There are a lot of reasons seasoned critics and cinephiles still hold onto the 1970s as Hollywood’s true “Golden Age.” They’re the touchstone decade built on a string of benchmark classics which we rightly measure all the films that followed and most of those that came before against, when filmmakers’ personal visions ruled even as the modern blockbuster was born.
“Chinatown” is a keystone movie of that era, one of the pictures that let the world see the transformation that was taking place, as it was happening. It is auteurist, with the screenwriter as the true auteur here, as was the case with “Network.” It was and is epic, but intimate.
It’s also a star vehicle with Jack Nicholson‘s coming out as a major star. Taken in context, it was yet another period piece anchored in a previous Golden Age — the 1930s. But it was and remains something startling and new, a film noir that transcended the genre and slapped a modern, post Manson Family, mid-Watergate exclamation point on it.
The violence Roman Polanski put on screen still makes you grimace. The performances have an effortless reality about them, even at their most operatic.
And Robert Towne’s genre script, which made most of those that preceded it and everything that came after seem lazy and undercooked by comparison, still unsettles, challenges, surprises and thrills.
A story that taps into the corruption the Nixon era, the large scale scheming that remade Los Angeles in the ’30s and the perversions of the rich and unrestrained, seemingly tailor-made for the not-yet-exposed pedophile Polanski, it’s no wonder that “Chinatown” became shorthand in the movie and the culture for pervasive and systemic rot and injustice.
Nicholson is J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a dapper private eye who presides over an office with two seasoned “associates” (Joe Mantell and Crispin Glover’s dad, Bruce Glover) and a secretary (Nandu Hinds) he’s genteel enough to send out of the room when he wants to repeat an off-color joke.
A society dame (Diane Ladd) shows up and asks him to check on her husband, whom she thinks is having an affair. Jake advises her to “let sleeping dogs lie,” but it’s to no avail. When she tells him her husband’s name, “Mulwray,” Jake recognizes it.
And after he and his associates have “tailed” their quarry from water board public meetings to mid-drought water reservoirs to the sea, snapping shots of Mulwray rowing a possible paramour around Echo Lake, he smells a little publicity that might boost his business.
The “scandal” that explodes in the papers happens with or without Jake’s machinations. But the ruthlessly rich femme fatale (Faye Dunaway) who shows up at his office with her lawyer upends all of that. She’s the “real” Mrs. Mulwray. She’s ready to sue.
Jake’s efforts to head that off send him in search of Mulwray, as the city’s water czar goes missing. And right after he’s found drowned, Jake’s real problems begin. Mrs. Mulwray, her obscenely-rich father (John Huston) and a whole lot of people who either know better than to keep asking questions about that “accident” or water “theft” or land buyouts seem hellbent on keeping Jake from getting to the bottom of things, and by any means necessary.
Towne’s screenplay embraces some conventions of the detective picture and eschews others. Jake is as much a man of mystery here as anybody else. There is no lazy voice-over narration — Nicholson himself couldn’t avoid this crutch when he and Towne made the sequel “The Two Jakes” in 1990 — no sense of a “home” life, a place where Jake keeps his natty suits and parks his ’35 Ford roadster.
We figure out he was a cop from his dealings with other cops (Perry Lopez, Richard Bakalyan). We hear he worked “Chinatown.” We jump to our own conclusions about what that meant, an uphill battle in a Byzantine, lawless underworld sure to corrupt those meant to police it.
The immaculate screen compositions Polanski is famous for only make themselves obvious a few times here. But his handling of violence stamps his imprint on the film in a few indelible scenes.
Playing a mobster Jake refers to as a “midget” inexplicably hired by tough-guy ex-sheriff (Roy Jenson) as “muscle,” Polanski gives himself a showy, tiny role, calling the detective “kitty cat” as in what “curiosity” killed, and slits the detective’s nose.
But the standouts in the cast are director-turned-actor Huston — putting his stamp on the sorts of larger-than-life roles he’d play a few times on the screen, in between directing his own classic-strewn ouevr — and Dunaway. His ease at this rich Man in Full character, incapable of being corrected — he keeps pronouncing “Gitt-ees” as “Gitts” — stopped or even told “No,” a tycoon above shame and anything else that might rein him in, is a marvel, a character lived, not “acted.”
“Of course I’m respectable. I’m old! Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
Dunaway’s twitchy, nervous energy is put to great use as a woman with an agenda and secrets, a character capable of things.
“I don’t get tough with anyone, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does.”
And Nicholson projects an easy unflappability, a man capable of irritation and violence (he doesn’t carry a gun), holding his own in fights he can’t avoid, but seemingly willing to take some lumps and awful risks just to secure “my reputation.”
“I’m judging only on the basis of one afternoon and an evening,” Mrs Mulwray cracks at his roughed-up state. “But, uh, if this is how you go about your work, I’d say you’d be lucky to, uh, get through a whole day.”
“Chinatown” maintains more of a sense of “era” than a specific time. The Depression has receded some, not that most of the folks portrayed here would have felt the full brunt of it. The cars depicted are as late as 1938 (rich Mrs. Mulwray’s 12 cylinder Packard), the fashions a bit earlier, the “Seabiscuit” headlines date it to the late 1930s.
The plot’s many twists and subtle wrinkles make one grateful for the rewind option that home video and streaming offer.
And the dialogue crackles with a timelessness that holds up, fifty years after its release, nearly 90 years after it is set.
“Somebody went to a lot of trouble here, and I want to find out, lawsuit or no lawsuit. I’m not the one who’s supposed to be caught with his pants down.”
If you love movies you should love the ones with great writing. And if you’re looking for that yardstick against which to better judge any movie that comes along, you can’t do better than immerse yourself in “Chinatown.” It’s the gold standard’s gold standard, a “Citizen Kane” for the ’70s and a movie that remains timeless, in or fifty years out of its time.
Rating: R, violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, Perry Lopez, Diane Ladd, Bruce Glover, Joe Mantell, Roy Jenson, James Hong, Richard Bakalyan, John Hillerman, Roman Polanski and John Huston.
Credits: Directed by Roman Polanski, scripted by Robert Towne. A Paramount release on Netflix, Amazon, other streamers
Running time: 2:10
