To me, this movie is perfection.

Thanks for the memories!

As Good As It Gets

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

****SPOILERS**** On the morning of January 15, 1947 the dissected and mutilated body of 22 year old Elizabeth Short, Lucie Arnez,was found in pieces in Los Angeles's Limert Park. That soon causes a frenzy of newspaper and magazine headlines all over the country about the beautiful woman who suffered such a grizzly death. Dubbed the "Black Dahlia" by the press Short's background reviled that she was a young girl from New England looking to make it big in the movies who came up short or dead in doing it. Elizabeth didn't make it big when she was alive but became an Hollywood as well as major murder mystery after her death. It's the two LA policemen Sgt. Harry Hansen, Efrem Zimbalist Jr, & Sgt. Finis Brown, Ronny Cox, who were assigned to the case who came up with a number of suspects who all proved to be innocent. Both Hansen & Brown found it very difficult in finding Elizabeth's killer in that as many as 50 people, all BS artists, came forward claiming credit for it. The one person who in fact did murder Elizabeth by providing the LA police a number of items only she could have had on her at the time of her murder. As well as being able to answer correctly the three questions, that's still after all these years kept from the public, concerning her murder but was never seen or heard from again. That's after he got in touch with an LA newspaper editor by phone a week after, January 23, 1947, her body was found. The futile search for Elizabeth's murderer has gone on for almost 70 years with no results in sight. It's very possible that whoever murdered Elizabeth is dead himself but the fact that he got away with it makes her death more disturbing. He may well have murdered other victims as well and even if he were caught and punished for those other crimes her murder is still an open not closed case.It was sad that beside being brutally murdered and mutilated Elizabeth found the fame as well as movie stardom that she so desperately was seeking not in life but sadly in death. Dozens of books and magazine articles were written about her as well as a half or so dozen, including this made for TV movie, films which she never lived to see. And in being dubbed the "Black Dahlia" a name which she in fact gave herself made her over the years one of the biggest real life, not phony, legends in all of Hollywood & movie history.

This is by far the best-told, best-acted and best-produced of all the many movies about Elizabeth Short's story.Lucie Arnaz's restrained performance succeeds in presenting Short as a woman of thwarted ambition, floating in a vacuum of failure, just hanging on by a thread. She should have received an Emmy for it.This version of the Black Dahlia story has more in-depth characterization of Elizabeth Short than other versions, which go more for sensationalism. I don't understand why "Who Is The Black Dahlia?" isn't out on DVD, especially considering its cult following.

I watched the film when it was first broadcast and I remember actually being really frightened by it. It was the eerie, atmospheric setting of the movie and good acting that gave the movie it's frightening aspects not the gore and carnage that movies made today depend on. Also, after watching her for years in "The Lucy Show" it was a very pleasant surprise to see Lucy Arnez playing a sexy young woman. Her acting career was really hampered by being the daughter of the famous woman. I wish that the film would be shown again on a cable telvision channel such as TCM or AMC so I could tape it. The recent big screen movie version of "The Black Dahlia" was a major disappointment especially compared to this well done made-for-television version.

I too was frightened the first time I saw this TV movie. It tells the story of the short life, and gruesome, unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, whose nickname was the Black Dahlia, a type of flower. There is a certain creepiness that pervades this low-key period story, told in flashbacks of Short's brief Los Angeles existence before her slaughter. Efram Zimbalist, Jr., portrays the detective who becomes obsessed with the young, attractive woman's story. The period details feel right, for I am too young to have any first-hand experience of the time, and Lucie Arnaz's performance as the doomed title character adds emotional weight to what could have been an exploitive picture. This is another example of how superior, in general, '70's made-for-television movies were to future endeavors.