In The Heat Of The L.A. Noir Night -Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, Far Dunaway, John Huston, directed by Roman Polanski, 1974   

No question the 1930s and1940s gave us some great black and white tough guy film noir detectives. Guys like Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade who were more than willing to take a punch or two, take a few slugs (bullets and liquor both), keep the femmes happy in or out of the un-shown bed and wave a little flag for some rough-hewn justice in this wicked old world. Or a detective like Steve in Out Of The Past who let a gun simple femme get the better of his judgment and wound up dead, very dead for his efforts. No wonder since that time there have been periodic homage to that genre in the days of Technicolor. The film under review Roman Polanski’s homage to the genre in color Chinatown fits right in with that trend.

Here our protagonist J.J. Gettis, played to a tee by Jack Nicholson, is working the mean slumming streets of L.A. back in the 1930s, a time if you can believe this when the place was a small almost desert community stopped by the Pacific Ocean. A time when a tough guy detective could navigate the town without trouble. As usual in detective thrillers what Gettis was originally hired for, getting the goods on an errant husband off on a toot with a mistress turns out to be a greed, hunger, and treachery all wrapped up in one bow-water rights.   

See that errant husband happened to be the water commissioner for L.A back in the day and since he was serious about his work he noticed some very strange things happening to the water supply just as a city bond to build a damn was coming up for a vote. That something funny cost the good commissioner his life, and Gettis a nasty slice on the nose. Of course that only whetted his appetite for the truth. So he winds up going mano y mano with one Noah Cross, played by gruff John Huston who is the big wheel behind the building of the dam of his own purposes. Those purposes did not include providing water for drought-stricken L.A. but to irrigate the farmlands in the valley. The land that he was buying up through dummy proxies. So the battle was joined.

Along the way the water commissioner’s wife, his real wife and not the scam wife that was sent to Gettis to set him up for the fall, Noah’s daughter, played by Faye Dunaway, hires Gettis hired Gettis to get to the bottom of the situation about her husband’s death but also to keep tabs on him since she was hiding a deep dark secret that she did not want exposed. That secret in the end was that the young women who her husband was supposed to be having an affair with was actually her sister-and daughter. Yes incest was in the air among the rich and powerful. That secret also led to her death by that overbearing father’s action. And poor Jake was left holding the bag.  

There might not have been much rough-hewn justice in the end in this film but Jake certainly took a few cuts, a few slugs (bullets and liquor both), keep the daughter happy in the shown bed, and tried to bring some early version of truth to power so he earned his top shelf status among the great film detectives right along with Phillip and Sam. A modern noir-ish classic.