May 9, 2002
United States. English. Color. 131 minutes. Available: VCR and DVD.
Crew
Director: Roman Polanski
Screenplay: Robert Towne, Roman Polanski
(uncredited)
Cinematography: John A. Alonzo
Editing: Sam
O'Steen
Original music: Jerry Goldsmith
Production design: Richard
Sylbert
Costume design: Anthea Sylbert
Producers: Robert Evans, C.O.
Erickson
Cast
Jack Nicholson (Jake Gittes)
Faye Dunaway (Evelyn Cross Mulwray)
John
Huston (Noah Cross)
Perry Lopez (Lieutenant Lou Escobar)
John Hillerman
(Russ Yelburton)
Darrell Zwerling (Hollis Mulwray)
Diane Ladd (Ida
Sessions/Evelyn Mulwray Imposter)
Roy Jenson (Claude Mulvihill)
Roman
Polanski (cameo as man with knife)
Joe Mantell (Walsh)
Bruce Glover
(Duffy)
Belinda Palmer (Katherine Cross)
Burt Young (Curly)
Synopsis
Jake Gittes is an L.A. private eye who specializes in matrimonial strife and infidelity. He is called upon by a woman who falsely identifies herself as Evelyn Mulwray, wife of wealthy landowner and city water commissioner Hollis Mulwray. The imposter has Gittes spy on her "husband" to find out if he is having an affair. Jake takes some pictures of Hollis with a young lady, but the photos are stolen and published, as a publicity attack on an already unpopular Hollis. (L.A. is in the middle of a water shortage as the result of a drought, and Hollis has become something of a scapegoat for the angry public.) Gittes soon comes to understand how he has been used, when the real Mrs. Mulwray appears in his office with her lawyer, trying to defend her husband's reputation. However, when Hollis Mulwray is found murdered down by an L.A. river the next day, Mrs. Mulwray hires him to find the killer. Jake gradually uncovers a plot to buy unwatered land for low prices, divert the city's water supply in order to water the land, and then sell the land off for millions of dollars. The plot is masterminded by Noah Cross, Evelyn's father and Hollis' one-time business partner, who has a vast network of corrupt city officials and landowners backing him up. While Gittes continues to unravel the details of this scandal, he falls for the recently-widowed Mrs. Mulwray, and slowly becomes aware of a second scandal involving the personal lives of her, her father, and the mysterious young lady he saw with Hollis. In the end, Jake's struggle to uncover the truth leads him into Chinatown (the site of a past failure during his years as a cop), and eventually results in Mrs. Mulwray's death at the hands of the corrupt L.A. police. Noah Cross wins, and Gittes walks away defeated.
Summary of Critical Reviews
Cocks, Jay. "Lost Angelenos," Time, 1 July 1974: 42.
In talking about Chinatown, Cocks continually refers to a predecessor in the private-eye genre: writer Raymond Chandler, and his own fictional detective Philip Marlowe. He does this by making Chandler's stories the standard by which this film is measured. He cites the movie's main strength as its setting, a 1930s Los Angeles which closely matches reality, or at least the most common images associated with that era, ranging from the standard joke, "six suburbs in search of a city" to Marlowe's description, "a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style." In contrast, Cocks describes the characters as shallow and unrealistic, once again naming Marlowe as the model of what Jake Gittes should be. While Cocks is correct about the way Jack Nicholson's and Faye Dunaway's acting do not meet the stereotypical roles of private eye and femme fatale, he has missed the point: they're not supposed to. Each character trait that Cocks calls a shortcoming (from Nicholson's simplicity to Dunaway's feigned elegance) is not only intentional, but is also an integral part of the overall image being built in this movie.
Gilliatt, Penelope. "Private Nose," The New Yorker, 1 July 1974: 70.
Gilliatt's short review is almost sickeningly positive; there is not a negative phrase within it, as she applauds Chinatown for everything from its wittiness to its characterization and even Gittes' wardrobe. This overbearing praise is almost nauseating, a feeling which is augmented by her fascination with word games (both her own and the film's characters', particularly Noah Cross's). Also somewhat annoying is her obsession with pointing out all of Polanski's hidden jokes and "oblique farce," some of which are not quite believable in terms of their effectiveness or the probability of their actually having been intended by director Roman Polanski; she at one point suggests that Noah Cross's name is derived from the way an actor feigning a Chinese accent might say "no cross me." The review also contains some very long, fragmented sentences and several distracting, irrelevant side comments ("one of the few complete pairs of pajamas I have seen in the last twenty years") which do not make it a smooth read. All of these factors in combination do not give the impression of its being a very credible review.
