FILM REVIEW: 'CHINATOWN'
Streaming Now: Roman Polanski's 1974 Classic Debuts on Netflix
(Paramount Pictures) Chinatown is one of those films with a famous last line: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown," which serves as both explanation and shorthand for the venality, pettiness and, finally, horror we've witnessed over the movie's 130 minutes. Only the final scene of Roman Polanski's 1974 crime story is actually set in the neighborhood on the northern end of downtown Los Angeles. Private detective Jake Gittes ("Two Ts and an E!" as he shouts to a scrum of reporters) used to be a cop in what we're led to believe is a gritty, morally compromising part of the city. In Jack Nicholson's leeringly charming performance, Gittes barges through the film's 1937 setting like a '70s used car salesman, with oily charisma and never-take-no-for-an-answer chutzpa. But because he's a private dick in a neo-noir thriller -- a tough guy with a sensitive heart and an eye for the femme fatale-- he's also, ultimately, a source of compassion in a darkly convoluted universe. As is often said of The Wire, Chinatown (written by Robert Towne) takes its city's measure from the bottom -- a dead bum under a bridge, drowned by a torrent that should be "barely a trickle" in the L.A. River basin -- to the very top, where Noah Cross (John Huston) sits like a hawk, waiting to elegantly snatch whatever he desires.
Cross used to own the lucrative water authority which served Los Angeles (then a city of 1.5 million), along with a younger partner, Hollis Mulwray, the eventual husband of Cross's daughter Evelyn -- a fraught Faye Dunaway, who holds the film's most unnerving secret (no spoilers here, though). Mulwray insists that a natural resource should rest in public hands, forces the sale of the authority to the city, and takes over as the water department's chief engineer. He's a semi-honest man in a dishonest environment, and he ends up standing against the interests of those, like his former partner, who would like water flowing to places where it will create the most wealth, citizens be damned. Mulwray's murder early in the movie serves to show just how far those interests will go. It's in solving Mulwray's murder that Gittes finds himself intertwined with Noah and Evelyn, and discovers just how dangerous Cross can be.
Chinatown could easily be remade today -- God help us -- although Gittes would be played by an actor much younger than Nicholson, then a 37-year-old with a bald spot and receding hairline. (Dunaway, at 33, is gorgeous despite an apparent attack by an eyebrow waxer; the 68-year-old Huston is onscreen for a remarkably short time, but invests Cross with depths of depravity in a stunning performance.) The movie is funnier than a noir should be -- especially one with as shocking a reveal as Dunaway's; a pivotal meet-cute scene includes an R-rated recitation of a dirty joke, and Nicholson spends half the movie in an outrageously large nose bandage. (Anti-Semitism and wife-beating are also played for laughs.) The film's concerns are those of Los Angeles and California as a whole, today: real estate and water. Partly based on historical events, Chinatown's backdrop revolves around the city's transformation from a parched strip of land hard by an undrinkable ocean to a verdant oasis, accomplished by essentially stealing water from the Owens Valley. Chinatown's early minutes give us a quote even better than its final lines: "Los Angeles is a desert community...Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we never existed." And if a few people end up trampled in getting that water where it needs to go? What the hell, it's only Chinatown.
For Fans Of: Memento, The Maltese Falcon, L.A. Confidential
Why We Like It: Roman Polanski Direction, Jack Nicholson, Los Angeles
'Chinatown' is currently streaming on Netflix.
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