This is the writer's film, not the director's!

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2009)

It has always annoyed me when a screenwriter's contribution is overlooked so the director can jump to the front of the credit parade, as far as importance to the project is determined. In his book "Hollywood Animal", Joe (Basic Instinct) Eszterhas describes how the man who lensed two of his scripts, Costa Gavras, was talking at a college and the so called film students, who've bought into this auteur theory, didn't really get it that somebody else conceived and wrote the piece in the first place.
Robert Towne is a man who apparently is very fast with doctoring others' stories and very slow with the completion of his own scripts. If it really took him seven years to write "Chinatown" (as Robert Evans claimed in "The Kid Stays In The Picture"), then it was worth it for the whole world out there. This is an original work which should be judged differently than adapted projects. In "Premiere" magazine a few years ago, there was a list of the best screenplays ever. Well, to be fair, one should separate the "Chinatown"s of the industry from films that turn plays, TV shows, video games and novels into big screen transformations.
Towne's reputation as the guy most young writers look up to is secure, even if he never wrote anything else again. On the commentary for "Wonderland", James Cox and Captain Mauzner are practically jumping up and down recalling a meeting they had with Towne, at which he lauded praise on their John Holmes based investigation/exploration.
Yes, Towne can create indelible characters and scenarios which actors and even in this case, directors, should kiss his hand for. I see there is a disc out now with a commentary track featuring David Fincher and Towne. Can't wait to hear that!
"Chinatown" was vintage before the recalling of the past was just another cinematic cliché and excuse for young men to wear their grand pappy's old suits. The 1930s are beaming with some promise here and the unscrupulous moguls have a plan to get really rich (as if they weren't already) by screwing whoever they have to out of their fair share of nature's resources.
Jack Nicholson and his almost father in law, John Huston, are both perfect in their roles as the detective and the crusty bastard whose evil lies at the heart of this whole display of an era when shame had much more power than it does in today's tell all society.
Faye Dunaway has her finest moments in a terrific career in this epic. She shows (and doesn't at key moments) the full range of emotions this resilient lady is always going through and that a woman's world seventy plus years ago was radically different than today's.
"Chinatown" is certainly one of the great works of art from film's first century. Let's hope some other rich in spirit and plotting screenwriter watches this, for the first or hundredth time, and pens something worth being in the same category of quality.