A stylish tour de force embodying a novel combination of real-estate issues, murder mystery, rueful romance, and an appallingly licentious business magnate
[Note: This entry, on a fictional movie based partly on real-life utility issues in California of 80 or so years ago, is NOT meant to be a comment on any public utilities, electric or otherwise, in the New York
Subsections below:
Contributors make for a Who’s Who of Hollywood names of the time
Polanski’s contribution added life, almost despite his disposition at the time
The plot is complex and allows fancy little eddies of action
The story was a complex “fable” spun by Towne, and meant to employ Nicholson’s strengths
As when comparing the Godfather films with this one: Why this film may not click with modern audiences, emotionally
Nice little nuggets in this film
Director’s dossier
This film has received a lot of praise over the years, especially in its day. In more modern times, its distinction is due at least partly to its confluence of numerous different sources of creative input. That is, it isn’t simply due to one person or another that this film has succeeded as it has. And this fact has made it a distinct and enticing film, seeming to have an authenticity and consistency of its own, while representing a true collaboration of partners each of whom is giving some level of top contribution—something that may be considered rare in Hollywood history among outstanding films.
Contributors make for a Who’s Who of Hollywood names of the time
It had Roman Polanski directing (see “Director’s dossier” below); Jack Nicholson in a starring role, in what some critics have considered one of his best performances; Faye Dunaway in a costarring role, within about a 15-year period in which she was still a hot property as a leading-lady actress; and Robert Towne as the writer of the original screenplay, which has been long considered a classic and was the only aspect of the film that won an Oscar (with the 11 Oscar nominations it received). It also features production design by Richard Sylbert, whose work turns up noticeably in such renowned films as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), among others. Sam O’Steen was the editor, as he was of (at least) some of the just-named movies.
Robert Evans, of course, produced this film—he was the famed producer who was both an executive producer at Paramount during the cresting of the “Second Golden Age” of Hollywood (represented by the foremost baby boomer directors) and, more of a details-oriented task, produced individual films, which it seems was an unusual arrangement throughout American film’s history, it seems. How Evans was installed as Paramount’s head by Charlie Bluhdorn, the chief of the corporation, Gulf+Western, that had acquired Paramount (not long before Chinatown was made), and what this meant for movies in the fertile period from the late 1960s through the 1970s, is looked at colorfully in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
Evans is often interesting to hear make insightful comments in a making-of doc, though he can be hard to understand at times, due to the lingering effects of a stroke. He says of Chinatown that, where such fights that occurred during its production are concerned, “only through irreverence can you touch a bit of magic.”
Also, the score was by Jerry Goldsmith, though he apparently had to compose it in nine days, a short time for such a thing (while Polanski’s favorite film score writer Krzysztof [Christopher] Komeda had died, and another score, by Phillip Lambro, had proven inadequate for Evans). The music seems to complement this film well, with its signature evocatively languid trumpet, various figures and “voices” from piano, and its synthesizer “faking” strings at other times. This all seems fully equipped to provide a glint of occasionally-rueful stylishness yet, when needed, a sort of shadowy, uneasy-conditions quality. The music, of course, varies with changes in emotional tone that can often happen quickly within relatively short scenes.
With all this talent, you would think that this film represented a high point
Polanski’s contribution added life, almost despite his disposition at the time
Though Polanski—who even appears in a cameo role a couple times—would seem to have been right for this film, with its overlay of paranoia—a sense that the mystery Gittes is plumbing never lacks for another odd twist, this isn’t simply a Polanski film (nor, might it be said, is it his best, perhaps, though he says in DVD commentary that it is one of his two favorites of his films, the other being The Pianist; this status of Chinatown he admits maybe with a hint of uneasiness). Polanski seems to have been on a kind of producer-wrought leash when making this film; according to the DVD making-of extras (hereafter, “DVD”), he did not want to return to Los Angeles, since his wife Sharon Tate had been murdered there by the Manson family in 1969. He originally thought the script was a little too long (at 180 pages), and made suggestions about it thinking he wouldn’t see it again (DVD). And during production, he apparently found it necessary to compromise enough in allowing the director of photography—who ended up being John A. Alonzo (after another man was tried and found unsatisfactory)—to follow his tastes as to lighting, while Polanski had control over a favorite parameter, framing the shots (DVD).
“To be honest, [the film] was to me a job,” he said, not a work of passion of his (DVD), while I would suggest Rosemary’s Baby was more a work of passion for him. But it would seem the collaborative aspect of its making that led it to be both a great film and, ultimately, one of Polanski’s favorites.
