Never Seen It!: Chinatown
Spoiler: No one is Kung fu fighting in this one
Welcome to Never Seen It! a new monthly series where I’ll watch a film I’ve never seen before that is considered classic or iconic or with cult favorite status and talk about it. No, seriously, it’s MY pleasure!
Facial bandages are having a moment. By this I mean in the real world with the current GOP presidential nominee who inadvertently found a way to distract from those tiny hands and, more importantly, in Roman Polanski’s 1974 cinematic world with J.J. “Jake” Gittes, private investigator, “just a snoop,” in the City of Angels. This is Chinatown.
The facial bandage context is as follows: Early on in the movie, Jake, played by a spry 37-year old Jack Nicholson, gets caught poking around where he doesn’t belong. A hired muscle, one of those suit-and-tie-evil-with-a-smile-types, schools Jake. “You’re a very nosy fella, kitty cat,” the bad guy says with a grin. He brandishes a large knife. There’s no “uh-oh” music in a minor key to warn you that something super bad (and super gross) is about to go down. SCHING-SCHING! goes the knife and along with it a corner of Jake’s least interesting feature. Mercy. It’s not just horrific for its brutality, but for the bad guy’s casual demeanor. Like he’s definitely done this kind of thing before. Maybe earlier that day! And if you can make it through the moment without instinctively cupping your nose as if it, too, started gushing red like the fountain at the Bellagio, you are 100% a block of cheese. Even more bonkers is that Jake spends over half the movie with a dopey white bandage pasted across his nose like a pup tent and the man can still very much get. it.1
Honestly, from the way I heard this movie talked about over the years, I expected there to be more of that kind of gnarly, wincing type of violence. I really expected to strap in for a couple of hours of shoot-outs and knife fights and, okay, I admit it, maybe some Kung fu action (IT’S CHINATOWN!), and a lot of cigarette smoking as Jack Nicholson painted the streets of Chinatown red with vengeance. Vengeance for what exactly, I had no idea, but, again, the aura of the film suggested something mean and deeply rooted had to be in play. Instead only once scene actually takes place in Chinatown. It is the last scene and has almost nothing to do with Chinatown. Which should make you mad, but it doesn’t because “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown!” And when you emotionally limp across the finish line to get to that famous bit of dialogue the movie and why people are still talking about it all makes a bit more sense.
Chinatown, written by Robert Towne, directed by Roman Polanski (a terrible person), is set in 1937 and billed as a “neo-noir.” Noir films and books were most popular in the 1940s and 1950s. They follow a kind of formulaic structure involving a central crime (a kidnapping, a missing person) that leads characters into a deeper plot with bigger stakes. There’s often a detective or an average citizen who steps up to do the right thing; a femme fatale (#ladiesamiright); an innocent who is a victim of circumstances; other criminal or shady elements participating in the larger narrative plots (think bosses, power brokers, officials on the take, wealthy patriarchs). Secrets; lies; mistaken identity; deflection; a lot of shadows; low lighting; the sounds of a melancholy saxophone; and many abandoned creepy places and sad Edward Hopper-esque offices and apartments are all cinematic elements that give the noir its pervasive sensibility: cynical and sad.
I love the noir genre. When it’s done really well, I enjoy feeling off-balance and a bit in the dark (pun intended). It’s like you’re watching a prank unfold, being told you’re in on it, and then finding out the joke’s on you. There is something really satisfying to that in terms of craftsmanship. You might be able to guess “who done it,” but there’s usually a few more twists along the way that pack a more emotional rather than narrative sucker punch. I also don’t mind the stylized aesthetic features that go hand in hand with this genre. They tend to add another layer of visual storytelling that enriches the strange emotional currents underneath the characters and plot.
Chinatown is rife with those and it serves the film well. Polanski may be a hemorrhoid of a human, but he knows his way around a camera. For instance, shots where the main characters are speaking with their faces masked by bands of darkness filtered through grainy light complements the themes of secrecy, deception, and frustrated aims that are hallmarks of the noir. There’s also a lot of voyeurism in the movie, which is central to Jake’s work as a P.I. It also creates remove, the unsettling perspective of being on the periphery: the closer Jake gets to what he thinks is the truth, the further he gets from what’s really going on. Polanksi sets this up with scenes where people are reflected in the lens of a camera or in the frame of a car mirror. In both cases Jake is the person surveying others. He’s inside and outside of these mini-dramas that unfold silently so that he can’t truly grasp what it is he’s seeing and why it matters.
Ultimately we find out that why it matters has nothing to do with, as I had hoped (!), ass-kicking for ancient wrongs, and everything to do with the Los Angeles water system. What? That’s what the young, sizzling Jack Nicholson signed up for? To be in a movie about bureaucracy? Yes. Sort of.
