Title: CHINATOWN

Date: 6/15/1995; Publication: Magill's Survey of Cinema;

Magill's Survey of Cinema

06-15-1995

CHINATOWN

Abstract:
J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a Los Angeles private eye investigating a murder related to a battle for the city's water rights. The clues lead him to the beautiful Evelyn Mulray (Faye Dunaway) and her malicious and wealthy father, Noah Cross (John Huston). Roman Polanski's compelling film noir thriller is an absorbing, brilliantly executed motion picture.


Summary:
One of the most interesting trends in Hollywood film production during the 1970's has been the rash of films which take the movie past as a touchstone for personal expression about contemporary life. Directors as diverse as Brian de Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Clint Eastwood, and Mel Brooks have drawn on the styles, directors, and genres of a bygone era in filmmaking for inspiration. CHINATOWN is representative of this trend. The Polish-born director Roman Polanski interweaves elements of the classic detective thriller with his unique world view. In the best tradition of Hollywood film noir, Polanski skillfully blends a mixture of romance, mystery, and cool cynicism while adding several contemporary variations. The result is the best of these "touchstone" films. Polanski is aided by the topnotch original screenplay of Robert Towne, an expert and attractive cast, and overall production values (especially with regard to music, cinematography, and set decoration) which are among the most outstanding in modern film history.

CHINATOWN concerns Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a private detective who is duped into discrediting Hollis Mulwray, an engineer involved in an important water project. When Mulwray is a victim of an apparent suicide, Gittes decides to dig deeper into the case. He soon finds himself piecing together an elaborate puzzle composed of murder, the monopolization of drought-stricken Los Angeles' water supply, a land swindle, and Mulwray's mysteriously beautiful wife Evelyn (Faye Dunaway). Gittes and Evelyn become romantically involved, but the woman's dark past eventually leads to her death while Gittes himself is rendered powerless in the face of widespread political corruption.

This plot is generated by the traditional private-eye formula of literature and film. Gittes is a cool, wisecracking lone operator much like Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. The film is by and large Chandleresque in its structure and outlook. As in the Marlowe novels, CHINATOWN is set in Los Angeles during the late 1930's and involves the stripping away of facades to reveal secrets. Like Marlowe, Gittes operates under a self-imposed code of honor and is undeterred by warnings from the police to mind his own business or by threats on his life.

Crucial to CHINATOWN is the metaphorical depiction of Los Angeles as a moral wasteland. The drought-ravaged Los Angeles of the film is shown as intensely arid, a near desert. This is a land where life is cheap, where the money and power of opportunists sap the energy of the city's inhabitants. Like Chandler, Polanski and Towne give us a city whose glamorous allure masks anguish and despair.

As in the hard-boiled detective tradition, CHINATOWN places its detective in the center of the action. Gittes has the largest amount of onscreen time, and it is his perception of events which is relayed to the audience. In this sense, the film approximates the first-person narration typical of Chandler's lean prose. 1940's versions of Chandler's Marlowe novels, such as MURDER, MY SWEET (1944) and LADY IN THE LAKE (1946), tried to duplicate this narrative style as closely as possible. LADY IN THE LAKE employs a subjective camera throughout the film to approximate Marlowe's point of view. In MURDER, MY SWEET, Marlowe relates events through flashback, which allows certain visual effects to become the equivalent of his mental state. Notable among these is the darkening of the screen with an inky substance when Marlowe is knocked unconscious (as his voice-over explains that he felt darkness descending over him). While CHINATOWN eschews stylistic devices such as this, the film nevertheless gives us a perception of events and details which approximates Gittes's own idea of them. We see clues (the obituary column, Mulwray's glasses) when he does, and we are never allowed to have more information than he does. Thus, we become sharers in Gittes's search for truth amidst a maze of deceptive appearances. A crucial scene in this regard occurs when Gittes follows Evelyn to a house and watches her through a window. Here, Evelyn appears to be abusing the distraught "mistress" of her late husband. Gittes concludes that Evelyn is holding the girl prisoner (a conclusion that turns out to be incorrect), but at this point he and the audience share a voyeuristic perspective of misleading appearances. It is this perspective that is at the core of CHINATOWN. As Gittes says at one point, "You can't always tell what's going on." This line serves as an indicator of Gittes's predicament as well as our own.

While CHINATOWN is faithful to its generic source in terms of plot, formula, and character, it is more than just a nostalgic homage. Polanski and Towne have added a number of variations on the standard structure. Among these is Evelyn's sensational revelation that she had incestuous relations with her father, the villainous Noah Cross (John Huston). Mulwray's "mistress" is, in fact, the offspring of this liaison. In addition, the film's subtext of political corruption clearly has echoes of a Watergate type of coverup and is depicted as the kind of corruption that permeates every level of government. Finally, the criminals are not apprehended at the conclusion of the film. Gittes's powerlessness and failure to effect successfully the private eye's code establishes the film's vision as bleak and uncompromising. The private eye's code is shown as no longer operable. In short, the film re-creates a fictional universe of the past to displace its pessimistic view of a decadent present.

All of Polanski's work generates from the director's pessimistic vision of a decadent world. As in CHINATOWN, a key element in his films is faulty perception. For example, in REPULSION (1965), ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968), and MACBETH (1971), Polanski presents distraught female protagonists whose mental conditions gradually deteriorate. As a result, they become uncertain as to whether their experience of events is real or illusory. In REPULSION and MACBETH, certain of the females' visions (the hands reaching from the wall in the former film, the blood on the hands in the latter) turn out to be manifestations of unbalanced minds. But in ROSEMARY'S BABY, the female protagonist's nightmares become realized. Thus, Polanski's work can be seen as centering on characters who tread the line between what they believe to be real and what is in fact real. In other words, appearances become the basic structural problem in Polanski's cinema, and CHINATOWN is certainly relevant in this regard. Moreover, CHINATOWN, like CUL-DE-SAC (1966) and MACBETH, concerns a male protagonist who becomes embroiled in events which get out of control and finally overcome him in some way. And like all of Polanski's work, CHINATOWN contains scenes of grisly, blood-soaked violence. Polanski himself appears in the film as a vicious hoodlum who slices off part of Gittes's nose. This is a reworking of a scene from one of Polanski's Polish film shorts, TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE (1958), in which Polanski also plays a menacing hoodlum.

