Chinatown
CHINATOWN
USA, 1974
Director: Roman Polanski
Production: Paramount Pictures, Penthouse, and The Long Road Productions; Technicolor, 35mm, Panavision; running time: 131 minutes. Released 21 June 1974. Filmed on location in Los Angeles.
Producer: Robert Evans; screenplay: Robert Towne; titles: Wayne Fitzgerald; assistant director: Howard Koch, Jr.; photography: John A. Alonzo; editor: Sam O'Steen; sound: Larry Jost and Bud Grenzbach; sound editor: Robert Cornett; production designer: Richard Sylbert; set designer: Gabe and Robert Resh; art director: W. Stewart Campbell; music score: Jerry Goldsmith; special effects: Logan Frazee; costume designer: Anthea Sylbert.
Cast: Jack Nicholson (J. J. Gittes); Faye Dunaway (Evelyn Mulwray); John Huston (Noah Cross); John Hillerman (Yelburton); Perry Lopez (Lieutenant Escobar); Burt Young (Curly); Darrell Zwerling (Hollis Mulwray); Diane Ladd (Ida Sessions); Roy Jensen (Mulvihill); Roman Polanski (Man with knife); Dick Bakalyan (Loach); Joe Mantell (Walsh); Bruce Glover (Duffy); Nandu Hinds (Sophie); James Hong (Evelyn's butler); Belinda Palmer (Katherine); Fritzie Burr (Mulwray's secretary); Elizabeth Harding (Curly's wife).
Awards: Oscar, Best Original Screenplay, 1974; New York Film Critics' Award, Best Actor (Nicholson; award also in conjunction with his role in The Last Detail), 1974.
Publications
Script:
Towne, Robert, Chinatown, The Last Detail, Shampoo: Screenplays, New York, 1994.
Books:
Crane, Robert David, and Christopher Fryer, Jack Nicholson—Faceto Face, New York, 1975.
Bullis, Roger Alan, An Analysis of the Interpersonal Communicationof Private Detective Characters in Selected "Mean Street" MotionPictures, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978.
Bisplinghoff, Gretchen, and Virginia Wexman, Roman Polanski:A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1979.
Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, editors, Film Noir, New York, 1979.
Kiernan, Thomas, The Roman Polanski Story, New York, 1980.
Leaming, Barbara, Polanski: A Biography, New York, 1981.
Tuska, Jon, editor, Close-up: The Contemporary Director, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1981.
Leaming, Barbara, Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur: A Biography, New York, 1981; as Polanski: His Life and Films, London, 1982.
Downing, David, Jack Nicholson: A Biography, London, 1983.
Polanski, Roman, Roman, London, 1984.
Wexman, Virginia Wright, Roman Polanski, Boston, 1985.
Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and others, Roman Polanski, Munich, 1986.
Avron, Dominique, Roman Polasnki, Paris, 1987.
Parker, John, Polanski, London, 1995.
Eaton, Michael, Chinatown, London, 1997.
Articles:
Farber, Stephen, "Violence and the Bitch Goddess," in Film Comment (New York) vol. 10, 1974.
Cohen, M. S., in Take One (Montreal), July 1974.
Burke, Tom, "The Restoration of Roman Polanski," in Rolling Stone (New York), 18 July, 1974.
"Dialogue on Film: Roman Polanski," in American Film (Washing-ton, D.C.), August 1974.
Combs, Richard, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August, 1974.
Milne, Tom, in Sight and Sound (London), Autumn, 1974.
Kavanagh, J., "Chinatown: Other Places, Other Times," in Jump Cut (Chicago), September-October 1974.
Sperber, M., "Chinatown: Do As Little as Possible: Polanski's Message and Manipulation," in Jump Cut (Chicago), September-October 1974.
Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), October 1974.
Stewart, Garrett, in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Winter 1974.
Cook, P., "The Sound Track," in Films in Review (New York), November 1974.
Cohen, Mitchell, "Villains and Victims," in Film Comment (New York) November-December 1974.
Jameson, R. T., "Film Noir: Today, Son of Noir," in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1974.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1974.
