a classic film noir from the '70s

Rating: 9/10 (21 November 2010)

The moment you see those opening credits in monochrome brown-sepia, you know you are in for a treat. This is a film by someone steeped in the tradition of the best film noir, and though not a style one associates with Polanski, his sense of drama and of pacing, and his painstaking care to make every shot add to the overall atmosphere, is perfectly suited. Though lacking the distinctive low viewpoints, close-ups and heavy shadows of traditional film noir, this is one of the few later films which manage perfectly to capture the atmosphere and the understated tension of the genre.
The writing and the acting, too, is straight out of the best tradition of film noir. Robert Towne's excellent Oscar-winning script, written with Jack Nicholson in mind for the central character of LA private detective J.J.Gittes, is written entirely from Gittes' perspective (I don't believe there's a single scene in which he doesn't figure). If Bogart was the epitome of Chandler's Marlowe in the 40's, then Nicholson is a worthy successor, and I wonder whether Towne ever considered writing another screenplay around the same character. When I first saw this film when it came out, I hadn't seen Nicholson before, and I remember being just blown away (I didn't see Easy Rider until a couple of years later). Faye Dunaway and the superbly cast John Huston complete the triangle, and we only discover their relative roles in the mystery as Gittes gradually pieces the complex jigsaw together, which of course is just how it should be. The supporting actors are more than adequate, secondary to the story but never detracting from it, with Perry Lopez doing a great job as the struggling but confident lieutenant (who of course is a former colleague of Gittes).
But for me, Polanski himself is the star of this film (and I don't mean his nice little cameo part). I'm glad he wasn't tempted to shoot in black-and-white, though it wouldn't have been out of place -- the consistently washed-out colour so well delivers the sense of the heat and the desert (only the blue of the ocean and the bright lights of Chinatown itself stand out), and his choice of shot, variety of speed, and attention to detail never distract the viewer, nor detract from the acting and the unfolding tale. It's only after the film is over, when you sit back in admiration, that you realise there really wasn't a single moment when you were impatient to move on, or lost track of the plot, or felt a wrong note had been hit. I regard this, along with his recent superb version of Oliver Twist, to be his best works. And that's not an easy choice to make.