1971-1980ClassicsFilm NoirRoman PolanskiUSA

Roman Polanski – Chinatown (1974)

Polanski’s Oscar Nominated throwback to the noirs of the 40’s and 50’s starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston.

Summary: A private detective investigating an adultery case stumbles on to a scheme of murder that has something to do with water

Review
Pin-striped suits, men’s hair parted slightly off-center like Richard Arlen’s, four-door convertible touring cars (not yet declared unsafe), official portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt in public buildings, women with marceled hair, and elegant slouches.

These are just some of the 1930’s artifacts that decorate Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, a new private-eye melodrama that celebrates not only a time and a place (Los Angeles) but also a kind of criminality that to us jaded souls today appears to be nothing worse than an eccentric form of legitimate private enterprise.

There’s nothing wanton, mindless, or (with one exception) especially vicious about the murders and assaults that J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a private detective who has heretofore specialized in matrimonial disputes, sets out to solve in Chinatown. No senseless massacres, no rapes, no firebombings of innocents.

In that far-off time—midway between the repeal of Prohibition and the inauguration of lend-lease—murderers, swindlers, and blackmailers acted according to carefully premeditated plans. These plans, in turn, were always there for the uncovering by a Sam Spade or a Philip Marlowe or, in this case, a J. J. Gittes, a man whose name is repeatedly mispronounced as Gibbs, which is one of the burdens he learns to live with, along with a vulnerable nose.

This fixed order of things, of a cause for every effect, explains the enduring appeal of fiction like Chinatown, but it also is something of a test for the writer who comes after Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and who doesn’t hesitate to evoke their memories and thus to invite comparisons.

Robert Towne, who adapted The Last Detail and wrote the original screenplay for Chinatown, is good but I’m not sure he’s good enough to compete with the big boys. When Robert Altman set out to make Chandler’s The Long Good-bye, he had the good sense to turn it into a contemporary film that was as much a comment on the form as an evocation of it.

Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne have attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirties-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep. Others may not be as finicky.

Among the good things in Chinatown are the performances by Mr. Nicholson, who wears an air of comic, lazy, very vulnerable sophistication that is this film’s major contribution to the genre, Faye Dunaway, as the widow of the film’s first murder victim, a woman too beautiful to be either good or true, and John Huston, who plays a wealthy old tycoon whose down-home, sod-kicking manner can’t quite disguise the sort of fanaticism displayed by Sidney Greenstreet in Mr. Huston’s Maltese Falcon.

The plot is a labyrinth of successive revelations having to do with Los Angeles water reserves, land rights, fraud, and intra-family hanky-panky, climaxing in Los Angeles’s Chinatown on a street that seems no more mysterious than Flatbush Avenue.

Mr. Polanski himself turns up in the film’s most vicious scene, playing the half-pint hood who neatly slices one of J. J. Gittes’s nostrils, thus requiring the detective to go through the rest of the picture with stitches that look like blood-encrusted cat’s whiskers sticking out of his nose.
Vincent Canby, June 21, 1974

1.37GB | 2h 05m | 704×304 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/5871692F829A313/Chinatown.cd1.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/77FDDD90D407468/Chinatown.cd2.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/ECC02047EDA11B3/Swedish_Subs.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:Swedish Soft-Subs

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