It is Polanski's overall personal vision that clarifies CHINATOWN's position as a "touchstone" film of the 1970's. On the one hand, he takes the Hollywood film noir and the hard-boiled detective novel as a point of contact. For example, the casting of John Huston as Noah Cross has considerable resonance -- Huston directed THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), one of the first classics of film noir. Jerry Goldsmith's haunting score calls to mind the films of Hollywood's past, as do CHINATOWN's opening credits: they are shot in black and white and appear in the old 1:33 screen format. On the other hand, Polanski works to subvert the genre once we enter this fictional universe. Indeed, the very first scene, in which Curly (Burt Young) frantically gnaws on Gittes's Venetian blinds, hints at the subversion to follow. In a sense, Curly's action functions as an assault on this familiar visual motif from the film noir. What we are finally left with is a world where values of individual honor and effective action are sadly out of place.

Both Polanski's Polish films and his English-language features have generally earned critical acclaim in this country, but at the box office he has not fared so well. CHINATOWN is an exception to this, as was ROSEMARY'S BABY. Both films are among the two hundred top-grossing films of all time. According to a 1977 survey conducted by the American Film Institute, CHINATOWN appeared on the list of the fifty most popular films ever made in Hollywood. One reason for CHINATOWN's popularity is the potent teaming of Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Gittes is yet another of Nicholson's volatile but essentially vulnerable screen characters. With his flashy suits and gold cigarette case, Gittes is himself all surface and appearance; the autographed portrait of Adolphe Menjou on the wall of his office reinforces Gittes's aura of artificial glamour. Like other Nicholson portrayals, Gittes's facade begins to crack once he comes to care for others. Nicholson won much acclaim for this performance. He received the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics awards as Best Actor of 1974 (in both cases, he was honored for his roles in CHINATOWN and THE LAST DETAIL), as well as the Golden Globe award as Best Actor in a Drama. For her role as a woman coming apart at the seams, Dunaway received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress. Both stars would have to wait for their Oscars, however. Nicholson won his in 1975 for ONE FLEW OVER THE CUKOO'S NEST, while Dunaway received hers in 1976 for NETWORK.

Ironically, CHINATOWN, one of the most critically acclaimed films of 1974, was overshadowed by another Paramount-produced "touchstone" film, THE GODFATHER, PART TWO, which won the lion's share of Academy Awards and critical accolades that year. Still, CHINATOWN was nominated in several major categories in addition to its acting nominees (John Huston's scene-stealing performance is also worthy of honors, but was unaccountably ignored), including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. Robert Towne, who had labored anonymously for many years as a script doctor, received the film's only Oscar for his original screenplay. Towne also won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Written Drama (written directly for the screen). The film also appeared on the "ten best" lists of the National Board of Review and TIME magazine.

CHINATOWN richly deserves this critical acclaim, for it is in every way an exemplary film. It powerfully holds up the movie past as a mirror to reflect a modern world in which old values are no longer functional.


Release Date: 1974

Production Line:
Robert Evans for Paramount

Director: Roman Polanski

Cinematographer: John A. Alonzo

File Editor: Sam O'Steen

Additional Credits:
Art direction - Richard Sylbert and W. Stewart Campbell
Music - Jerry Goldsmith

MPAA Rating: R

Run Time: 131 minutes

Cast:
J. J. (Jake) Gittes - Jack Nicholson
Evelyn Mulwray - Faye Dunaway
Noah Cross - John Huston
Yelburton - John Hillerman
Lieutenant Escobar - Perry Lopez
Curly - Burt Young
Hollis Mulwray - Darrell Zwerling
Ida Sessions - Diane Ladd
Mulvihill - Roy Jenson
Man with Knife - Roman Polanski
Loach - Dick Bakalyan
Walsh - Joe Mantell
Duffy - Bruce Glover
Sophie - Nandu Hinds
Katherine - Belinda Palmer
Mayor Bagby - Roy Roberts
Mr. Palmer - John Rogers
Emma Dill - Cecil Elliott
Lawyer - James O'Reare
Evelyn's butler - James Hong
Maid - Beulah Quo
Gardener - Jerry Fujikawa
Councilman - Noble Willingham
Councilman - Elliott Montgomery

Review Sources:
Newsweek: July 1, 1974, p.74
New York Times: June 21, 1974, p.26
Time: July 1, 1974, p.42
Variety: June 19, 1974, p.16

Named persons in Production Credits:
Robert Evans

Studios named in Production Credits:
Paramount

Screenplay (Author):
Robert Towne

Color



Video Available.
Genre:
Crime, Drama

Award Citations:
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Picture
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Director - Roman Polanski
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Actress - Faye Dunnaway
Academy Awards - Winner - Best Original Screenplay - Robert Towne
Academy Awards - Nomination - Cinematography - John A. Alonzo
British Academy Awards - Winner - Best Direction - Roman Polanski
British Academy Awards - Winner - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
British Academy Awards - Winner - Best Screenplay - Robert Towne
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Motion Picture-Drama
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Director - Roman Polanski
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Actor-Drama - Jack Nicholson
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Screenplay - Robert Towne
National Society of Film Critics - Winner - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson
New York Film Critics - Winner - Best Actor - Jack Nicholson

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