Chinatown
Director: Roman Polanski
Cinematographer: John A. Alonzo
Date released: 1974
What I Knew About This Movie
Final line is “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Set in pre-WWII Los Angeles
Jack Nicholson resprises this role in The Two Jakes.
One of the most well-respected scripts of all time
Post-Viewing Thoughts
One of the most notable parts of this movie is how few direct rip-offs I’ve seen. I don’t think this isn’t because people haven’t tried, but I think it might be because the film itself isn’t doing anything unique, it’s just doing the genre so well that you can’t quite hope to beat it. It’s also possible that the style and flow of the movie have been studied so deeply by other filmmakers that Chinatown is in the DNA of every movie that’s ever been shot or set in LA. There are some capital-I important movies on my list, and it’s going to be interested to see which movies injected which genetic material into the language of film.
I watched LA Confidential recently and I’m sure that I could point to several handfuls of shots that were stolen directly from Chinatown, but those shots have to exist in a lot of movies since 1979. I’d be willing to bet that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Inherent Vice and The Big Lebowski also have some of those setups.
Chinatown feels a lot like a Hammett novel. It’s a twisty (for the time) story about the people who control everything and the wake they leave behind that almost exclusively punishes poor people and people of color. That damage is mostly implied, but it’s persistent. The Hispanic boy on his horse riding through the mostly barren part of the valley and the ability of the rich to purchase hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the valley without anyone making noticeable noise is very much in-line with how things like this happened (both in the past and into today).
The incest wasn’t that shocking to me. Game of Thrones blunted the edge of that knife.
Favorite Scene
It’s hard to pick one favorite scene in this movie. Every scene is adding to the overall story or advancing our understanding of a character so they’ve all necessary. I really enjoyed the scene where Jake is in the orange grove being chased by angry farmers. The editing is fast but not modern choppy which helps it feel tense.
