Chinatown

Chinatown

Opening Shot

Photographs. A man's wife in compromising positions, spread across a desk. The husband (Burt Young) weeps. Jake Gittes (Nicholson) leans back, professionally bored. He's seen this before. John A. Alonzo lights the office in amber, all venetian blind shadows and cigarette smoke, and you think you know what kind of movie this is. You're wrong. Polanski lets you think it's a detective story for about forty minutes before the ground opens up.

What It Does

Alonzo's cinematography pays tribute to noir while subtly destroying it. Classic noir used shadow to hide things, to create visual mystery. Alonzo shoots Los Angeles in blinding sunlight, and the corruption is even harder to see because it's hiding in plain sight. The water department scenes are lit like government offices because that's what they are. The horror isn't in dark alleys. It's in conference rooms.

Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score in ten days after Phillip Lambro's original was rejected. What he produced is the loneliest trumpet line in film music, a solo that sounds like someone walking through a city that's already decided his fate. The score never builds to triumph because there's no triumph to build toward. Goldsmith understood the screenplay's engine: this isn't a story about solving a mystery. It's a story about discovering that the mystery was designed to be unsolvable.

Robert Towne's script is still the benchmark taught in screenwriting programs, and it works because of what it withholds. You learn the truth about Evelyn Mulwray at the same pace Jake does, and each revelation arrives just late enough that you've already committed to the wrong theory. Faye Dunaway's performance in the "my sister, my daughter" scene is so raw that it doesn't feel like acting. It feels like a confession extracted under duress.

Why It's on the List

Chinatown is the American film that says the quiet part loud: the systems of power in this country were built by men like Noah Cross, and they were built to be unpunishable. Jake Gittes is a competent man in a world where competence is irrelevant because the outcome was decided before he got involved. Polanski's ending, where Cross walks away with the girl and Gittes is told to forget it, is the most honest conclusion in American cinema. The detective doesn't win. He never could.

The Argument Against

Polanski's involvement is the elephant in any discussion of this film, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Separating art from artist is a personal decision, but the film's subject matter (powerful men who abuse with impunity) resonates with its director's biography in a way that complicates the viewing experience. On purely cinematic grounds, the third act's reliance on Evelyn's exposition to deliver the central revelation can feel mechanically convenient despite Dunaway's extraordinary performance.

Closing Image

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." The crowd parts. Cross leads Katherine away. Evelyn's body is slumped in the car. Jake stands in the street, surrounded by people who will go home and not think about this again. The camera pulls back. The street swallows the scene. Justice was never on the menu.