Give Long Beach Its Due, or Face Failure at the Box Office

The current movie adaptation of “All the King’s Men” appears to be a flop, and I can only guess that one reason is that the filmmakers ignored Long Beach.

Uh-huh, Long Beach.

In the novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren, the narrator becomes so disillusioned by the corruption of his politician boss in Louisiana that he drives off in his car and doesn’t stop until he arrives in Long Beach.

He doesn’t explain why he chose the city except to say, “When you don’t like it where you are you, always go West.” He heads home a couple of days later, saying he feels “much refreshed.” The movie omitted this interlude. Not that viewers would have seen much of Long Beach, anyway.

As the novel’s narrator puts it: “I was in Long Beach 36 hours and spent all of that time in a hotel room, except for 40 minutes in a barbershop off the lobby of the hotel.”

Well, there was no Queen Mary out here back then.

Long Beach’s two cents’ worth: Needless to say, the city has been mentioned in countless movies over the years. Take “The Blue Dahlia” (1946), in which party girl Veronica Lake tells Alan Ladd the reason she’s driving to Malibu.

Lake: “I flipped a coin. Heads I go to Malibu, tails I go to Laguna.”

Ladd: “And what if the coin rolls under the davenport?”

Lake: “I go to Long Beach.”

A finger-lickin’ shock: Irene DeBlasio of Studio City noticed a driver in a company car who had forsaken the Colonel to sneak a visit with Wendy (see photo).

Unreal estate: Today’s showings (see accompanying) include:

* A house whose appliances are a steal, from Dick Eastman of Hermosa Beach. (The ad writer is “quite” a speller, by the way.)

* A property that would cause suffering, “maybe from the monthly payments,” commented Don Hansen of Hollywood.

* Some dueling homes, crashing into each other across property lines, from Allen Zimbleman of Palm Springs.

Monkey business?: “An officer reports a male peeling two crates of bananas and leaving the peels on the sidewalk,” read the bulletin in Pomona College’s Student Life newspaper.

And the male was a human, not a simian.

“When asked to remove the peels,” the newspaper continued, the young man “said they were for an art project and that he would remove them when finished. The Dean is called, and the peels are moved onto the grass.”

Sometimes society can make the life of an artist so difficult.

miscelLAny: San Diego takes understandable pride in being the birthplace of WD-40, one of the world’s most famous lubricants.

And San Diego magazine points out that the stuff is handy in ways its creator probably didn’t foresee. For instance, English pub owners were urged last year “to spray toilets with WD-40 to discourage drug users from snorting coke on them.”

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083; by fax at (213) 237-4712; by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. First St., L.A. 90012; and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.