It seems, in sum, to succeed in marrying style and atmosphere from a number of creative sources. In this review, I mainly want to focus on how it impresses as a peculiarly American kind of story: “business sleaze” whose nature seems always partly hidden, with each layer you discover coming into light only after you puzzle and pry, and you find with some disquiet yet another layer that raises questions. This sort of story seems thematically apropos for addressing the newspaper-making issues today.
The plot is complex and allows fancy little eddies of action
The plot is elaborate—at least in terms of what the mystery is that J.J. (“Jake”) Gittes (Nicholson) is trying to plumb. Gittes is a private investigator who used to work on the police force in L.A. until some mishap in that city’s version of Chinatown .
Initially, Jake is hired by a woman who claims to be the wife of the chief engineer of L.A.
Eventually Jake meets up with Evelyn, and tries to reason with her. He believes someone is trying to do dirt to her husband, hence the fraudulent request of his services from a woman in disguise tied to her claiming Mulwray was having an affair. In a brisk, dense conversation, and Jake explains his tricky position—his reputation is at stake, along with all else—and Evelyn decides to drop the lawsuit, and after his explanation of Hollis’ apparent predicament, she gives him a suggestion as to where her husband might be (i.e., a reservoir).
When Jake visits the reservoir, he finds signs of some kind of trouble; Lieutenant Lou Escobar, a former work associate, is there; Escobar is an earthy, tough sort, played by Perry Lopez. Jake finds that Hollis Mulwray is dead. His body is pulled grotesquely, by humiliating rope, up a runoff channel.
The mystery winds on, and it is one of the pleasures of this movie to see how it unfolds. Can we figure out what is going on a little before Jake can? Actually, we can’t. Jake begins to suspect murder, and yet the young woman Jake saw Hollis with becomes an important piece of the puzzle. Early on, she seems merely a mistress; if Jake can find her, maybe she knows something about what happened to Hollis, as indeed is said by the former private owner of the water system, Noah Cross (played by veteran film director John Huston). Noah Cross also happens to be Evelyn’s father (and as Jake has found with a little surprise, Evelyn had married her father’s business partner; Hollis and Cross had both run the city water’s department for some time, and they eventually had a falling out, supposedly—as Evelyn says—over the collapse of the Vanderlit [sp?] dam, which is why Hollis opposed the building of another dam, the proposed Alto Vallejo). (According to the film’s Wikipedia article, this dam-risk situation echoes a real-life tragedy of the late 1920s in which a dam actually failed, with significant loss of life, shortly after being personally inspected by William Mulholland [1855-1935], who had worked toward an early water system that facilitated the growth of Los Angeles.)
Cross warns Jake about Evelyn, apropos of a signature line of the film (I may paraphrase it a bit), “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.” Evelyn is a disturbed woman, he asserts. In the end, Cross presses Jake to find the mistress, whom Jake remains piqued about anyway.
The story eventually involves Jake’s stumbling upon clues suggesting that a scheme is afoot to have elderly residents of a rest home buy land that is apparently willed to the rest home, or whose ownership is otherwise transferred (after the residents’ deaths) to a company, Albacore (a name itself bubbling up in puzzling clues through the film), that is owned by Cross. This is part of a larger land-development scheme that the proposed dam is supposed to support (which would explain the later explosive growth of the L.A.
If all this seems too complicated to absorb, if you see the movie, you’ll see the same set of allegations, interrelations, and so on there. Maybe the movie delivers them a little more smoothly, but it will still take a few viewings to understand them as well as you can (I don’t know if I do 100 percent).
The story was a complex “fable” spun by Towne, and meant to employ Nicholson’s strengths
Nicholson says the original idea Towne had was for a trilogy of movies on the history of L.A., running from 1937 (the year of Chinatown) through 1953, when no-fault divorce became law there (DVD). Only one of the other two of the envisioned series was made, The Two Jakes (1990), which was produced by Evans and written by Towne and starred (and was directed by) Nicholson, though it was not nearly as successful as the first installment.
Towne’s conception for Chinatown—in general form, an update on the noir genre—seemed largely focused on the development of L.A., with less thought about Evelyn, which seems to show in how the movie affects us (more on this soon). Towne derived the story from the several sources, including the real matter of a development plan that was approved in a tortuously disingenuous fashion, as he found; the loss of natural beauty at the seashore; and the history of how the water system developed at the city (DVD). He added the trope of Chinatown , which I think can be read not as a racist element, as some might see it today. As is said in different ways by Towne and Nicholson (the Chinatown trope represents the “futility of good intentions”), Chinatown was an odd zone for a law-enforcement because whites couldn’t get the cultural references (or, of course, the language), so if you did vice squad work, you had no idea whether you were onto a crime or not, or how to deal with it. As a result, a police officer there, as Jake has done in the movie, defaults to doing “as little as possible,” because you really can’t get traction there in terms of your normal work (DVD).