Andersson, W., and K. Josef, "Amerika," in Filmrutan (Liding, Sweden) vol. 18, no. 1, 1975.
Cappabianca, A., "L'occhio e il ragno. Note su Chinatown e Ilfantasma della liberta," in Filmcritica (Rome), January-Febru-ary 1975.
Mancini, M., "Vuoto e fiction (Wyler, Polanski, Peckinpah)," in Filmcritica (Rome), January-February 1975.
Kane, P., in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), February-March 1975.
Alonzo, John, "Behind the Scenes of Chinatown," in AmericanCinematographer (Hollywood), May 1975.
McGinnis, W. D., in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Mary-land), Summer 1975.
Oliver, B., "The Long Goodbye and Chinatown: Debunking the Private Eye Tradition," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland) Summer 1975.
Palmer, R. Barton, "Chinatown and the Detective Story," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), Spring 1977.
Beneli, D., "Contemporary Film Noir: Questing in Chinatown's Maze," in Cinemonkey (Portland, Oregon), no. 4, 1978.
Albright, Charles, Jr., in Magill's Survey of Cinema 1, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980.
Linderman, D., "Oedipus in Chinatown," in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Fall 1981-Spring 1982.
Laguna, P., in Kino (Warsaw), July 1983.
Levy, S., "Forget It? Never—It's Chinatown," in Boxoffice (Chi-cago), February 1990.
Horowitz, Mark, "Fault Lines," in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1990.
Lyons, D., "Laws in the Iris: The Private Eye in the Seventies," in Film Comment (New York), July-August 1993.
Biskind, Peter, "The Low Road to Chinatown," in Premiere (New York), June 1994.
Feeney, F., "Water and Power," in Written By (Los Angeles), vol. 1, December-January 1996–97.
* * *
The title of Polanski's film refers to the state of mind of Jack Nicholson's character, a former cop in L.A.'s Chinatown who left the force and turned private eye after getting in over his head on a case he never fully understood, bringing tragedy to a woman he'd sought to help.
History begins to repeat itself in characteristically bleak Polanskian terms when Nicholson becomes enmeshed in a case involving seeming femme fatale Faye Dunaway, playing the abused daughter of a local power broker (John Huston), the conniving, murderous villain behind a lucrative water rights and land grabbing scheme. Events come full circle when Nicholson again finds himself in Chinatown, this time to help Dunaway escape the clutches of her incestuous father once and for all—only to wind up getting her killed instead.
Unlike the similarly shady but virtuous white knight detectives in the fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, men who managed to restore at least some semblance of moral order to their chaotic noir universes at the end of each case, Nicholson's variation on Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe succeeds only in maintaining the status quo, and, on some levels, making things worse. As his cop pal Lt. Escobar tells him at one point: "You never learn, do you, Jake?"—no, he doesn't, because his state of mind fates him not to. "Come on, Jake, it's Chinatown," Nicholson's colleague says, leading him away from this latest scene of inscrutable—and unpreventable—tragedy in the devastated detective's life. It is one of the most haunting, and memorable, closing lines in the history of noir cinema.
Robert Towne's Oscar-winning screenplay for this seminal Watergate-era detective thriller was written expressly for his pal Nicholson, a lifelong clothes horse who had longed to do a part where he could be a dapper dan. California native Towne had been writing a tale about a real-life incident of corruption and environmental scandal drawn from L.A.'s early history when he got the idea of turning the piece into a period detective yarn in homage to his idols Hammett and Chandler.
Nicholson quickly signed on to play the gumshoe, Jake Gittes, and suggested Polanski, another friend, as director. Paramount green-lighted the project when Polanski agreed to direct—provided Towne would subject his 180-page script to an overhaul. Towne initially resisted, then agreed to undertake the task, working closely with Polanski.
The project marked Polanski's return to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking after two back-to-back box-office failures, Macbeth (1971) and What? (1973), both made in Europe. It also marked his return to Hollywood itself, scene of the 1969 Manson murders that claimed the lives of his wife, actress Sharon Tate, and several friends. He quickly began molding Towne's period mystery into a typically dark Polanski essay on sex and violence set in the "landscape of the mind."