Zimmerman, Paul D. "Blood and Water," Newsweek, 1 July 1974: 74.
Although Zimmerman's review is also predominantly acclaim of the movie, it is much more convincing because of the depth of his observations. He identifies Polanski's title and setting as not only appropriate choices for the action, but also as a clever and effective metaphor for the "moral climate" that he believes is Polanski's real underlying theme in this work: the "Byzantine corruption" and "decadence of the 1970s." He makes further insightful and congratulatory comments on Nicholson's and Dunaway's abilities to adapt their usual acting styles to meet their assigned characters, and also on Polanski's success at developing meaningful messages and parallels (like the one between a dam scandal in a fictional 1950s L.A. and the then-volatile Watergate scandal in real-life 1970s D.C.) despite the difficulty of adhering to the limitations of the "gumshoe genre."
Berardinelli, James. "Chinatown." ReelViews. 2001. James
Berardinelli. Accessed 11 March 2002 Berardinelli's opinion of Chinatown is that its success is
born of the fact that it is the exception to so many rules and expectations. Not
only does he cite this movie as "the high-water point in the careers of both
lead-actor Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski," but also dubs it the
"finest color entry into the film noir genre." His main point is that the film
takes all of the cliches and conventions of the stereotypical
private-investigator movie and re-works them to give the story life and depth,
establishing expectations early on and then breaking them as the plot unfolds.
In keeping with this same line of thought, Berardinelli's one key disagreement
with all three of the earlier reviews is his statement of how unrealistic
Polanski's 1930s L.A. is (calling it the "exaggerated stuff of dreams and
movies"). While this statement fits well into his argument (as another example
of Polanski playing with the norms), one has to doubt the accuracy and/or
credibility of such a statement, seeing as how Berardinelli is the most recent
of the four reviewers and therefore the least likely to have actually
experienced the '30s firsthand.
Background Information
In 1968 Polish-born film director Roman Polanski first came to Hollywood
where he easily gained a reputation with the psychological thriller Rosemary's
Baby. However, after the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the infamous
Charles Manson gang in 1969, Polanski decided to return to Europe.
Chinatown marked Polanski's 1974 return to the USA, and seemed
to foreshadow a promising Hollywood career in store for him... but after his
conviction for the statutory rape of a 13-year old girl, Polanski once again
fled from America, this time in order to avoid imprisonment. (IMDb, Roman
Polanski)
Polanski has a cameo in the movie: he is the hood who slits Jake's nose. This
scene was actually extremely complex to film, and Polanski and Nicholson both
got so tired of explaining how it was done that they simply began to claim
Nicholson's nose was actually cut. (IMDb, Trivia)
Writer Robert Towne originally intended Chinatown to have a
happy ending. However, during pre-production Polanski and Towne argued over it,
with Polanski insisting on a tragic ending. Polanski won the argument and, when
the picture was re-released in 1999, Towne admitted that he had been wrong.
