Bryson Apartment Hotel - Operation As An Apartment Hotel - Association With Raymond Chandler and Film Noir

Association With Raymond Chandler and Film Noir

Novelist Raymond Chandler added to The Bryson's landmark status when he featured it in his 1943 work The Lady in the Lake. Owing to its connection with Chandler, The Bryson has been described as one of the city's "high-rises that were meant to house wealthy transplants from back East but became the faded palaces of L.A. noir." In the novel, detective Philip Marlowe visited the Bryson Tower in pursuit of the title character. Chandler described the Bryson:

"Twenty five minutes brought us to the Bryson Tower, a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms. The entrance was in an L, up marble steps, through a Moorish archway, and over a lobby that was too big and a carpet that was too blue. Blue Ali Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in. There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those moustaches that get stuck under your finger nail."

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce reports that thousands of Chandler fans travel to Los Angeles to see the locations of Chandler's works, including the Bryson and the Montecito Apartments. In a 2007 article about Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, one writer described the view of The Bryson, with "its enduring rooftop sign," as "a symbol of a cityscape that is rapidly disappearing" -- the city "as it looked to Philip Marlowe, heading toward the Bryson Apartment Hotel for another rendezvous."

The Bryson has also been featured in other noir stories and books, including Double Indemnity. Fittingly, when Stephen Frears shot his 1990 neo-noir, The Grifters, he chose The Bryson Apartments as one of the principal locations—the home of John Cusack's character, Roy Dillon, and the site of the bloody climax.