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| Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson by keizle Chinatown, 1974 |
Chinatown: the best crime film of all time
Roman Polanski, 1974
Philip French
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.55 BST
T
he near perfection of Roman Polanski's Chinatown starts with Diener/Hauser/Bates's haunting art nouveau poster for the film: an emblematic Hokusai wave breaks against Jack Nicholson's silhouette as the smoke from his cigarette floats up to merge with Faye Dunaway's medusa-like hair. The movie ends equally unforgettably with the line "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown!", as lapidary a pay-off as Scarlett O'Hara's "After all, tomorrow is another day."
Behind the angst-ridden film noirs of the 40s and 50s lie the social and political tensions of the second world war and the postwar decade. Similarly, Chinatown was conceived, written, produced and released in the troubled period that included the last years of the Vietnam war, Watergate and Nixon's fraught second term in the White House. But it retained its freshness, vitality and timelessness by being set so immaculately in an earlier period – Los Angeles in the long, hot summer of 1937 – and it deals with the scandals of that era, those touching on the complex politics of water in the arid West.
While gathering divorce evidence on behalf of a suspicious wife, Gittes (Nicholson) is sucked into a world beyond his comprehension involving municipal corruption, sexual transgression and the power of old money. He encounters the rich, ruthless capitalist Noah Cross (John Huston) and his estranged daughter, the beautiful Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), whose husband, head of the Los Angeles Water and Power Board, dies under mysterious circumstances.
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| Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway Chinatown |
In his screenplay, Robert Towne develops two dominant metaphors; the first centres on water. During a period of drought someone is dumping water from local reservoirs, and it becomes clear that this most precious of human resources is being manipulated by land speculators in their own interests. The name of Evelyn's husband, Hollis Mulwray, evokes William Mullholland, the Los Angeles engineer responsible in the 20s for the deals that, in the old Western phrase, "made water flow uphill in search of the money". The name Noah Cross suggests the loveable Old Testament patriarch, played in the 1966 blockbuster The Bible by John Huston, but here reprised in a less benevolent mode as a self-righteous plutocrat who has harnessed the flood in his own interests.
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| Roman Polanski Chinatown |
The other metaphor is that of Chinatown, an inscrutable place which outsiders either stand back from or misread in a way that demonstrates the futility of good intentions. Jake worked in Chinatown during his days in the LAPD and, at the end of the picture, returns there in a bid for redemption that turns out to be an act of tragic pointlessness. He's in every scene, frequently with the camera just behind him. We see and experience everything from his point of view, with Polanski composing every frame, dictating each camera movement.
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| Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway Chinatown |
The movie captures the city in a summer heatwave: the blinding exteriors dazzle the eye and blur the judgment; shafts of light create a sinister atmosphere as they penetrate the dark interiors through venetian blinds. Jerry Goldsmith's superb score uses strings and percussion during moments of suspense and a distant, bluesy trumpet for elegiac, contemplative scenes. Above all there is Nicholson's Gittes, a cocky, confident man losing his social moorings and ending up as the proverbial drowning man reaching out for straws.
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