At first it seems like Jake is like any other kind of gumshoe trying to make a buck. His bread and butter comes from getting the dirt on cheating spouses. Noir 101: nothing is ever as it seems and neither is anyone for that matter. It’s immediately evident there’s more to that story. Jake is smart, savvy, and quick with a wry rejoinder.2 He’s seemingly unruffled by anything and very canny—always a few steps ahead of the other guy. Moreover, Jake is a white hat. He takes a lot of crap from beat cops, detectives, and just about everyone for being in a business perceived as el mondo sleazealicious. But he’s not like other private dicks. He has a conscience (that becomes a liability) and a code that translates into making sure the bad people pay and the good people come out on top for a change. Jake isn’t naive and he’s not above getting his hands dirty, but he is perilously drawn to justice.
We later find out that Jake was a cop who worked cases for the D.A. in (say it with me) Chinatown. We later-later discover that something terrible went down, something involving a young female-type. The only thing Jake ever says about it directly is this: “I was trying to keep someone from being hurt. I ended up making sure that she was hurt.” (sharp intake of breath). There are a few veiled references to the fallout of whatever trauma took place. It’s not clear if Jake left the squad because he couldn’t take the guilt or if he was blamed for what happened. It’s enough to know that the word “Chinatown” is a nuclear reference and not anything Jake wants to revisit anytime soon or ever. Of course this only adds to his dark, brooding, sexy, mysterious aura. If you sit there going “I could get him to talk,” you probably also watched a lot of My So Called Life in the 90s.
Jake is initially hired by a wealthy woman who gives her name as Evelyn Mulwray to tail her husband, Hollis, and report on whether or not he’s having an affair. Hollis is the chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Aside from the maybe affair, Hollis is as straight as they come. One of the first things Jake does is follow Hollis to a city council meeting. Los Angeles is in the grips of a drought. Plans to build a dam would divert water to the city. But Hollis refuses to sign off, arguing that the area is already too geologically unsound and it’s a catastrophe in the making. It’s a very “not on my watch” kind of moment, which produces a lot of grumbles and pulling of ties in the room. There’s a rapid fall of dominoes that push us and Jake into the next tier of the noir’s labyrinth: Hollis’ affair makes the papers; Jake enjoys a bump in popularity and business; Hollis turns up dead under mega fishy circumstances like ten seconds later; and twelve seconds after that another woman comes forward claiming to be the REAL Evelyn Mulwray (played by a cool as a pack of menthols Faye Dunaway). GASP!
All of it smells bad to Jake, real bad, a diaper left out in the middle of Death Valley in July rotten kind of bad. He can see the set ups nesting in one another like Russian Matryoshkas. Real Evelyn retains Jake’s services to uncover the truth, which earns him the aforementioned nasty slice to the schnoz that he takes like it’s no more than a punch to the gut. You don’t get a complimentary nose job like that if you’ve got nothing to hide. There is something under wraps and it is a dooo-OOOOZy that I definitely didn’t see coming.
We learn that Evelyn has a father named Noah Cross (played by the terrifying John Huston) who is a major power broker. He also happened to be Hollis’ business partner until a bitter feud drove them apart. The elegance and impact of this film relies on being willing to give yourself over to the layered narrative threads. I don’t want to spoil that experience with plot points if I can help it. What I will say is that Cross is a kind of criminal mastermind and part of his motivations involve money. When Jake thinks he knows all he needs to know he confronts Cross who, like the slice-n-dice thug on his payroll, is completely unfazed. Jake is an irritating wasp at a lakeside picnic to Cross. What follows is an exchange that I played back at least three times:
Jake: How much are you worth?
Cross: How much do you want?
Jake: No, really. How much are you worth? 10 million? More?
Cross (laughing): Oh, at least that!
Jake: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?
Cross: The future!
Uggh. My stomach. How is that it’s 2024 and IT FEELS LIKE THIS CONVERSATION IS ALARMINGLY RELEVANT? Not cool, Robert Towne. Also: How dare you?
The film is hardly done with us at that moment. It yanks the wheel into a 180 tailspin, piling on a few more plot twists, and suddenly we see the entire story for what it actually is: a timeless one about corruption, greed, injustice, wealth, power, and those who will always control the world and the rest of us flinging ourselves against the tide as we try to do the right thing, try to beat the casino house and deny the game is fixed. At the end we’re left as wrung out and shocked as the previously unflappable Jake Gittes, unsure of how to feel about basic fundamentals like truth and the “arc of the moral universe,” which is not a curve but a horizon line constantly receding. And that’s Chinatown.
Said baddy is weirdly played by Roman Polanski. Just four years later he would flee to Europe to avoid jail time for assault crimes, so, self-type-casting I guess? Seriously, he is a bucket of medical waste.
There’s a lot of masterful writing in the script. Nicholson’s career ascension is just under way in this film and it shows in the way he commands even the smallest exchanges such as this one on a phone call:
Woman: Are you alone?
Jake: Aren’t we all?
No CGI either.
Top fact: a couple of additional scenes of *The Conversation* were shot in a corner of the set of *Chinatown* when Walter Murch had to finish the film off with Coppola having buggered off to direct *The Godfather Part 2*.