Chinatown (1974)

Director: Roman Polanski
Writer: Robert Towne
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston

Index: The First Thirty.

Apparently not content to successfully surf the changing waves of a film industry almost unrecognisably different from the fifties to the seventies, Jack Nicholson blistered his way to the end of his First Thirty. He ended it with an Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but I’m just as eager to see Chinatown again, as it’s been almost two decades since I saw it last. It’s going to be interesting to see which of the two is the better film. It may well be this one.

Everything about it stands up, even though it’s inherently hindered by being a colour film noir. Something about noir demands black and white, more truly infinite shades of grey, but a sunbleached Los Angeles during a drought is a strong second best. Neonoir has never looked better in colour and anamorphic widescreen.

In fact, everything is tasty from the start, including the opening credits, with their sepia tones, elegant typefaces and smoky jazz score. Nicholson even looks somewhat elegant in his white suit and sumptuous office, compared to what the hardboiled dicks of the thirties lived in. J. J. Gittes even has a couple of assistants on his payroll, not just a beautiful secretary.

However, the business is as seedy as always, snapping salacious photos to prove infidelities to suspicious spouses. We join him as he gives the latest batch to Curly, whose wife has been cheating on him. And then Mrs. Mulwray hires him to find similar material on her husband.

Two things quickly become notable. Firstly, Hollis Mulwray is a highly important man, the chief engineer at the Department of Water and Power. The first thing Gittes sees him do is say no to a major proposal, to build an Alto Vallejo Dam. It won’t hold, he states. It’ll be a disaster. He won’t build it, even though L.A. is seriously thirsty for water during an extended drought.

Secondly, after finishing the job, it turns out that Mrs. Mulwray isn’t Mrs. Mulwray. That’s made clear when the real Mrs. Mulwray shows up and sues him. Of course, that’s just the start of this story not the end, because noir always has twists and turns and there’s no shortage of those here. In fact, the real Mrs. Mulwray ends up hiring him too, because she wants to know who set up her husband just as much as Gittes wants to know who used him to do it. It won’t surprise to find that Hollis soon shows up dead and we want to know whodunit too.

I’ll let you figure all that out for yourselves, as it’s quite a ride, but clearly it’s something to do with water, which is the sexiest subject in the world during a drought, and history, as it’s set in the thirties. Much of the reason that L.A. became the city we know today is due to water and it was brought to the city via aqueduct by William Mulholland, on whom Hollis Mulwray was based, sparking the California water wars.

What I will say is that everything works but the people who do the most work best. That’s not just Jack Nicholson, though he is perfectly cast as Jake Gittes. Just like Billy Buddusky in The Last Detail, Robert Towne wrote this part specifically for him and he brings precisely the right balance of mental acumen, perseverance and world-weariness to the role.

Put simply, he’s bright enough to thrive as a private detective; tenacious enough to keep on digging, even when the scale of the mystery is at its peak; and submersed enough in the dark side of the City of Angels to spend half the film covered in bandages. Ironically, it was Roman Polanski, Chinatown’s director, who slices open his nostril with a knife.

While Polanski plays a cheap thug, there are a pair of major foils for Gittes. Faye Dunaway may have been a nightmare on set, Polanski describing her as “a gigantic pain in the ass”, but she was just as perfect as Evelyn Mulwray as Nicholson was as Gittes. In many ways, she’s the link between the past and the present, her elegance reminding of a golden age movie star but her deeds more modern. Polanski also said that no actress ever took her work as seriously as she did and that’s right there on screen.

The other is her screen father, Noah Cross, played by legendary Hollywood director John Huston, who epitomes old money and charm. Of course, this is a noir so nobody’s ever quite as innocent as they seem and usually turns out to be even more corrupt than we imagine.

Behind them is a deep cast of highly capable character actors. Darryl Zwerling, whose work I’ve seen without recognising him, is excellent as Mulwray and John Hillerman, the same year as Blazing Saddles, matches him as his deputy. A young James Hong is memorable, as are Diane Ladd, Burt Young, Rance Howard and others.

The greatest success of all, though, was the only one that was rewarded with an Academy Award. Chinatown earned eleven nominations but only Robert Towne won for his script in a tough year. Nicholson lost to Art Carney for Harry and Tonto, Dunaway lost to Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Polanski lost to Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part II, which also won Best Picture.

Towne’s script is impeccable, trawling us in early with false pretenses and making us want to discover what’s really going on. We have no real stake in what happens to Mulwray but we find ourselves invested anyway if only because we were deceived too. For a while, things seem almost leisurely, though Gittes certainly finds answers, albeit alongside more questions, but the script, the editing, the direction and every other aspect of the film speeds up towards an almost frantic climax.

Towne’s script for The Last Detail was superb and this one is even better still. He’d follow up with Shampoo, making three Oscar nods in a row, but then drifted back into script doctor work and films he was unhappy enough with to have his name excised. Ironically, his fourth and final nomination would be for one of the latter, so Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes technically landed an nomination for his Hungarian sheepdog, P. H. Vazak, the only dog ever to be nominated for writing a movie.

Of course, I’m not watching for Towne; I’m watching for Jack Nicholson and this counts as his second undying classic in my opinion, the sort of picture that Roger Ebert called a Great Film. He’d given classic performances in a few others too, but none of those movies matched his contributions to them. Here, he’s on top of his game and everybody else followed suit.

So, with only three more left before One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, each of which I’ve seen before, I’m all the more eager to see which of the two stands up the best to a fresh watch in 2025, fifty years on from original release.