Intrigue and suspense are the order of the day, and nothing is as it appears to be. Inscrutable, to be sure, and a wonderfully entertaining motion picture.
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You can count the great private-eye flicks on the fingers of one hand, and once you get past "The Maltese Falcon," you're on your own. Besides the "Falcon," my own personal list includes Bogart's "The Big Sleep," Dick Powell's "Murder, My Sweet," Robert Mitchum's "Farewell, My Lovely," Denzel Washington's "Devil in a Blue Dress," and, of course, Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown." So, I've got six fingers.
Like an intricate Chinese puzzle box, "Chinatown" starts out simply and opens up into a labyrinth of complications. As one of the characters says, in Chinatown "you can't always tell what's going on." Intrigue and suspense are the order of the day, and nothing is as it appears to be. Inscrutable, to be sure, and a wonderfully entertaining motion picture.
Nicholson stars as a Philip Marlowe-like private eye, Jake Gittes, working in Los Angeles in the late nineteen-thirties. We know the time because director Roman Polanski is attentive to details. Pictures of FDR hang on the walls, Seabiscuit is everyone's favorite horse, and a newspaper masthead reads "September 29, 1937." Jake takes on a modest investigation into the affairs of an unfaithful husband, the kind of case he handles all the time, and ends up in a plot that leads him to the highest reaches of power. L.A. was essentially a desert community without water in the early part of the twentieth century, so water became a key issue in the politics of the city's development. The people who controlled the water controlled the town. The story paints a picture of unbounded corruption, with skeletons in every closet, double dealing the order of the day, and evil conquering all.
Amid this perversity sits J.J. Gittes. Like the classic PI's of fiction, Jake is a tough guy, smart, glib, somewhat romantic, and thoroughly decent. While he may not admit to being a pillar of the community, he is honest and makes a reasonably successful living at what he does. It's one of Nicholson's best roles because Polanski keeps his natural propensity toward exaggerated histrionics in check.
Jake is engaging and sweet, roughhewn, somewhat crude; a charming roughneck. Polanksi also has the audacity to cover up Nicholson's good looks for over half the picture. Early on Jake gets his nose slit by a hood (Polanski in a cameo) and has to keep it bandaged for most of the rest of the film! Like everything else about the story, Jake's very appearance seems eerily off-balance.
Faye Dunaway plays the female interest, a rich socialite who eventually hires Jake to do some work for her. She is a quintessential femme fatale, with emphasis on the latter. John Huston plays a big-shot multimillionaire who could be behind much of the story's wrongdoing. He may be elegant of speech, but he's creepy in every scene. At one point he sums up his existence: "You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they're capable of anything." Huston seems positively "capable of anything."
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