Chinatown
Neo-Noir Mystery | 131 Minutes | 1974 | United States
(4/4)
Director: Roman Polanski | Producer: Robert Evans | Writer: Robert Towne | Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Burt Young, Diane Ladd | Music: Jerry Goldsmith | Cinematography: John A. Alonzo | Editor: Sam O’Steen
Chinatown is a detective story, loosely inspired by the California water wars which took place between the fledgeling city of Los Angeles and the surrounding Owens Valley in the early twentieth century. The pivotal figure in those wars was William Mulholland, the chief architect of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, whose career came to an abrupt end with the failure of the St Francis Dam in 1928, a catastrophe which killed an estimated 431 people. Mulholland today is best known via the constructs which still bear his name, notably Mulholland Drive which spans the Santa Monica Mountains and is imbued with so much Hollywood history. And just as Chinatown occupies the world of murky fact, it inhabits too the pristine dreams of Golden Age cinema, from the classic film noirs of the 1940s to the thrillers and dramas of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger. Compared to Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, it shares none of the reflexivity or overt circularity, yet it still ends up in much the same space, with the same liminal atmosphere, the same lingering emotions and passions and dreads. Chinatown is a strange film, and all the better for it.
It is at once more and less than the sum of its parts: difficult to say more because the parts themselves are so stellar and respected, from Robert Towne’s Academy Award-winning screenplay, often regarded as one of the finest examples of the form, to the greatest performance of Jack Nicholson’s career, which especially for a period in the 1970s was carried with a gay abandon masking its keen focus and willingness to take risks. It also features a compelling performance from Faye Dunaway, who director Roman Polanski fought for and then fought with on set, and from John Huston perhaps the most haunting and dastardly villain ever on screen, a genteel man who is not so much amoral as cognizant of and intuitively drawn towards a place where morals no longer exist, much less prosper. Yet for all of this, the strengths of Chinatown so often seem to eschew both the script, which without Polanski’s late adjustments could easily have scanned as a rote whodunnit, and even the performances, making way for mood and ambiance and composition of place.
A neo-noir which owes much to The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, still Chinatown largely stays out of the shadows. Until the chaotic streetlit finale which finally lands us in Chinatown itself, many of its most unsettling scenes take place in broad daylight, for instance when Jake Gittes (Nicholson) first visits Evelyn Mulwray’s (Dunaway) home, a discreet Spanish-style mansion in the foothills of Pasadena, and languors towards the Asian gardener whose broken English inadvertently provides Gittes with his first clue, a spell whose eerie stillness out by the garden pond is broken once Mulwray makes her striking entrance; or when Gittes goes to meet Mulwray’s father, Noah Cross (Huston), at Cross’s ranch, and the two interrogate each other over brunch, a meal of broiled fish served with the heads still intact which barely gets eaten.
When Gittes goes to investigate a reservoir – a stone’s throw from the Hollywood Hills, after an oblique tip from a Mexican boy on horseback – which has been releasing tons of water each night despite a supposed drought, a Los Angeles water department goon slices his left nostril. The bandage which subsequently covers the left side of Gittes’ face serves as a mask and as a form of protection: when it comes off, he and Mulwray kiss, and the mystery at once deepens and becomes more personal. Gittes serves the same sort of role for the audience. We look over his shoulder, never inhabiting a space before he inhabits it, close to yet at a certain remove from his perspective: sometimes his shoulder gets in the way, blocking doorways and other lines of sight, preempting but never diminishing painful discoveries.
Throughout Chinatown there is the theme of doubling, from Ida Sessions who introduces Gittes to the case by pretending to be Mulwray, to Mulwray herself, and the ineffable true nature of her relationship to her daughter Katherine, to a slew of private eyes and police detectives, and to the obscure ownership of tracts of land and even the water itself, the city’s most valuable resource. The elderly residents of a retirement home and the denizens of Chinatown are figured as an amorphous mass, sharpening the senses while defying comprehension. Full of ambient noise, running streams, gushing reservoirs, ticking clocks, birdsong and crickets, Chinatown also boasts one of the best scores in the cinema, wide-eyed and sunny and swooning and mournful, a jazzy score apparently composed in ten days by Jerry Goldsmith.
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