This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 21, 2020.
This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.
Director: Roman Polanski.
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson, Roman Polanski, Dick Bakalyan, Joe Mantell, Bruce Glover, Nandu Hinds, James Hong, Beulah Quo.
In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind offers plenty of unkind evaluations of Hollywood's key players of the '60s and '70s, but one of the bluntest he saves for Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne.
"Towne had two weaknesses," writes Biskind. "He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts. And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller. He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events."
As Chinatown producer Robert Evans (who doesn't escape Biskind's withering pen) put it, "Towne could talk to you about a screenplay he was going to write and tell you every page of it, and it never came out on paper - never".
Remarkable then that Chinatown, the film Towne won his Academy Award for, is one of the best screenplays of all time. It's story of a detective hired to catch a cheating husband, only to uncover large-scale corruption, a land grab and worse, is still used today to teach screenwriting students.
The secret to its success, according to Biskind and others, was director Roman Polanksi, who described Towne's script as a mess and spent nearly two months rewriting it to Towne's dismay. Polanski made huge cuts, re-ordered scenes, ditched the unnecessary narration, and wrote the bleak "European" ending. He also got rid of superfluous characters and scenes, effectively halving the script's length.
But most importantly, Polanski reshaped the mystery so the audience sees it unfold through the eyes of ex-cop-turned-private eye Jake Gittes (Nicholson). Polanski even frames numerous shots from Gittes' perspective, or over his shoulder, or by following him into a scene - when Gittes gets knocked out in a fight, the whole film goes dark and the action only restarts when Gittes reawakens. The detective is in every scene and we learn everything as he learns it, giving the film its propulsive edge, pulling us through the shocks and surprises with him. It's Towne's sizzling dialogue, well crafted characters and meticulously interwoven plots, but Polanski gave it the much-needed structure and distinctive point-of-view Towne couldn't.
This video explains a lot more of why the script is so great, but it's also full of spoilers FYI:
There's an old writing adage that it's not enough to have your hero stuck in a tree - you have to throw rocks at them too. Chinatown is a beautiful example of this. With every serpentine twist of this brilliant detective story, Gittes gets shot, bashed, threatened and sliced. The questions pile up and by the end, we have all the answers, but Gittes is a broken man, and you're left wondering was it worth it? Is it ever worth it? Nope. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. That's what that final line means - you can't solve them all, you can't help everyone. Hell, maybe you can't even help anyone. Try, and you'll end up a fractured shell of a human, like Gittes. It pays not to care. Bleak, innit? Pays to remember that the director's pregnant wife was murdered just five years prior in the very city where the movie was set and shot. It's fair to say Polanski, who would later flee America after allegedly drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl, did not have a terribly cheery view of humanity at the time.
Chinatown, arguably Polanski's best film, is a throwback, invoking the noir films of the '30s, '40s and '50s, and the tropes of writers Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain and Raymond Chandler, but not just in its 1937 setting or its detective story. Picture its shots in black and white, and Chinatown could easily have sat alongside the likes of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity or even Sunset Boulevard. The production design beautifully captures the Los Angeles of 1937, and the cinematography goes from gorgeous wideshots of drought-stricken California to wobbly handheld grabs of sudden violence. Polanski throws in focus pulls and slow camera moves for good measure - nothing too elaborate, just tricks that highlight Gittes (and the audience) taking in the evidence or assessing a piece of the puzzle.
Before Towne even struck the first key on his typewriter, Gittes was always going to be played by Jack Nicholson. The two were friends, and no one else was ever even considered for the role. It's one of his many great performances (he earnt his fourth of 12 Oscar nominations here) and showcases his ability to make questionable characters likeable. Gittes is a wise-ass but empathetic, well-to-do but not unscrupulous, cutting but kind, arrogant but clever. His moral code, like him, is far from perfect, but generally he is a good man. Nicholson showcases all these dichotomies beautifully, while also painting a portrait of an increasingly vulnerable man. There's an eyeroll he delivers, only half-caught by the camera, in the opening scene that perfectly illustrates the limits of his capacity to care in the midst of a moment where he's otherwise being generous to a cash-strapped man who's just found out his wife is cheating on him. By the film's end, there are no eyerolls - just the dead-eyed stare of devastation as Gittes is guided away from the carnage of Chinatown. Both men are Gittes, equally inhabited by Nicholson.
Seeing him opposite Faye Dunaway, another of the all-time greats, is one of the wonderful bonuses of Chinatown. She may have feuded endlessly with Polanski on set, but you wouldn't know it from watching the finished product. Coolly subverting the noir stereotype of the femme fatale, Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray (a role intended for Ali McGraw, then Jane Fonda) comes across as villain and victim in different moments, switching easily from venomous to vulnerable. It's a beautifully written role (Towne gets the credit here), but a difficult one, and Dunaway makes all the complexities and secrets of Evelyn feel real. It earned Dunaway her second of three Oscar nominations, and the film sparks of electricity whenever she and Nicholson share the screen.
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| Another great Hollywood stare-off. |
Rounding it all out is John Huston as the bad guy whose true depravity only becomes apparent late in the film when the shock twists pile up on each other like a car crash. Huston, who was at the time a living legend of noir having written and directed The Maltese Falcon, gives a marvellous performance that is deceptively human and frightening in its mundaneness. His actions in the final moments are soul-destroying, helping to give the film one of the great downer endings of all time.
Unlike a lot of films on this list, Chinatown was revered at the time by critics, award-givers and audiences alike. Towne was the film's only Oscar-winner out of eleven nominations - The Godfather Part II cleaned up that year - but Chinatown won four Golden Globes and three BAFTAs. Like now, chief among the recognition was for that screenplay. Google "best screenplays of all time" and you'll find Chinatown only a click away. Now, as it was then, people knew Chinatown's script was one for the ages.
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