Featured Movies
Partners
Chinatown
Polanski's masterly film noir takes us back to the days when Los Angeles was a small town. Jack Nicholson stars
Chinatown marked Roman Polanski's return to Hollywood filmmaking after the 1969 murder of his wife, Sharon Tate. As such, it's no surprise his film is caustic and uncompromising, with no good guys or happy endings. In 1930s Los Angeles, cop-turned-private eye JJ 'Jake' Gittes (Jack Nicholson) makes a living from sleazy divorce cases, and is called upon to investigate the private life of Hollis Mulwray, the head of the Department of Water and Power. It seems like straightforward adultery - but Gittes is in way over his head before he's even started. Mulwray is murdered. After Gittes encounters Mulwray's beautiful wife Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) and her domineering father Noah Cross (John Huston), he thinks he knows what's going on - except with each new piece of 'evidence' his theories are disproved. In Polanski's L.A, nothing is what it seems, everyone lies, and corruption infects every aspect of public and private life. One of Chinatown's great strengths is an incredibly complex (yet completely coherent) script by Robert Towne, which is rightly held up as a Holy Grail of screenwriting. This attention to detail is matched by Polanski's vision - the film reveals something new with each repeated viewing. He also manages to present familiar LA locations in a unique way, a feat matched only by Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. Jack Nicholson is superb as a basically decent man who tries to find the truth, but can't bear the revelations he uncovers - right up to the film's horrifically unhappy ending. Verdict In short, Chinatown is the greatest film of 1970s cinema's golden era (that wasn't made by Martin Scorsese). |
