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LATE TO THE PARTY: CHINATOWN (1974)

post #1 of 5
4/18/11 at 10:20pm
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by Jeremy G. Butler: link

Better late than never...
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post #2 of 5
4/18/11 at 11:54pm

Nice write up Jeremy. This film is damn near perfect in my opinion. Townes screenplay in particular is actually perfect. As in flawless. Tight as a drum.

 

Polanski's direction is clever enough to let the script shine through and not try and distract from it, while still very much giving it his auteurs stamp. LA has never looked more parched, more sun drenched, more pristine - but that simply makes the horrors that are uncovered all the more contrasting.

 

This is neck and neck with Five Easy Pieces as my favourite Nicholson performance with this just edging ahead. He's just so damn energetic and hungry as an actor in this, long before he became the icon/caricature he turned into in his later years, he obviously knows how good the script is and he just runs with it. Dunaway is utterly luminous as well.

 

Thing is, for all its pop cultural saturation, with moments that have passed into legend, the film is just so damn good that their significance and power of those moments hasn't diminished in the slightest.

 

Every reason I love the movies.

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post #3 of 5
4/19/11 at 7:37am

Thanks for reading!  I agree with everything you said.  One of the dudes in the comments said something to the effect of Polanski's direction playing second (or even third) fiddle to Towne's screenplay, but I think it's things like you said earlier about how LA looks that brings the direction to the front.  One of the things I forgot to mention (there's always something!) is how he's able to sell the fact that the city's in a drought with little more than a color pallet.  What few shots of desert there are are simply locations and serve the narrative, not ham-handed visual metaphors.  LA LOOKS like it's in a drought even though you never see any real physical evidence of it.  That's Polanski (well, and John A. Alonzo).

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post #4 of 5
4/19/11 at 9:44am

Welcome to Chinatown, Jeremy!  This is a film that I came to be in awe of through a film noir studies class during college (about 6 or 7 years ago!).  I had to do an essay on Polanski's influence on the film and I actually have a section that focuses on what he brought to Towne's screenplay.

 

Excerpt:

 

 

A European vision...

Quote:
In speaking about Chinatown, producer Robert Evans reveals, "I wanted a European's vision, not an American vision of it.  Because Europeans see America differently." (Chinatown, DVD)  In Roman Polanski, Evans found a director who was more than just European.  He found a cynic who confesses, "Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling."

 

 

Polanski's surrealist aesthetic...

Quote:
One of Chinatown's strangest tangential visual details, and possibly its most morbidly humorous (only after watching the film through at least once), is the film's fascination with Evelyn Mulwray's left eye.  Seemingly a small detail in Robert Towne's original script which is brought up, as Evelyn Mulwray is tending to the cut on Jake's nose, in order bring the two future lovers closer, the detail achieves a foreshadowing anxiety through Polanski's surrealist aesthetic.  Polanski has described Towne as "someone who has got a great talent for the verbal side, but none for the visual.  I was somehow constantly bored with the material." (Wexman, 91)

 

 

Foreshadowing eye...

Quote:
To his vision of Towne's screenplay, Polanski added his own visual detail to color Jake's fascination with Evelyn's flawed left iris.  As the 'midget' (played by Polanski himself) fires away at Jake and Evelyn's vehicular escape from the Mar Vista Rest Home (foreshadowing the way Evelyn attempts to escape her father at the end of the film), Evelyn begins to scratch around her left eye as if something is already bothering her, further foreshadowing what is to come. 

 

 

Different ending...

Quote:
Of course, these hints would mean nothing if Polanski had decided to stick to Towne's originally scripted ending in which Evelyn kills Noah Cross and successfully makes it to Mexico with Jake and her daughter.  In an interview, Polanski revealed, "Bob announced they wanted a happy ending.  He wanted the girl to survive and Cross to die.  I was absolutely adamant that she had to die at the end if the film is to have any kind of meaning."  (Chinatown, DVD)

 

Casting John Huston...

Quote:
Seeing as how Towne's private-eye script was enough to draw Polanski back to America, it is obvious that Polanski is a lover of the genre.  This is evident in many of the directorial choices, stylistic or otherwise, that he applied to Towne's original script: the most prominent and honorary example being Polanski's decision to cast John Huston in the part of the film's villain, Noah Cross.  Huston, himself a respected director, writer, and actor, had a hand in establishing the archetype of the film noir formula a generation earlier with his directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, based on the hard-boiled Dashiell Hammet novel. 
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post #5 of 5
4/19/11 at 10:28am

Excellent!  I didn't even pick up on the stuff with the left eye.  I'd really like to read the rest of that essay, if you wouldn't mind sharing!  I was also not aware that Polanski had changed the script, but it makes perfect sense.

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