In addition to trimming and tightening Towne's screenplay in an effort to make it less convoluted and more focused, Polanski insisted on enhancing the romantic relationship between Nicholson and Dunaway, which helps to further illustrate the concept that Nicholson's character is inadvertently repeating his past. To the same end, he altered Towne's conclusion. Towne's original script not only did not conclude in Chinatown, but it ended on a very different, upbeat note with Dunaway's character (Evelyn Mulwray) surviving and her loathsome monster of a father dead; justice triumphs and Evelyn and Jake go off into the pre-smog L.A. sunset together. Towne to this day disdains Polanski's downbeat finale, which is set in Chinatown, as a too-literal and ghoulish example of "bleak chic." But it is Polanski's ending that transforms the film from a polished, superbly acted evocation of the vanished pre-World War II milieu of Hammett and Chandler into a detective story of considerable and disturbing power—a seminal film of the 1970s. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of Chinatown ending any other way than it does. Polanski's alteration gives the film its meaning (troubling though it may be); it's what the story is all about.
An ill-conceived and ill-fated 1990 sequel, The Two Jakes, also written by Towne and starring Nicholson, who directed as well, makes this even clearer. The sequel, set in L.A. of the 1940s and involving an oil rather than water and land scheme this time, had plot—plenty of it—but lacked a story; Polanski had already told it, superbly and definitively, 16 years earlier.
—John McCarty
Chinatown
Chinatown
Roman Polanski directed this 1974 classic film portraying the mystery and intrigue of Raymond Chandler's fascinating novel. Jack Nicholson played Jake Gittes, a private detective trapped in the odd Asian-immigrant culture of the desert West. Hired to investigate the murder of the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Power and Water Authority in 1930s California, Gittes finds himself pulled into the unique political and economic power structure of the arid region: water politics with all its deceits and double dealings dominates planning and development.
The film acquired a cult following because of its dark, intriguing story—seemingly based in another world and era—and the enduring popularity of Jack Nicholson. Chinatown's film noir setting places it in a long line of fine films deriving from the 1940s mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock. The defining characteristic of such films is uncertainty—of character and plot. Gittes repeatedly appears as the trapped character searching in vain for truth; indeed, the viewer searches with him. In the end, the evil is nearly always exposed. However, typical to film noir, Chinatown's conclusion leaves the viewer strangely unsure if truth actually has emerged victorious.
In 1990, Nicholson starred in and directed Chinatown's sequel, The Two Jakes, set in 1948 California. Oil has replaced water as the power source for regional wealth, creating a fine backdrop for another dark mystery based on adultery and intrigue.
—Brian Black
Chinatown
Chinatown ★★★★ 1974 (R)
Private detective Jake Gittes (Nicholson) finds himself overwhelmed in a scandalous case involving the rich and powerful of Los Angeles. Gripping, atmospheric mystery excels in virtually every aspect, with strong narrative drive and outstanding performances from Nicholson, Dunaway, and Huston. Director Polanski also appears in a suitable unsettling cameo. Fabulous. A sneaky, snaking delight filled with seedy characters and plots-within-plots. Followed more than 15 years later by “The Two Jakes.” 131m/C VHS, DVD . Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Diane Ladd, John Hillerman, Burt Young, Perry Lopez, Darrell Zwerling, Joe Mantell; D: Roman Polanski; W: Robert Towne; C: John A. Alonzo; M: Jerry Goldsmith. Oscars '74: Orig. Screenplay; AFI '98: Top 100; British Acad. '74: Actor (Nicholson), Director (Polanski), Screenplay; Golden Globes '75: Actor—Drama (Nicholson), Director (Polanski), Film—Drama, Screenplay, Natl. Film Reg. '91;; N.Y. Film Critics '74: Actor (Nicholson); Natl. Soc. Film Critics '74: Actor (Nicholson); Writers Guild '74: Orig. Screenplay.