Chinatown

The swank label ‘Paramount Presents’ continues its line of prestige studio tentpole pictures in 4K Ultra HD. This time out it’s Chinatown, an all-pro effort by élite Hollywood talent and a crowning achievement of the fading studio system. It is as perfect a film as could be made in 1974. The case can be made that Roman Polanski was the best director working.

Most every movie fan admires this picture, and by now plenty have read Sam Wasson’s celebrated book about its making. Chinatown is now fifty years old, so no matter how familiar it seems to us, it’s wise to remember that today’s generation has less interest in movie history, and multitudes out there have never heard of it. So we don’t mind writing this basic overview.

“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.”

Chinatown ‘did it all’ for film students of 1974. The term film noir was four or five years away from gaining traction in the general culture. We UCLA students were immersing ourselves in classic examples on our incredible Melnitz Hall screen, taking advantage of the newly-founded UCLA Film Archive’s holdings of Paramount and Fox nitrate studio prints. Thus Alain Silver, Carl Macek, Elizabeth Ward, Bob Porfirio and James Ursini were already refining the French noir definition for an American sensibility.

Where was noir in ’74?  The American style was originally tagged as ending in 1958 with Orson Welles’  Touch of Evil. Everything made thereafter was considered a self-conscious neo-noir … at least partly channeling an older form.  Even as B&W was being phased out, plenty of 1960s films retained the style, like Burt Kennedy’s  The Money Trap. The James Garner vehicle  Marlowe  shows the influence even as it pursues other agendas. Along with interesting nostalgia pieces like John Flynn’s  The Outfit, Roman Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown was one of the first films that the UCLA critical studies crowd recognized as a bona fide Neo-Noir. It’s makers knew they were toying with an older convention. The show even begins as an ersatz 1940s film, with a nostalgic B&W title sequence formatted for the old Academy ratio.

Robert Towne’s drama of 1930s Los Angeles does more than just look back at old romantic thriller conventions. Following in the footsteps of classic noirs that yearned for lost hopes and ideals, Chinatown constructs a noir metaphor for the Garden of Eden. Some time in the past, the City of the Angels fell prey to a land grab by The Devil. The water to make it grow was stolen by political powers intent on ‘owning’ the future, in perpetuity.

Ambitious detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) puts on airs of respectability. But a shady client tricks him into publicizing an indiscretion on the part of Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer in charge of Los Angeles’ water supply. Mulwray’s wife Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) sues Jake, but then relents and hires him to find out who wants to discredit her husband. It doesn’t take long for Jake to uncover a sinister plot by persons unknown to make millions from the drought in the San Fernando Valley. The trail leads to Evelyn’s father Noah Cross (John Huston), a land baron obsessed with power and control.

Honest ‘origin’ stories tend to uncover Original Crimes.

Chinatown captures the sense of a sick and disillusioned Los Angeles, a sleepy town with big secrets to hide. A private dick in the classic Raymond Chandler tradition, Jake Gittes claims that he’s an ethical businessman. But Jake also nurses a fatal streak of idealism. He hides it from the man who really knows him, LAPD lieutenant Lou Escobar. Some trouble in Chinatown a number of years ago resulted in Jake’s ignominious departure from the force.  Jake’s snappy dialogue and feigned sophistication can’t hide the fact that he’s still troubled by the fate of a woman he wanted to protect.

Gittes now wants to redeem himself by coming to the aid of another woman in distress, the secretive, potentially dangerous Evelyn Mulwray. He’s smarter now, and soon begins to uncover Noah Cross’s large-scale real estate conspiracy. But Gittes makes critical mistakes. His bigotry is a weakness: he can snap out curses in Chinese, but fumbles a clue offered by a ‘jabbering’ Japanese gardener. He also tells the police too many lies, alienating a needed ally, Escobar. Worse still, Gittes foolishly underestimates his enemies’ deadly reach.

“Next time you lose the whole thing. Cut it off and feed it to my goldfish.”

They say that only foreigners can really nail the American ambience. In 1973 much of Los Angeles was still unchanged. Roman Polanski expresses the essence of 1930s L.A. in every scene. For some shots designer Richard Sylbert had only to drop some television aerials and repaint some curbs. A cramped apartment building serving as the home of sometime actress Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) resembles the Alvarado courtyard address where William Desmond Taylor was murdered. A dry wash and an orange grove represent the San Fernando Valley. Just as ‘foretold’ in Chinatown, the Valley is now an endless residential development.