The zone of Chinatown thus represents a distillation of how alien and licentious things in L.A.
But Towne also conceived of a strong character in Gittes, which he wrote tailored to, as Nicholson says, what he thought Nicholson’s personality was (DVD). Towne says he “couldn’t have conceived of the character of Gittes if I hadn’t known or roomed with Jack,” and he cites as hallmarks of both Gittes and Jack a “thin-skinned quality, cynicism, [and] flashes of anger.” Gittes, who is the character with most screen time, is definitely the most colorful one in the film. He seems a bit too much of a wiseass to be a typical everyday cop. He has become a P.I., yet has seemed to stay mainly in matrimonial work, which is apparently compatible with Gittes’ being, as Towne says, “pushy, a bedroom peeper, a hustler.” Yet this character is honest and curious enough to start plumbing the mystery surrounding Hollis Mulwray, helped not least by the romantic allure of his betrayed wife Evelyn.
Gittes may be (or tries to be) an equal in fox-like qualities to the serpentine mystery at hand, but as a romantic partner, he has his work cut out for him in a different way. The way the film has little eddies of action in which motives and “the direction of things” (as to positive or negative) can switch within a few minutes, plays well to the relationship between Jake and Evelyn Mulwray, the latter of whom is only seen in scenes with Jake.
As Nicholson says, Gittes “had to resign [from the police after working in Chinatown ] because he got too personally involved with [some female there]” (DVD). As it turns out, in the way that a noir often features a femme fatale, Jake will again get “too personally engaged” with a woman, this time Evelyn Mulwray. How this is hinted even in a minor scene, while he seems intent on controlling his fate as he deals with the labyrinthine criminal mystery at hand, can be seen when he tries to buy himself a chance to get away from the police who are escorting him to whom they really want to arrest, Evelyn. When he has taken them to her supposed location, he says to former police partner Escobar that he wants to meet privately with Evelyn. Jake’s assertion “It would mean a lot to her” if he spoke with her briefly first, is his ruse. “You never learn, do you, Jake?” Escobar remonstrates. Then Escobar allows him five minutes. While they are really not at the place where Mulwray is at all, Jake breaks away with a former client, Curly (played by Burt Young), and…. Well, it’s that kind of winding story.
While Jake may seem to try to manage the coiling situation around him, and has a vulnerable woman he becomes emotionally bound up with, the situation always gets more complicated and a step ahead of him. If you thought this was a version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, you’d be wrong, especially as to how gripping Jake and Evelyn’s relationship may strike us. In short, this noir is more of a Jack Nicholson variety, not a James Stewart variety. Nicholson’s Jake is wilier, as allows him to try to meet the demands of a really seedy situation, where Stewart’s Scottie was more of a sincere (if melancholy) fall guy trying to cope within a cold set of machinations.
As when comparing the Godfather films with this one: Why this film may not click with modern audiences, emotionally
People who feel this film isn’t quite up to the first two Godfather films (1972 and 1974), which Chinatown came out close to, are missing the point, I think. The Godfather films depict criminality where manners, style, and an in-group’s ethos and conventions are as much of interest as the more brutal facts of their crimes. In view of this, these movies are for those who feel and like to take in an esthetic feast, to a good extent.
It is also, less fortunately, because of how the movie seems like a puzzle that soothes those who’ve made the acquaintance of sleaze that its love story, between Jake and Evelyn, always strikes me as distant, not quite engaging, fleeting (like an afterthought) or like a routinized dance between two cool numbers. Jake himself seems not the type to be really that concerned with being close to women, and this seems true in parallel with Jake’s character being designed after Towne’s view of Nicholson’s personality. Nicholson has always seemed without peer as someone who works his way, by wit and charm, through the maze of sleaze or other non–lowbrow-entertainment danger in our world, with a sex symbol aspect tagging along; but this seems also like the type of male, as exemplified in his Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment (see my September 7 entry), who runs through women as if they were tissues.
Yet despite this, I think the way Jake falls for Evelyn, we can identify with; we can emotionally invest in this to an extent. Where Faye Dunaway is concerned, there is more of a problem in identifying.
