I Don't Get Tough With Anyone, Mr. Gittes. My Lawyer Does.

Rating: 10/10 (31 July 2000)

Of all the movies produced by Robert Evans during his tenure in charge of Paramount in the early-mid 1970s, CHINATOWN is the one for which I think he deserves the most credit. Evans, either by design or serendipity, brought together Robert Towne's superb screenplay and Roman Polanski's confident and polished direction to create a magnificently accomplished tale of avarice and treachery. The oppressive heat of a 1937 Los Angeles summer drought seems burned into the celluloid, thanks to John A. Alonzo's immaculate cinematography and there is also strong production design from Richard Sylbert. Jerry Goldsmith contributes a haunting and evocative score.
Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a medium-rent private detective specialising in matrimony cases, who is duped into investigating a racket involving murdered water Commissioner Hollis Mulwray. Gittes concentrates on Mulwray's emotionally disturbed widow (Faye Dunaway) with whom he becomes emotionally involved and her powerful father Noah Cross (John Huston), a Machiavellian figure who is hiding a horrible secret.
Dunaway and Huston are great (possibly career-best) and Nicholson has not yet reached the excesses of his (admittedly entertaining) scenery-chewing style on view in such movies as THE SHINING and THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK. Polanksi has taken the typical 1940s film noir (which we are used to seeing in black- and-white) and updated it to lush colour, making it richly evocative of the period during which it is set yet, at the same time, curiously modern even by todays standards.
CHINATOWN completely deserves it's reputation as one of the key films of the 1970's which earned that particular decade its well-deserved epithet as the outstanding period for the production of intelligent and challenging cinema.
Real fans should also look at the belated sequel, THE TWO JAKES (1990) and, especially, Curtis Hanson's homage, LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997).