Echo Park, Evelyn Mulwray’s Beverly Hills (or is it Los Feliz?) estate, various reservoirs and Catalina’s Avalon Bay haven’t substantially changed. Polanski evokes the past with even better signifiers, like the sight of a boiling radiator through a barbershop window and the chi-chi cars in the valet lot of the Biltmore Hotel. As if acknowledging the jest that L.A. is one big unplanned, unconscious urban mistake, a hideaway motel carries the name Macondo, a lift from Gabriel Gárcia Márquez’ novel of ‘realismo mágico,’  100 Years of Solitude.

Already established as a movie star, Jack Nicholson ascended to a new level of achievement in Chinatown. For the first time we saw his full range and felt the gravity behind his boyish features, mischievous grin and short-sighted gaze. His Jake Gittes isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is. We don’t blame him for not seeing all the pitfalls laid in his path; he would have done much better if he were less cocky about his ability to snooker people. Jake tries to trick Lt. Escobar one time too many.

Film detectives are prone to superficial beatings, the kind that heal in just two or three script pages. The thugs that intercept Jake aren’t so lenient. He receives a nasty battle scar in the form of a slit nostril, a scene done so well, everybody in the audience jumps an inch. Jake wears his bandage proudly, not realizing that the gash is really the Mark of Cain. The nervous, evasive Evelyn Mulwray carries her own telltale physical signifier, a discolored spot in the iris of one of her eyes. The ‘flaw’ is more than an excuse not to look Jake in the eye. Eye color is inherited, and Evelyn’s psychological disturbance has everything to do with shameful hereditary secrets. Los Angeles is a primitive land where the powerful break taboos, letting succeeding generations deal with the unspeakable consequences.

The cost of idealism and innocence always runs high in Polanski films, and Chinatown is no exception. The ‘nosy’ Jake Gittes is taught a lesson with a switchblade knife. The flaw in Evelyn’s eye becomes a horrible, perverse punishment.

“The future, Mister Gittes!  The future!”

Chinatown finds relevance in its notion that powerful men took possession of Los Angeles long before most of us were born. John Huston’s charming monster Noah Cross fancies himself an unofficial Viceroy of the entire region — he wears a caballero sash, as would a Don of old Spanish days. Cross is the kind of kingpin who might have run liquor into Los Angeles during Prohibition; his main muscle Mulvihill appears to be a disgraced former sheriff of Ventura County,

Robert Towne’s story of how Los Angeles got its water is a fiction that many now assume to be the truth … if only because there are so many lawless abuses of civic power on the history books. Chinatown shifts the decade forward to declare that city water was deliberately withheld until bankruptcies put most of the drought-plagued San Fernando Valley under new ownership. Only then was the Valley incorporated into the City proper, making all that water available for agriculture at bargain rates. Cross calls this ‘buying the future’ but Towne’s screenplay compares it to a rape. Chinatown is fiction, but a case can be made that it doesn’t distort L.A.’s capacity for civic corruption. Crimes almost as big were routinely swept under the rug.

Roman Polanski was enticed back to Hollywood to direct; his achievement in  Rosemary’s Baby had not been forgotten. Frankly, nobody working in town had half his talent. There isn’t a single false step to be seen in Chinatown, in performance or camerawork. The Panavision view always seems in the optimal place — Roman Polanski said that he didn’t film with two cameras, because for any given scene there is only one place our eye wants to be. Nobobdy blocked scenes better than Polanski. Often in unbroken takes, group shots become close-ups of faces, or key action like an extended arm holding a gun.

Chinatown ignores the early ’70s embrace of improvisation. The finale has a perfection of framing and action seen only in a few old Hollywood movies. Eight characters move in and out of the frame. In just a few extended shots Polanski juxtaposes running figures with a bloody face, with Noah Cross’s grasping hands, with the dazed Jake looking over his shoulder, incapable of righting what has gone wrong. The expressive blocking of the finale just can’t be improved. It compares favorably with classic, much-studied examples like Michael Curtiz’s  Casablanca and Otto Preminger’s  Laura. Just like those films, it also delivers an unforgettable closing dialogue line.

Chinatown remains a high water mark for Hollywood glory. We’re lucky to have been witnesses to such genuine, glamorous excellence. It received ten Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Writer. But it won only one, for Robert Towne. That’s what happens when a picture goes up against the likes of The Godfather Part II.  Paramount didn’t complain, as both pictures were theirs.