(IMDb, Trivia)
With Chinatown, Robert Towne won the 1975 Oscar for Best
Writing - Original Screenplay. Other 1975 Oscar Nominations for
Chinatown were: Roman Polanski for Best Director; Jack
Nicholson for Best Actor in a Leading Role; Faye Dunaway for Best Actress in a
Leading Role; Jerry Goldsmith for Best Music-Original Dramatic Score; Robert
Evans for Best Picture; John A Alonzo for Best Cinematography; W. Stewart
Campbell, Ruby R. Levitt, and Richard Sylbert for Best Art Direction-Set
Decoration; Anthea Sylbert for Best Costume Design; Charles Grenzbach and Larry
Jost for Best Sound; and Sam O'Steen for Best Film Editing. The film fared
better, actually, in the British Academy Awards; Robert Towne again won for Best
Screenplay, joined this time by Roman Polanski for Best Direction and Jack
Nicholson for Best Actor. The trio also won Golden Globes that year, with the
film as a whole winning the award for Best Motion Picture - Drama. (IMDb,
Awards)
Chinatown was actually the first part of a planned trilogy
written by Robert Towne about Jake Gittes and Los Angeles. The second part,
The Two Jakes, was directed by Nicholson in 1990. Neither Towne
nor Nicholson won any awards for this sequel. (IMDb, Trivia)
Los Angeles, the setting for Chinatown, was actually one of
the filming locations: Gittes spies on Mulwray while he is boating at Echo Park
Lake. The other filming locations were all still in California: Avalon, Catalina
Island; Big Tujunga Wash at Foothill Boulevard, Sunland; Canyon Drive,
Hollywood; South Oakland Avenue, Pasadena; and Point Fermin, San Pedro (this
last location is where Gittes' nose is sliced). (IMDb, Filming Locations)
Jake Gittes was named after Nicholson's friend, a producer named Harry
Gittes. (IMDb, Trivia)
Some odd items are included in the contents of Ida Sessions' pocketbook when
Jake Gittes rummages through it, specifically a $2 bill and a Screen Actors
Guild membership card. (IMDb, Trivia)
The central conspiracy in Chinatown is actually based on a
real historical event: the 1908 Owne River Valley Scandal. The name of the
film's Water and Power Engineer, Hollis Mulwray, is a play on the name of the
real-life head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power during that
scandal, William Mulholland (1855-1935). Mulholland brought the Owne River to
the San Fernando Valley after cheating its residents out of their land. Robert
Towne got much of his information regarding this scandal from Carey McWilliams'
interpretive history entitled Southern California Country, an Island on the
Land. (Ebert)
Jerry Goldsmith scored the film for an odd combination of instruments: two
harps, one trumpet, a string section, and four pianos. The reason for using four
pianos is that Goldsmith had the players use them in four different ways
throughout the film: one was a standard performance piano, one was intentionally
detuned, one was played by the strings inside the piano (instead of by the
keys), and one was "prepared" (a technique where the sounds produced are altered
by placing various objects on the strings while playing). (Davis, 58)
Critical Analysis
The very name of the Roman Polanski's Chinatown is
misleading. Without looking at a cast list or reading a review, you might even
expect this to be another contribution to the massive martial arts genre,
permeated with Oriental culture (or cliches thereof) and consisting of a string
of endless fight scenes with some sort of loose plot leading from one to the
next. Even upon digging as deep as the videocassette sleeve and discovering that
Jack Nicholson plays an L.A. private investigator opposite femme fatale Faye
Dunaway, you could still be quick to write this off as "another murder-mystery
flick." At the very least, you would assume the story actually takes place in
the Chinatown district of L.A. These, however, are just the first round of
falsehoods and fallacies you would encounter in the course of viewing this
deceptive 1974 film.
Chinatown, generally considered to be a revival of the film
noir genre that dominated America cinema from the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s
(Cook, 449-453), bears much resemblance to the classic private eye films that
precede it. Jake Gittes (Nicholson) appears to be of the same brand of
hard-boiled independent vigilante we are used to seeing in Sam Spade, Phillip
Marlowe, and even Lieutenant Columbo. Gittes is an ex-cop who felt the need to
operate outside the confines of the insincere and ineffective police department,
and now earns his living gathering evidence for paying clients. For a while, his
role in the film is also consistent with that of the archetypal sleuth; he
serves to gradually reveal small pieces of a larger puzzle that eventually all
fall into place, at which point the mystery is solved and the finger is pointed
at the "bad guy." The film even contains all the other typical players in your
standard "whodunnit" mystery plot: the seductive femme fatale Evelyn Mulwray
(Dunaway), the always-suspicious antagonist Noah Cross (John Huston), the
uncooperative lawman Lieutenant Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez), the inevitable murder
victim Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), and the tough henchman Claude
Mulvihill (Roy Jenson; also a nameless knife-wielding thug played by Polanski
himself). The classic recipe has, in its simplest form, been fulfilled. (Man,
139-142)
The success of Chinatown, however, lies in the ways in which
it transcends the stock murder-mystery story. Even from the start, Gittes does
not match the image of past private-eyes. Instead of the sparsely-furnished
hole-in-the-wall office you would expect, Gittes works in an environment of
style: an office building with brand-new venetian blinds in every room,
three-piece designer suits and well-groomed facial features, a full liquor
cabinet, and a small paid staff (two operatives and a secretary) at his command;
certainly not the humble character usually associated with the gumshoe image.
