Two Travelers on the Mean Streets of Los Angeles

John Heminway’s PBS series “Travels” makes a Los Angeles stop Sunday evening at 8 on KCET Channel 28, with the novelist-essayist John Gregory Dunne as writer-narrator. The hourlong visit is called “L.A. Is It,” and, unique among Eastern visitors, Dunne seems to agree with the title; he loves the place for all its evident problems.

Then again, Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, lived in Los Angeles for nigh on to a quarter-century, partly on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (their house was robbed twice, he reports) and later on a palisade in Malibu. (He had to turn his desk so he faced a blank wall because otherwise he gazed at the sea for hours.)

The up-to-date visit (dated 1990) includes a ride on the new light-rail system to Long Beach and attention to the city’s ever-thickening ethnic mix. There is an interview with two young Chinese developers building very large and expensive homes for Chinese families in Arcadia, while old Anglo settlers look on with fairly scrutable expressions.

Dunne’s text is actually more interesting than the generally banal images--a Chinatown-to-the-ocean ride along Sunset, Dunne among the throngs on Venice Beach, tourists at the Chinese, musclemen and some barrio gang members, home boys and home girls.

But Dunne feels as well as sees the place, reporting its sense of promise and possibility (at least as he experienced it a quarter-century ago), the feeling of liberation provided by the freeway mobility--except of course in SigAlerts, when you can listen to our 68 radio stations.

He left, Dunne says, because he came to feel he had stayed too long at the fair or the party and needed new stimuli. Yet he returns three or four times a year, with some feeling of homecoming.

If Los Angeles is no longer perceived as having the allure it did in earlier years, it may be, Dunne says, less a comment on Los Angeles than on a declining confidence in the larger American Dream.

A much earlier Los Angeles, of the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, is revisited in words and pictures in “Chandler,” a profile of the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler. It was produced for Melvyn Bragg’s “South Bank Show” on London Weekend Television in 1988, Chandler’s centenary year (he died in La Jolla in 1959).

It has been seen locally before and is worth watching again. (It airs Sunday evening at 6:30 on KCET, preceding and part of a package with the Dunne visitation.) Chandler, born in Chicago but schooled in England where he lived until he was nearly 30, was ever after an expatriate in his native land.

He had little love for Los Angeles (where he became a successful oil executive until his drinking got him fired) and once said that the city had the personality of a Dixie cup. He evoked the city--a hard and often corrupt city, with mean streets and frequently meaner cops--with a hard credibility that has made the place and the time indelible in the imagination of millions of readers. By the time postwar growth was creating a different Los Angeles, Chandler was written out.

The expertly made program includes early black-and-white footage of the city as Chandler found it. The English actor Robert Stephens, made up to look amazingly like the author, speaks as Chandler, the texts being his eloquent, acerbic and finally melancholy letters.

There are clips from several of the Chandler films, including a fine glimpse of Bogart as Philip Marlowe, still the greatest private eye of them all.

A love letter to Los Angeles from John Gregory Dunne and another one now from Steve Martin in his film “L.A. Story,” both saying it’s easy to embrace the city despite its flaws and follies, or maybe because of them. It could be a trend.