.com collaborator Larry Harnisch, a Los Angeles Times copy editor writing a book about the Black Dahlia murder, says people have oversimplified the era into a series of clichés.

Escapism is a major factor, but people are wrong to think the years of the Cold War and Red Scare were less anxious than the modern age of terror alerts, Harnisch says.

Misguided or not, noir nostalgia enjoys a resurgence at least once a decade: from the high praise for “Chinatown” in the 1970s to the crowd-pleasing “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” of the 1980s to the “Swingers”-inspired cocktail and cigar fixation of the 1990s.

They join the ranks of countless other films about collisions of fame and tragedy: in “Bugsy,” Warren Beatty plays a celebrity gangster who really wants to act.

In “L.A. Confidential,” widely considered the gold standard of postwar noir -- “Chinatown” is prewar noir -- Kevin Spacey's Det. Sgt. Jack Vincennes chases small screen stardom as Russell Crowe's Officer “Bud” White tries to rescue a prostitute transformed into a Veronica Lake wannabe.

213, Inc.'s noir-influenced bars -- the Golden Gopher, Broadway Bar, and the new Seven Grand -- admirably evoke the era, but the first two opened within the last three years and Seven Grand is opening soon.

Other names regularly cited by lovers of noir are the Musso and Frank Grill, a Hollywood restaurant that defines “venerable” with its wood paneling and red-jacketed career waiters.

The downtown Biltmore Hotel, the last place Elizabeth Short was seen alive -- still stands, a perfect embodiment of slick surfaces and palm trees.

And the spacious Vista Theater around the corner -- built in the 1920s -- is one of the city's greatest old movie theaters, along with San Pedro's stunning Warner Grand.

COOPER: As our physical world becomes more cluttered with loud, ugly places, signs and people, I think folks are attracted to a more elegant, refined and less generic time, when men and women carried and expressed themselves with more grace and style -- even when robbing banks, punching each other or shooting at cops.

HARNISCH: We have an extremely superficial, slick, glossy, glamorized view of the past. ... I don't think anyone can delve into the complex history of postwar America and come away with the notion that life was simple, gentle or kind. ... Part of what is alluring about Los Angeles in the 1940s and '50s is the simplistic images spun by television and films.

MARSAK: People may be nostalgic for the “good old days,” when the streets were clean and the cops rescued kittens, but they miss out on the fact that people were still people, and misery and mayhem always follow wherever people congregate.

COOPER: Many, though great old locations are always under threat from developers or overzealous owners who think their gorgeous old signs, facades and interiors are old and tacky, and would look better if they were modernized....Once you train yourself to see them under the cosmetic coverings, you see Quonset Huts everywhere -- these U-shaped war surplus structures formed the quick walls and roof of many a quickly built storefront, and for some time in the late '40s provided family housing for returning soldiers in what are now the parking lots of the L.A. Zoo.

HARNISCH: I think noir is the most trite of clichés. There's lots of interesting architecture in Los Angeles, but there isn't a stick of wood standing in L.A. that symbolizes noir to me. The film aestheticians have gotten so lax about their standards that any black-and- white film is considered noir. Today's pseudo-noir, as opposed to a few original films produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is a joke.

MARSAK: Noir is everywhere, if you train yourself to see it. If you watch the old movies, and study, really study, books of twentieth century architecture, you can get a feeling of what L.A. used to look like. And when a neon sign is glowing against the wet pavement at sundown, you almost expect a shadowy figure -- a gangster? a dishy dame? -- to emerge from the shadows.

HARNISCH: Absolutely not. The studio system manufactured glamour on a huge assembly line that was dismantled years ago. We know, with the embarrassing thoroughness of tabloid TV, the stars' foibles and human flaws. Under the studio system, actors and actresses served a long apprenticeship with extensive training before getting a starring role. There isn't a single young leading man or woman today who has the acting skills of the older generation. And of course, when movies are nothing but video games in which the figures are replaced by live people, there's no demand for any acting ability. Which is why I rarely go to the movies.

MARSAK: Leo DiCaprio might have looked great in The Aviator, but when he's out and about, he looks like a slob. George Clooney, though, never leaves the house without looking like a glamorous movie star. The person who should best personify the '40s and '50s is YOU -- go to a vintage clothing store, buy yourself some snappy duds, and become your own noir superhero!

COOPER: Nicole Kidman carries herself like one of the established female stars of the day (a la Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyk), and chooses modest gowns that are more suggestive than revealing. And Kate Winslet has a sophisticated, retro quality that lets her seem at home in many eras. Dita Von Teese, on the more erotic side, can be counted on to turn out in period perfect make up, hair and attire.

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