The irony of this clean-cut first impression, though, is obvious to the point of
being humorous, as our first indication of Gittes's dirty line of work comes
from racy pictures being flipped through by his distraught client Curly; Gittes
is a muckraker, earning his living by taking pictures of people engaged in
extramarital affairs to support his clients' divorce cases. By engaging in such
low-brow activities in order to elevate his personal appearance to high-class,
Gittes has shattered the wall of morality that usually separates the private-eye
from the world he must investigate; he has bought right into commercial culture
and become consumed by the same amoral greed that grips everyone else (Man, 140,
144). This image foreshadows Gittes' inability to fulfill the role of the
ingenious private investigator when a real issue arises, because he is not
distanced enough from the outside world to appropriately observe or change it.
One could surmise, even, that Gittes is on some level aware of this shortcoming,
since he shows great reluctance to even tackle the simplest stage of
investigation with regards to the high-profile water commissioner Hollis
Mulwray; when a woman posing as Mulwray's wife hires Gittes to investigate him
for evidence of adultery, Gittes instinctively tries to sidestep it by advising
the woman to let the matter go if she truly loves her husband. Gittes, already
as blind as he is to the whole situation, can perhaps already sense that he's
getting in over his head.
Chinatown's reliance on murder-mystery cliches that get
broken down is so effective, in fact, that Gittes himself can not escape the
pre-established illusion. Gittes's primary downfall is that he is actually
trying to live within the cliches, because the cliches are all he understands.
The truth is continually clouded for him because he is always trying to fit new
clues and information into predetermined categories that lead to given stock
scenarios: Mulwray's involvement with the young girl "must" be adultery (he's
really her stepfather), Mulwray's murder "must" have been committed by Evelyn
out of jealousy (despite all the evidence regarding his death as a way to keep
the water scandal from getting out), the hidden Katherine "must" be a kidnapped
murder witness (she's really being hidden from Cross by her protective
mother/sister), the union between Evelyn and her father Noah Cross "must" have
been rape (really just another of Cross's manipulative deeds, leading his
daughter into sensual pleasures in an otherwise bleak existence), and Cross's
water scandal "must" be about material greed (instead of the power trip Cross
has proven his lust for on countless occasions). Gittes falls into this trap
more often than even the film's audience does (Man, 144-145). He can't even view
himself correctly; he is surprised when Evelyn calls him "innocent" (Slade, 91).
Gittes tries so hard to fit the mold of the "ideal" detective, that he instead
makes himself out to be a bumbling clown, an image made complete by the nose
bandage he wears for most of the film; his lifestyle has made him far too
innocent, so that he misperceives things continually (Lev, 56).
Gittes' physical appearance, at the beginning and throughout the course of
the film, runs parallel to that of Chinatown's 1930's L.A. Both
are visually appealing on the surface. Southern California's weather is bright
and sunny, the people are all as well-groomed as Gittes, and the general look of
things in the early scenes of the film is clean and colorful. But, as with
Gittes, all of L.A.'s dirt is beneath the surface, corrupting the city from
within. This hidden ugliness seeping out into the city from its core is
represented by a gradual shift of the visual representations of both the scenery
and of Gittes himself. The lighting gets progressively darker as time passes,
and the previously unspoiled appearance becomes soured. When Gittes's nose gets
sliced by the Roman Polanski character, ruining his pristine and unlined face,
it is almost simultaneous with the ruining of the "face" of L.A. (Lev, xxi, 55);
the same connection can be made of the "flaw" in Evelyn Mulwray's eye, which
Jake discovers while alone with her in her stylish mansion.