Of all the performances in the film, Dunaway’s, I think, wears thin most quickly on repeated viewings. It seems actress-y, a little too arch or pretentious (she does score points in showing some sense of Evelyn’s “class”). Meanwhile, in her stuttering mentions of Evelyn’s father, the acting just seems not competent enough. I think it would be fair to Dunaway (who had previously starred in the early baby boomer “manifesto” Bonnie and Clyde [1967] and would later be in such films as the noted Network [1976]) to argue that she portrays Evelyn as a posturing, brittle sort because maybe this is what has been wrought by the shocking abuse we later find her to have been subjected to. The abuse—which I won’t reveal, as not to spoil it—is such that, in real life, it could create real divides in all range of people. Maybe Dunaway’s performance was the best she could do, as an actress who more generally seems to have represented a transition between (1) the older “grand dame” types of the Bette Davises and such and (2) the more modern, sometimes-Method-acting types like Meryl Streep and Debra Winger.
On the other hand, Dunaway’s cool performance seems to suit the story in the following way. While we seem only to see her in situations involving Jake, and since the film is famously shot from Jake’s perspective anyway (Nicholson notes that Polanski echoed Raymond Chandler’s first-person detective style in having a fair amount of Chinatown be shot from behind Jake’s back), Evelyn turns out to be something of a hypothetical construct that Jake is trying to stitch together, just like the larger mystery he in investigating.
In any event, his learning about Evelyn’s darkest secret comes as he unfolds the larger mystery, and thus the emotional attachment we see and can believe is all his, not so much her attachment to him. We can feel for him when he is crestfallen at the end of the film, whereas we never quite feel the same at any earlier point for Evelyn, though we may pity her at times.
Some critic within the last 20 years or so—wish I knew who it was—wrote that Nicholson, especially in his 1970s heyday, embodied the sort of character esthetic of someone teetering on the borderline between being under a more-or-less happy illusion and becoming quite disabused of this illusion. Chinatown is a good example of this (note his expression, for one tiny instance, when he is peering puzzledly into the seeming “koi pond” in the Mulwrays’ back yard, and sees the eyeglasses). Other good examples are One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975; see my February 10 entry) and The Shining (1980; note his expression at times when he is in the ballroom bathroom with Delbert Grady).
Nice little nuggets in this film
A few details show how well planned so much of this film was (Polanski worked closely with Towne on the script once he agreed to do the film). The minor character of Claude Mulvihill (Roy Jenson), who is a henchman of, as it turns out, Noah Cross, is an example of a criminal underling who sometimes seems almost comical. At first appearing as a frumpy sort with slouch-apt cigar, he is identified as helping out the town water department due to public unrest related to the ongoing draught and the rationing of water. According to Jake, Mulvihill had formerly been the sheriff of Ventura County
I don’t think his performance in this film is Nicholson’s very best, but it is certainly among his top five or so. My favorite scene in the film, for some reason, is the last occasion on which he turns up at the office that had once been Hollis Mulwray’s and is now that of Ross Yelburton, the former deputy who assumed Hollis’ position after his death; Jake is now trying to find out who might have initiated Hollis’ murder. Yelburton (played by John Hellerman) seems like a typical smooth bureaucrat. Jake, who has proven intrepid and not to be easily discouraged by bureaucracy even when mildly hounding Yelburton’s solemn-faced receptionist, tries to wangle some information out of Yelburton, and Jake both is at the latter’s mercy in terms of the likely stonewalling and yet tries to facilitate the “free flow of information” by putting on a “comradely” cynical air that might match the more hidden agenda of Yelburton.
Nicholson’s slightly swaggering, suave performance—as he suggests if Yelburton comes clean with some info, he can stay department head for the next 20 years—seems just the right pitch for a character who is generally on the side of honesty, but knows he is dealing with a business/government setup that is not all about honesty, and therefore he has to employ ruses that will loosen the information logjam without ending up being simply a patsy to be kept in his place. Of course, we know the mystery will continue to remain in some part out of his grasp.
What we still have is a movie that pleases with repeated viewings, when we want an artistic “template” by which, when we’re inclined, we can measure some of the seediness we’ve been taken a ride by in the past.
Director’s dossier
I don’t know Polanski’s career well at all; the only films of his I’ve seen are Rosemary’s Baby (1968; see my February 10 blog entry) and Chinatown, each of which I’ve seen several times; and The Pianist (2002), which I only saw once, in the theater. His early notable films, not including the earlier two just mentioned, were Repulsion (1965); Cul-de-Sac (1966); Macbeth (1971), the Shakespeare play, apparently in a bloody but acclaimed version, starring Jon Finch, who played the hapless, wrongly suspected man in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972); and The Tenant (1976), apparently something of a cult film today. In fact, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant are considered by critics something of a trilogy for locating the action in a confined indoor space (making for a drama, more or less, of “paranoia in an apartment”). Tess (1980), a long adaptation of a novel, was another of his films. Starting in about 1976, all his films were made out of the U.S. This account isn’t meant to show all his film career, which of course has continued until the present time.
