Chinatown

The iconic original poster for Chinatown

Directed by Roman Polanski. Starring Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicholson, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Burt Young, Diane Ladd Club, IFI, Dublin, 130 m

If you are old enough to remember the emergence of Chinatown in 1974, you will recall – amid all the deserved acclaim – some puzzlement as to what all these talented people were up to. Why bother making a film noir in colour? Why bother now? The end of the classic era for hardboiled crime cinema was still just about within arm’s reach. Would it not make more sense to update the thing?

To ask the question is to admit confusion about the history of Los Angeles. In 1937, when the movie is set, this strange nowhere was still forming itself into something a little like a city. Chinatown is, among many other things, an attempt to identify the point at which a cowboy conurbation shook off its shady past and attempted to pull on a shroud of respectability. Little about it would make sense if relocated to the Nixon era.

The film is also a magnificently sordid mystery story. Roman Polanski’s gift to, first, British, then American cinema was a Polish pessimism – hardened in the Holocaust – that stripped the former of its whimsy and the latter of its sentimentality.

As anybody who cares about cinema knows, this lush, dreamily hazy film – John A Alonzo’s cinematography still seems daringly soft-focused – follows a cynical private eye as he stumbles across the truth (the real truth, to a large extent) about the source of LA’s water supply. Jack Nicholson is wry as the PI. Faye Dunaway is alien as the femme fatale.

What strikes one now is the conspicuous lack of knowing glances towards cinema of the 1940s. Most serious film-makers tackling such material today would find it impossible to avoid sinking into convoluted meta-textual references. Polanski plays that side of it straight. Everything else is twisty, perverse, sick and unhealthy.

Confirmation of Polanski’s seriousness of purpose came when he demanded that Robert Towne, the gifted screenwriter, allow him the most pessimistic ending imaginable. Any other denouement now seems unimaginable.