Chinatown

From the great screenwriter Robert Towne and the look of director Roman Polanski was made a modern film noir that gives us a look at from long ago of dark, complex and slow-paced detective stories that had sleazy and cool characters, every one of them dangers and desperate besides intelligent.

“Chinatown,” released in 1974, takes place in Los Angeles in 1937. Private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who formerly worked for the Chinatown’s police department, is assigned a case to settle the betrayal of Hollis Mulwray (Darrel Zwerling), the Chief Engineer for the city’s water company. Los Angeles has been in a season of a drought. The people are pushing workers to build a new dam. Mulwray is trying to figure out a midnight plan to mysteriously row large amounts of water from the city’s lake. Jake takes photos of Mulwray with a young woman. Soon, Mulwray is found murdered.

As Jake looks around one of the city’s water lakes to uncover who murdered Mulwray, his nose is cut open by a Man with a Knife, played by director Roman Polanski, who was hired to scare him off. It doesn’t take Jake long to find himself accidentally pulled into a huge difficult scheme involving a fake water crisis being planned for a few magnates to get control over large amounts of real-estate and design the future of the city.

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the widow of Hollis, is stuck in the middle of her late husband’s legacy and her powerful father’s (John Huston) clean foul, and goes to Jake for help. As another murder is done, the police, including Jake’s former partner, played by Joe Mantell, start to look all over Jake, and he slowly begins to realize that Evelyn is hiding a deep, dark secret that threatens to be the end of her and anyone standing too close.

Ace Black Blog stated in their review, “For Chinatown, Polanski re-creates a depressed Los Angeles as a small town filled with the thin veneer of respectability, but with a rotten core almost punching through to the surface. Jack Nicholson portrays Jake Gittes as a smart mouth happy to make a good living cruising through the underbelly of LA, who nevertheless soon realizes that he is facing events much bigger than he can handle. Faye Dunaway oozes, in turn, power, mystery, danger, seductiveness, and ultimately sheer vulnerability as she loses her husband and finds her life hurtling towards sudden destruction.”

In a fantastic reference to the golden era of film noir, John Huston comes in as Noah Cross, the man behind the plan to get the power back in his hands once taken over the entire city. Ace Black Blog said, “In 1942, Huston wrote the screenplay and directed The Maltese Falcon, one of the foundation stones of the noir style.”

Towne’s “Chinatown” script gives the film to collect the details of depression and destruction as the story is told. Every time Jake learns more about Hollis, Evelyn, or Noah, he figures out hwo little he knows about what is unfolding, and how much larger the plan being played out around him really is.

With Jake trying but not able to control the awesome people uniting around him and Evelyn, the film slowly but certainly goes towards a dark ending inevitably in Jake’s old Chinatown field. In the end, with nothing form Jake’s plan having worked, Towne writes one of the best movie lines in history for someone who has lost: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

Jake will not forget what happened that night, just as “Chinatown” is a smart unforgettable movie, and one of the best ever made.

Forget reading my review on this movie, go out and see it. This is one of those movies that just have to be seen to be believed, and is another one of my favorite movies.

Look out next week when he look at the sequel to this movie in “Jack Nicholson Month Part 2.” Also, I will be going with my cousin to see the new Smurfs movie. Review to come later in the day.