On Jan. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in Los Angeles, a 22-year-old woman named Elizabeth "Betty" Short was found brutally murdered. So gruesome was the crime scene that it became legendary: Among other desecrations, the body had been cut in two. The slaughter, uncharacteristic in its violence and driven by the victim's haunting beauty and generally feckless life, was investigated by a huge team, some of the results comical but all of them unfortunately futile.

Brian De Palma's film "The Black Dahlia" follows two police officers assigned to the case, Patrolman Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Sgt. Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), who let it grow in their minds until it haunts them, ultimately causing one a nervous breakdown with disastrous consequences. The result is a work busy in the least satisfying of ways, not teeming but crowded, not dense but packed. When she's not channeling Faye Dunaway, Hilary Swank veers toward Lauren Bacall in "The Big Sleep," while Rachel Miner does a neat spin on Martha Vickers, who played Bacall's little sister in that; here, Miner plays Swank's sis. Lee's girlfriend, Kay, meanwhile, is played in kewpie doll insouciance and sweater-gal pulchritude by Scarlett Johansson.

Too much of "The Black Dahlia" consists of narrated information; about half the movie is synopsis of what the filmmakers don't have time to dramatize. And despite genius-level contributions from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and art director Dante Ferretti, the handsome film is almost abusively murky, trafficking in difficult-to-follow plot manipulations, arbitrary twists and mumbled dialogue. It ultimately comes to rely on one of those by-now de rigueur 10-minute final synopses that shuffle through the story a second time, revealing the secret connections behind seemingly unrelated events.

Here's the lowdown, the q.t., the true gen: "The Black Dahlia" is a big nowhere.

-- Stephen Hunter (Sep. 15, 2006)

Contains extreme violence toward women, sexual content and profanity.