Sometimes conventional wisdom is true: there has been no greater original screenplay in the last 50 years than the one Robert Towne wrote for Chinatown. None more elegantly plotted and politically charged, none more literate and historically evocative, none more pungent in its hard-bitten dialogue and sophisticated in its play on noir archetypes. It’s never easy for a writer to get credit over a director – especially a director as skilled as Roman Polanski at peak form – but Towne’s voice reverberates strongly through a film that perfectly intersects Old Hollywood glamor with New Hollywood revisionism. It’s one of the decade’s true benchmarks.
It is also one of the most unremittingly bleak statements on How Things Work in America, where vast swaths of civilization are moved on the whims of powerful and unaccountable men, who can rest comfortably knowing their sins won’t be scrutinized on Earth. Yet the film goes down easy, thanks to the art deco seductiveness of its late ’30s Hollywood setting and a lead performance by Jack Nicholson that tucks a dogged, quixotic sense of justice behind a veneer of unimpeachable cool. His character may be a sarcastic private eye who gets paid mostly to snap photos of adulterers in flagrante, but Nicholson plays him with a hidden nobility. He’s going to follow this case to the end of the line, even though he has the hard experience to know it won’t lead him anywhere good.
