“Forget it Jake; it’s Chinatown.”
Has another American film ever wrapped itself up so neatly in one last line? While the coda never attained the mythological status of “Rosebud,” it’s at least as worthy of rumination. Who hasn’t, after all, been caught in circumstances where the game is rigged, you can’t win for losing, and only the good die young — at least metaphorically? Where personal depravity festers into institutional corruption? Though the historicity of the film is at best vague, the message is anything but: that the needs of the many are always subordinate to the solipsism of the rich and powerful, and those who stand in their way are going to get plowed under. Or at least wind up with a sliced nostril.
So director Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne’s 1974 film offers us all the trappings of classic film noir — but in color. The plot: J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is an ex-cop and current private eye in 1937 drought-stricken L.A. who gets lured into a case ostensibly concerning marital infidelity. The plot then thickens — or dampens, rather — revealing a conspiracy involving water and where it goes. As he navigates his way through an array of self-interested liars, Gittes, naturally, plunges into a rabbit hole of intrigue, greed and corruption. There is also a murder, a crooked ex-sheriff, thugs, benighted cops, and a beautiful woman (Faye Dunaway), along with a jazzy music score and gorgeous cinematography evoking a romantic past.
But this is no ordinary noir. In this New Hollywood, era, comforting genres got turned on their heads, and revisionist films like Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye subverted old tropes while exploding audience expectations. The precipitating event in Chinatown — a dissembling woman hiringa private dick — echoes Brigid O’Shaugnessy working Sam Spade at the start of The Maltese Falcon, that archetypal noir. But where Bogart’s Spade kept turning the tables on the rogues gallery attempting to ensnare him, Gittes is a man who makes a habit of arriving a day late and a dollar short. The fact that he can handle himself belies the fact that his idealism makes him ill-suited for the business. And can you imagine Bogart or Mitchum indulging in the kind of ingenuous delight Nicholson displays in his eagerness to tell a dirty joke? Or that any of the image peddlers in the heyday of noir would have signed off on their leading man walking around for a good chunk of the film with his nose covered by a large bandage?