Roman Polanski (1974)
Chinatown is famous not least for a disagreement between Roman Polanski and the screenwriter Robert Towne over how it should end. In Towne’s script, the main woman character, Evelyn Mulwray, kills Noah Cross, the father who raped her when she was a teenager. She kills Cross in order to save her daughter – their daughter – from him. J J (Jake) Gittes, the private detective protagonist, helps the daughter, Katherine, get away from Los Angeles, where the story is set, to a new life in Mexico. Polanski ‘knew that if Chinatown was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die’. When Towne dug his heels in, Polanski rewrote the last scene, which takes place in the Chinatown area of LA. Evelyn does fire a bullet at Cross and hits him in the arm. She then makes a getaway with Katherine; the police open fire on their car and kill Evelyn. The injury to Noah Cross isn’t serious enough to prevent his embrace of the young girl, shielding her eyes from the sight of her dead mother. One of his sidekicks urges an ashen Gittes to ‘Forget it, Jake – it’s Chinatown’.
The first film that Polanski made after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate, who was carrying their unborn child, was his adaptation of Macbeth (1971). Pauline Kael noted of this that ‘Shakespeare’s offstage corpses and murders are added to the onstage ones, and they so dominate the material that it’s difficult to pay attention to the poetry’. She also found it hard not to link Polanski’s gory staging of the murder of Lady Macduff and her children with Sharon Tate’s death at the hands of Charles Manson et al. Kael didn’t like Polanski’s work on Chinatown either, contrasting ‘its beautifully structured script’ and ‘draggy, overdeliberate direction’, whereby ‘evil runs rampant’. Polanski returned from Europe to Hollywood, for the first time since his wife’s murder, to make Chinatown and Sharon Tate was killed in Los Angeles. This awareness can certainly affect the way you notice things in the film. For example, the first bloodshed is caused by Polanski in front of the camera: he has a cameo as a knife-wielding hood, who wants to put the frighteners on Jake Gittes and slits the detective’s nose. But some of what Pauline Kael saw is puzzling and likely explained by her preconceived ideas of how Polanski would approach the material. ‘Everything’, wrote Kael, ‘is … mauve, nightmarish … everyone is yellow-lacquered’. It’s a surprising description of a visual scheme that sharply distinguishes the Venetian-blind-shadowed office interiors and sunny outdoors sequences, in which Polanski and his cinematographer John A Alonzo increase the atmosphere of mystery by throwing light on the subject.
Chinatown made a big impression on me when I saw it on its original release. I’ve probably seen it a couple more times in the decades since but the last time must have been at least twenty years ago. I was struck by how many little details came back to me on this eventual return to it – things like how Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway handle their drinks, their cigarette cases and lighters. The picture has aged well, not least in the clarity of its colour – a refreshing change after some other recent BFI screenings of 1970s Hollywood films. BFI euphemises these pink-brown prints as having a ‘magenta bias’ so a poorer print might have gone some way towards vindicating Pauline Kael’s point of view. She was right, though, about the excellence of Robert Towne’s script. Set in 1937, Chinatown is inspired by the California Water Wars of the early decades of last century; the plot centres on the disappearance and discovery of the dead body of Hollis Mulwray, the city’s water commissioner. He appears to have drowned, in an empty reservoir during a drought. Towne’s storyline is complicated but always clear; the themes expand easily into metaphors about the development of Los Angeles and the relationships of the main characters. This is a city built on a desert (by extension, Hollywood is built on sand). The motifs of parched ground and the diversion of water reflect the continuing lack of trust between the principals – and Evelyn Mulwray’s continuing evasions, in particular.
Jake Gittes used to be an LAPD police officer, based in Chinatown. The area connotes for him an unhappy relationship, presumably a love affair, he had with a woman – someone he ‘tried to prevent getting hurt and made sure she was hurt’. The movie tends increasingly and inexorably back to Chinatown – as a physical place and a state of mind – in the structure of the main story and in various Chinese elements: the ‘Chinaman’ joke that Gittes is told and tells his sidekicks; the Mulwrays’ Oriental house staff; the Chinese gardener there, whose pronunciation of English yields a clue to solving the mystery of Hollis Mulwray’s death. The film is shot in Panavision but Roman Polanski gives it narrative spaciousness too. The pace is unhurried in the early stages; the viewer has time to settle into the story. Polanski builds gradually a sense of urgency, and of Gittes and Evelyn Mulwray being hemmed in. The film is often funny, not just in the smart dialogue but also in episodes like Gittes’ and Evelyn’s visit to an old people’s home – the names of residents there are a crucial element in the financial skulduggery that Gittes uncovers. (The climax to this episode is actually too broadly comical, as the senior citizens gawp at a brawl between Gittes and one of the heavies.) The tonal variety of Chinatown is enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s music. The beautifully mournful theme on the trumpet is, for me, one of the most memorable of all movie scores. Goldsmith’s nervy glissandos and percussive effects are relatively obvious but they do their job.
Towne wrote the role of Gittes with Jack Nicholson, already a friend of Polanski, in mind but the director also got his own way in casting the female lead. The producer Robert Evans was keen for Jane Fonda to play Evelyn Mulwray but Polanski insisted on Faye Dunaway. Robert Towne is, to say the least, alert to the tropes and types of film noir: the hard-edged, wittily cynical detective who turns out to be an incorrigible romantic – he loses his heart and has it broken all over again; the black-widow femme fatale. The sequence of events in the story and the quality of the dialogue give the actors the chance to reanimate and modernise the stock characters from which they derive but Jack Nicholson achieves this much more successfully than Faye Dunaway. Gittes is a fine creation – coarse, droll, touchy, a fellow who keeps his emotional distance but who Aldo keeps wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nicholson delivers the one-liners with a splendid sly panache but he’s also very inside this vulnerable man. It makes sense that Jake’s natty appearance is repeatedly dishevelled; the white bandage he has to wear on his face, after Polanski’s knife man reminds Gittes of the dangers of being a nosey-parker, briefly turn him into a figure of fun. Compared with Nicholson’s acting, Faye Dunaway’s is too studied. Her Evelyn Mulwray is magnetically highly strung but you can always see Dunaway creating her effects. She’s stronger in the closing stages but I wish Jane Fonda had played the role. She and Nicholson never acted together.
The cast includes, among many others, Perry Lopez, as the LAPD investigating officer and Gittes’s former colleague, and John Hillerman, highly convincing as Hollis Mulwray’s urbanely dodgy deputy in the Department of Water and Power. Mulwray himself is played by Darrell Zwerling. The supporting performances are dominated by John Huston’s portrait of Noah Cross. (With its various biblical connotations, this is a finely suggestive name and Pauline Kael describes Cross well as a double rapist, of the land as well as of his daughter.) Noah Cross’s wolfish grin switches on and off like a light, and contains humour only when Cross is enjoying getting the better of Gittes. The grin and the old man’s pompous vocal delivery (which is quite close to Huston’s own) are a richly disgusting combination. John Huston occasionally verges on the edge of overdoing the villainy but his final embrace of Katherine (Belinda Palmer) is a moment of true horror.
29 March 2016
