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CHINATOWN
1974
Director
Roman Polanski
Starring
Jack Nicholson
Faye Dunaway
John Hillerman
John Huston
Runtime
131 minutes
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Robert Towne’s Raymond Chandler-esque noir detective story about the invisible corruption behind the urban development of Los Angeles is one the greatest screenplays in motion picture history. Yet it was Roman Polanski’s (we know) inherent pessimism—fueled by his return to the city where his wife, Sharon Tate, had been brutally murdered by the Manson family—that pushes CHINATOWN into even darker territory, uncompromisingly connecting the viciousness of urban politics to an inherent malevolence in the human spirit.
Faye Dunaway is a woman in trouble; Jack Nicholson is the nosey detective Jake Gittes who thinks he can get her out of it; and John Huston is the vilest plutocrat you've ever imagined, reshaping the future of a thriving city out of the basest human desires. As punishment for his incursions into the hidden history of a powerful family and the city they helped to build, Gittes gets his nose slashed and the bandage that he wears for the rest of the film is emblematic of one man’s fall into an abyss—and a nation taking the same path.
“Sometimes conventional wisdom is true: there has been no greater original screenplay in the last 50 years than the one Robert Towne wrote for CHINATOWN. None more elegantly plotted and politically charged, none more literate and historically evocative, none more pungent in its hard-bitten dialogue and sophisticated in its play on noir archetypes. It’s never easy for a writer to get credit over a director but Towne’s voice reverberates strongly through a film that perfectly intersects Old Hollywood glamor with New Hollywood revisionism. It’s one of the decade’s true benchmarks. It is also one of the most unremittingly bleak statements on How Things Work in America, where vast swaths of civilization are moved on the whims of powerful and unaccountable men, who can rest comfortably knowing their sins won’t be scrutinized on Earth.” - Scott Tobias
Faye Dunaway is a woman in trouble; Jack Nicholson is the nosey detective Jake Gittes who thinks he can get her out of it; and John Huston is the vilest plutocrat you've ever imagined, reshaping the future of a thriving city out of the basest human desires. As punishment for his incursions into the hidden history of a powerful family and the city they helped to build, Gittes gets his nose slashed and the bandage that he wears for the rest of the film is emblematic of one man’s fall into an abyss—and a nation taking the same path.
“Sometimes conventional wisdom is true: there has been no greater original screenplay in the last 50 years than the one Robert Towne wrote for CHINATOWN. None more elegantly plotted and politically charged, none more literate and historically evocative, none more pungent in its hard-bitten dialogue and sophisticated in its play on noir archetypes. It’s never easy for a writer to get credit over a director but Towne’s voice reverberates strongly through a film that perfectly intersects Old Hollywood glamor with New Hollywood revisionism. It’s one of the decade’s true benchmarks. It is also one of the most unremittingly bleak statements on How Things Work in America, where vast swaths of civilization are moved on the whims of powerful and unaccountable men, who can rest comfortably knowing their sins won’t be scrutinized on Earth.” - Scott Tobias