You know what happens to nosy fellows? ✵ Chinatown - REBEL REBEL ✵ 1960–1974 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Neo-noir crime thriller

DIRECTOR

Roman Polanski

WRITER

Robert Towne

STARS

Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

BEFORE

1941 John Huston’s movie noir The Maltese Falcon is released, and Polanski studies it avidly before he embarks on making Chinatown.

1968 Rosemary’s Baby is Polanski’s acclaimed horror movie about a young woman, played by Mia Farrow, who is impregnated by the devil.

AFTER

1988 Frantic, starring Harrison Ford, is Polanski’s first successful return to the thriller genre since making Chinatown.

Roman Polanski’s movie Chinatown is a gripping thriller with a truly nasty sting in its tail. Jack Nicholson plays the seedy private detective Jake Gittes, who investigates a conspiracy surrounding the Los Angeles water supply in the 1930s. During the course of his investigation, he uncovers a disturbing personal tragedy as he becomes involved with the chief water engineer’s wife, Evelyn Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway.

"Time has lessened our sense that this superlative 1974 film is simply a pastiche of the classic ’30s gumshoe thrillers—it now looks like a straightforward classic."

Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian, 2013

Powerful script

Key to the movie’s power is Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning script, which is widely regarded as one of the finest screenplays ever written for Hollywood. It was partly inspired by the true story of William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Department, who, on March 12, 1928, declared that the St. Francis Dam was safe, just hours before it failed catastrophically, with the resulting flood killing at least 600 people. In Towne’s screenplay, Mulholland becomes Hollis Mulwray, and the story turns into a fictional tale of the corrupt manipulation of the Los Angeles water supply for profit.

Towne wrote the script with Jack Nicholson in mind for the character of Gittes, the private eye who becomes unwittingly embroiled in the shadowy affairs of Mulwray’s associates. Nicholson is said to have been responsible for the hiring of Polanski, renowned for the psychological thrillers Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Polanski was in Europe at the time, having left the US after the murder of his wife in 1969. He was tempted back by the strength of Towne’s script, although Polanski and Towne had many differences over the final version.

There were two elements in particular that Polanski changed. First was the tragic and disturbing ending. Second was the decision not to use the voice-over narrative that so many private-eye film-noirs had employed in the past. Polanski insisted on letting the audience discover each new twist as Jake Gittes does. The effect of this is that both Jake and the audience are much more in the dark and far more unsettled by each new revelation.

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Gittes has his nose slashed as he gets too near the truth about the plot to dump water from the LA reservoirs. He is warned that if he continues to snoop, his whole nose will come off.

He owns the police!”

Evelyn Mulwray / Chinatown

Incompetent sleuth

Gittes’ desperate attempt to make sense of everything makes him a different kind of private eye from Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe a generation earlier in hard-boiled detective movies such as The Maltese Falcon. The audience knows that Marlowe will triumph in the end, but it becomes apparent that Gittes is going to mess up again and again, as he jumps to all the wrong conclusions. At the start of the movie, for instance, he is commissioned by the wife of Hollis Mulwray to prove her husband’s adultery. Very quickly Gittes hands her the seemingly incriminating photos—only he’s got it wrong twice over. First, the woman who commissioned him is not Mulwray’s wife but an impostor. Second, the young woman that he snaps out with Mulwray is not his mistress at all, as he, and we, the audience, will discover much later. Later in the movie, Gittes wrongly assumes that the real Evelyn Mulwray murdered her husband. An audience familiar with the roles of femmes fatales in earlier noir movies would naturally assume the same. But Mrs. Mulwray is the real victim, and the truth is so unsettling that Gittes can barely take it in. The real villain of the piece, it turns out, is the seemingly urbane old man Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father. He is the wealthy man whose determination to use the city’s water supply to his own advantage leads to the murder of his former business partner, Evelyn’s husband Hollis Mulwray.

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JACK NICHOLSON Actor

Jack Nicholson is one of the leading American movie actors of the last half century, renowned for playing difficult outsiders who can disarm with charm and humor. He was born in 1937 in Neptune City, New Jersey, where he grew up. His Hollywood acting career was slow to take off, and he had more success with writing screenplays. He had his first big acting break in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and a year later, his performance in Five Easy Pieces (1970) was widely acclaimed. Both movies brought him Oscar nominations for his acting, while One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) earned him his first Oscar win.

Key movies

1970 Five Easy Pieces

1974 Chinatown

1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

1980 The Shining

Unexpected twist

There is a twist at the end of Chinatown that makes the movie disturbingly different from other crime thrillers, and makes it linger long in the mind. In most movies about power and corruption, the detective simply homes in on, and then exposes, those responsible for a crime and its cover-up. But at the crucial moment in Chinatown, the focus is diverted away from Cross’s efforts to control the water supply. Instead, we are faced with a shocking revelation that appears to come out of the blue. Right at the end of the movie, we are left with the deeply disturbing image of Cross—who appears to have got away with everything—comforting his granddaughter.

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Gittes confronts Mrs. Mulwray with his theory that she killed her husband. But Gittes still has no idea what is going on.

Controlling men

Chinatown, it turns out, is not just about power and corruption. It also concerns the whole notion of male control. At one point, Gittes asks Cross why he feels the need to be richer: “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” “The future, Mr. Gittes,” Cross replies, “The future.” Women and water are the source of the future that Cross wants to control. And in his own way, Gittes, too, is pursuing control, probing and sticking his nose in where it is unwelcome.

His investigations lead to one of Chinatown’s nastiest and most memorable scenes. Gittes has his nose slit by a thug, played by Polanski himself: “You know what happens to nosy fellows? Huh? No? Wanna guess? Huh? No? Okay. They lose their noses.” It is a kind of emasculation, and Gittes’s dogged determination to solve the mystery reflects his need to regain control.

The problem for Gittes is that he is living, metaphorically, in Chinatown, a place that holds bad memories for him, which date back to his time spent in the police force. Yet it is Gittes himself who in the end chooses Chinatown, a world where anything goes, for the movie’s tragic denouement. There is no point in trying to do the right thing, his former police colleague tells him in the movie’s final line: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown…”

"You have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful."

Roman Polanski

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The poster for Chinatown suggests an old-fashioned film noir, with a chain-smoking detective and a femme fatale. But Polanski effectively subverts the genre and plays with audience expectations.

ROMAN POLANSKI Director

Born in Paris in 1933 to Polish parents, Roman Polanski grew up in Poland. During World War II, his parents were sent to a concentration camp where his mother died, but Roman survived by hiding in the countryside. After the war, he went to film school. His first feature movie, Knife in the Water (1962), was acclaimed internationally, and he moved to the UK to make movies such as the chilling Repulsion. In 1968, he met actress Sharon Tate and moved to the US, where he made the horror movie Rosemary’s Baby. The following year, Tate was murdered by the serial killers known as the Manson Family. Polanski left the US but was invited back to direct Chinatown. A few years later, he was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor and fled to France, where he still directs.

Key movies

1965 Repulsion

1968 Rosemary’s Baby

1974 Chinatown

1979 Tess

1988 Frantic

2002 The Pianist

What else to watch: The Maltese Falcon (1941) ✵ The Big Sleep (1946) ✵ Kiss Me Deadly (1955) ✵ Vertigo (1958) ✵ The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) ✵ L.A. Confidential (1997)