Chinatown, 1974

The “color noir” brilliance of Chinatown is just about enough to let you forgive all those terrible things you heard in the news about its director Roman Polanski, somehow despite the fact that sexual deviance plays a central part in the film. Let’s face it, the man knew his craft well enough to divert our attention from the searchlight to the stagelight and keep it there. The script has been heralded as the benchmark in Hollywood screenwriting, which ought to tell you that things get dicey and things get convoluted, and yet, by the credits, all of our questions have somehow been abated.

How many movies do people see and dismiss because of their predictability? The writing of Chinatown is nothing if not unpredictable, yet remarkably it succeeds in maintaining the time-honored and time-tested formula of a hard-boiled thriller. Monsieur Ebert explains it better, who I picture stepping out of a quiet theater and into the night of 1974 Chicago, walking the block or two to his flat, where he sits down at his typewriter immediately and pounds out his dead-on review. He claims there are two indispensable qualities of a traditional private eye. “He is deeply cynical about human nature, and he has a personal code and sticks to it.” Yet Nicholson’s Jake Gittes comes off less fatalistic and somehow more impressionable than the genre’s previous inductees. 

The cast is great, the direction is great, the writing is great…there’s just not a fallible element to this film. Somewhere in its two-plus hours I thought back to the days-which oddly weren’t at all long ago-when I would spend around fifteen dollars for a good four or five Blockbuster rentals and end up watching maybe two of them, opting to return them beforehand so that I wouldn’t accrue a late charge. Just streaming one film like Chinatown is enough to make the cinephile raise a glass-while staying seated on the couch, of course-to the modern age of quality movie watching.