The discovery of each other's physical flaws - his sliced nose and her flawed
eye - is a key moment in the film, for (at least) two reasons. First off, this
unfolding of their imperfections leads them to bed, much the same way that the
movie as a whole suggests settling into sensual pleasures and personal luxury in
light of the hopelessness of morals and prosocial action against the mass
corruption in capitalist society. Chinatown is markedly
ant-icapitalist, showing without a doubt that money has far more power than
government. Even Marxism is more hopeful in its message, suggesting an
alternative solution, but this movie indicates there is no solution; an
individual is far better off serving his own interests and minding his own
business than trying to beat the system (Lev, xxi, 58-59)
The scene where Gittes discovers the flaw in Evelyn's eye is also key because
of the attention it brings to "vision" as a central theme in the movie. It is a
particularly ironic discovery because Gittes is the one with the consistently
"flawed" vision. Another literal occurrence of this theme is the key piece of
evidence Jake finds that eventually leads him to Noah Cross as Hollis Mulwray's
killer: a pair of glasses in the pool behind Evelyn's house. But there are far
more non-literal examples of this theme: the superficial cleanliness of L.A. and
of Chinatown's characters, the snooping and spying that Gittes
does to earn his living, and Gittes' continual blindness to the truth. Another
sight reference is Cross's gigantic vision of incorporating the San Fernando
Valley into Los Angeles, which Gittes never fully perceives. Gittes'
shortsightedness comes into play one last time in the closing sequence of the
film: his faith in the law force that he has quit is still so strong (despite
all his external convictions about its powerlessness and his continual defiance
of its mandates) that he trusts that they can fix everything at the end once
they hear the truth from his mouth (Slade, 91). Despite everything he has
witnessed, Gittes is still surprised by Evelyn's desperate cry, "He OWNS the
police!" And, just as they did in his days as a Chinatown cop, the police force
lets him down by killing and convicting the wrong person - Evelyn Mulwray - so
that Cross goes unharmed (Man, 145). This recurring "vision" motif plays itself
out once again in the final scene of the film, with Evelyn bleeding from her eye
after she is shot to death, and Cross covering the young Katherine's eyes to
shield her from Evelyn's death (and lead her away into his world, where she is
probably doomed to repeat the life of her mother/sister before her).
The water scandal in Chinatown, made in 1974, can be seen to
stand for such then-current issues as they OPEC oil cartel, the Agnew bribery,
and, most obviously, the Watergate scandal. The association of the "threat from
water" motif with the fragility of human existence is a common archetype in
movies. The motif usually involves physical danger or death, whether in the form
of murder by drowning (The Parallax View), shipwreck disaster
(The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic), or
creatures from the sea (Jaws, 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea). Here, it is a deeper form of fragility; the whole city is falling
prey to a behind-the-scenes political/business scandal. Even the man
perpetrating the scandal, Noah Cross, has a sort of moral fragility that allows
the greed and power from the scandal to consume him. Cross thinks he is doing
good in all his evils; in his mind, he is helping L.A. by expanding it into the
valley and "bringing it to the water", and he is protecting and raising
Katherine like a good father should. What even he doesn't see, in all his power
and influence, is that his treatment of Evelyn and Katherine is an extension of
his exploitation of the business world - the water scandal - to a more
personal/intimate/sexual level (Lev, xxi, 54, 56-58).
In the end, we finally see why Chinatown is named as it is,
despite the fact that only the last five minutes or so takes place in that
location. The Chinatown district's lawlessness and political immunity has
extended to encompass all of L.A. (Slade, 91), and its inscrutability due to
prevailing ignorance (of its dominant foreign [Oriental] culture, as
demonstrated by Gittes's' tasteless Chinaman joke from the barber shop) has
extended to encompass human existence as a whole. Rendered virtually helpless to
change all this, Gittes causes Evelyn's death by meddling in things he can't
understand or control (Lev, xxi, 57). Gittes' failure to save Evelyn and
Katherine is a reenactment of an earlier failure during his career as a cop in
Chinatown - driving home the futility of an individual trying to beat the
prevailing evil in the world around us (Man, 142-143). Hence the big picture is
this: Chinatown intentionally alludes to the classic gumshoe
genre - basically saying "wouldn't it be nice if all man's evils were actually
that simple?" - and then capsizes those established expectations as a way of
portraying the loss of faith in American society (Man, 139). How should we, the
audience, respond to this? Perhaps it should be the same way Gittes's operative
Walsh does with the movie's closing statement: "Forget it... it's Chinatown."
Works Cited
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 3rd ed. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Davis, Richard. Complete Guide to Film Scoring. Ed. Jonathan
Feist. Boston: Berklee Press, 1999.
Ebert, Roger. "Chinatown." The Chicago
Sun-Times. 6 February 2000. Accessed 11 March 2002 The Internet Movie Database. Accessed 8 April 2002:
Lev, Peter. American Films of the70s: Conflicting Visions .
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Man, Glenn. Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance,
1967-1976. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Slade, Tony. "Chinatown." The International
Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Ed. Christopher Lyon and Susan
Doll. Volume I: Films. Chicago: St. James Press, 1984. 4 vols.