ChinatownNobody ever plans to get pulled into a conspiracy, but these things happen when the rich and powerful treat the ordinary people as pawns in their elaborate games. J.J. "Jake" Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private investigator who ends up, inch by inch, entrenching himself deeper into a plot involving very powerful people in the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, circa 1937. Jake has made a fine living "digging through other people's dirty linen"--his métier is in gathering evidence for suspicious spouses. But this occupation is still far preferable to his sordid past, something which is only hinted at in the film...something involving Chinatown.
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Jake is a smart man, but his capacity for the labyrinthine dodges and weaves in Chinatown is enough to make anyone's head spin. From the start, all seems cut and dry, a case like any other in his profession: follow the husband, discover the mistress; but Jake's quarry is the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling). Hollis is already developing a level of infamy in the (at the time) comparatively small city of L.A., his previous efforts to build a dam to aid with the problem of drought in the city failing miserably, resulting in the St. Francis Dam disaster, which killed hundreds. Hollis' refusal to repeat his mistake does not go over well with those who believe he is simply aiding the rich to become richer by hoarding the water; it couldn't be farther from the truth. Jake discovers the girl who Hollis is seeing, and his findings get leaked (fed?) to the press, a course of action which Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) does not take kindly to seeing publicized. This revelation is but one domino which begins to set Jake on the path of a deeper investigation; for each piece of new evidence he overturns, there are even more unanswered questions waiting. Hints and clues from the very start prove useful in this complex detective story, where Jake--and the audience--are trying to piece together the sequence of events, which prove to be far from innocent. Jake tracks leads down to everywhere from the L.A. Dept. of Water and Power, to the seemingly innocuous Albacore Club, where Jake confronts the imposing, elderly, stinking rich Noah Cross, played by the legendary film noir director, John Huston, in a deftly clever bit of casting. Cross--who perpetually called Jake "Mr. Gitts"--is a sly, old dog, who approaches Jake directly on his intentions, attempting to disarm him and pry away his secrets with an unnervingly warm, "grandfatherly" sense of cunning; in a film filled with memorable lines, Huston gets some of the best in such a short span of time on screen.
Jake's investigations do not come without a cost, a tab which gets collected in as horrible of a way as he could ever dread to happen. The lingering sense that his past as a cop working alongside his former colleagues in Chinatown leaves us with the sense that something terrible happened...something so bad, that he simply won't talk about it in detail. He only hints to Evelyn that what he did in Chinatown was "as little as possible", indicating that from his experiences, trying to do the right thing only meant hurting the wrong people--for all of Jake's efforts to do what he believes is the right thing, he is but a player in the bigger game unfolding in these key, formative years of L.A., where the forces beyond his control will treat him like the pawn he is. There's a saying about "sticking your nose where it doesn't belong" which is manifested in Chinatown, even literally when Jake investigates the reservoir, only to have a sadistic lackey (played by none other than the director, Roman Polanski) cut his nose in a brutal fashion, a reminder Jake wears for the remainder of the story. For all of Jake's clever way of arranging the events and characters to fall into place perfectly--much as Sam Spade does in John Huston's own The Maltese Falcon--the events which lead us to those hauntingly memorable last lines of the film are subtly hinted at throughout the movie. Little things get revisited in grim ways...a resting of one's head on the horn of a steering wheel by accident, a name dropped from an obituary column, and so forth. It is really only on a second viewing when so many of the cluse--now visible and transparent--take on additional meaning in the overarching plot, evidence of the complexity of this story of greed and confusion. Aside from a few choice pieces of language, blood, and brief nudity--none of which would have flown in the Hays Code-era of Hollywood--and the Technicolor, this film would have blended right in among the great film noir classics of the Thirties and Forties. The plot is complex and is filled with unsavory characters and members of the upper crust of new California, much like Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, which would be the spiritual progenitor of Chinatown. One could say that Chinatown is an homage, but in all fairness, it exceeds this simple definition by embodying the qualities of that genre and introducing new qualities and elements while honoring the hallmarks; it does more than stand on the shoulders of giants--it is a giant. There is a line which Noah Cross tells Jake near the end of the film, that what is happening in L.A. has to do with "the future"; shortly thereafter, they make their fateful journey to Chinatown, which itself appears more futuristic than the pre-war Los Angeles we have grown accustomed to seeing--street lights, neon signs, the lighting principally. Is this Polanski's way of saying what the future of L.A. is to be? Have those days of old gone by, and we are all just living in Chinatown now? Yes, I think so. Welcome to the future...let's just try to forget about it, and dream of the past, where even innocence was never really innocent.
Recommended for: Fans of a cynical period piece about Los Angeles' and the forces which made the city great...just don't look too closely at what (or who) they used for brick and mortar. And for fans of a film noir classic, even if it's inception is removed from the traditional era it evokes.
Jake's investigations do not come without a cost, a tab which gets collected in as horrible of a way as he could ever dread to happen. The lingering sense that his past as a cop working alongside his former colleagues in Chinatown leaves us with the sense that something terrible happened...something so bad, that he simply won't talk about it in detail. He only hints to Evelyn that what he did in Chinatown was "as little as possible", indicating that from his experiences, trying to do the right thing only meant hurting the wrong people--for all of Jake's efforts to do what he believes is the right thing, he is but a player in the bigger game unfolding in these key, formative years of L.A., where the forces beyond his control will treat him like the pawn he is. There's a saying about "sticking your nose where it doesn't belong" which is manifested in Chinatown, even literally when Jake investigates the reservoir, only to have a sadistic lackey (played by none other than the director, Roman Polanski) cut his nose in a brutal fashion, a reminder Jake wears for the remainder of the story. For all of Jake's clever way of arranging the events and characters to fall into place perfectly--much as Sam Spade does in John Huston's own The Maltese Falcon--the events which lead us to those hauntingly memorable last lines of the film are subtly hinted at throughout the movie. Little things get revisited in grim ways...a resting of one's head on the horn of a steering wheel by accident, a name dropped from an obituary column, and so forth. It is really only on a second viewing when so many of the cluse--now visible and transparent--take on additional meaning in the overarching plot, evidence of the complexity of this story of greed and confusion. Aside from a few choice pieces of language, blood, and brief nudity--none of which would have flown in the Hays Code-era of Hollywood--and the Technicolor, this film would have blended right in among the great film noir classics of the Thirties and Forties. The plot is complex and is filled with unsavory characters and members of the upper crust of new California, much like Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, which would be the spiritual progenitor of Chinatown. One could say that Chinatown is an homage, but in all fairness, it exceeds this simple definition by embodying the qualities of that genre and introducing new qualities and elements while honoring the hallmarks; it does more than stand on the shoulders of giants--it is a giant. There is a line which Noah Cross tells Jake near the end of the film, that what is happening in L.A. has to do with "the future"; shortly thereafter, they make their fateful journey to Chinatown, which itself appears more futuristic than the pre-war Los Angeles we have grown accustomed to seeing--street lights, neon signs, the lighting principally. Is this Polanski's way of saying what the future of L.A. is to be? Have those days of old gone by, and we are all just living in Chinatown now? Yes, I think so. Welcome to the future...let's just try to forget about it, and dream of the past, where even innocence was never really innocent.
Recommended for: Fans of a cynical period piece about Los Angeles' and the forces which made the city great...just don't look too closely at what (or who) they used for brick and mortar. And for fans of a film noir classic, even if it's inception is removed from the traditional era it evokes.