5 Reasons to Watch Chinatown (1974): A Sunburned Dream That Dies in Your Throat
Chinatown isn’t just a movie you watch. It’s a movie that puts the viewer in a sinkhole of corruption, conspiracy, and greed.
You don’t watch Roman Polanski’s Chinatown so much as it envelops the viewer in all the shit LA has to offer. It’s the kind of movie that’s smart enough to pretend it’s playing dumb, rich enough to look like it’s barely trying, and fatalistic enough to trick you into thinking that its misery might still make a difference. It won’t.
1. Jack Nicholson, Before He Became Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson plays J.J. Gittes, a private eye who dresses too well and intentionally knows too little. This isn’t the Jack of the slick grin and sunglasses, the caricature that he would become. In Chinatown, Nicholson gives you something rawer: a man trying to play smarter than he is, with life always a step ahead. He’s handsome, sure, but there’s grime beneath the polished veneer. A sneer when he shouldn’t sneer. A laugh when he shouldn’t laugh. He constantly looks like a man losing a bet he never understood in the first place.
2. Faye Dunaway’s Broken Glamour
Faye Dunaway works her way through Chinatown like a smoke ring in a dark room. She’s Evelyn Mulwray, a woman with secrets layered so deep you don’t even want to get to the bottom. You can’t like Evelyn—she’s too cold and that voice she uses—but you can’t help but pity her. Dunaway masterfully plays her like someone already mourning herself.
3. Chinatown’s Los Angeles, a Wasteland in the Sun
It’s impossible to see L.A. this way in any other flick. The way the city looks both brightly vivid and damned at the same time. Cinematographer John Alonzo turns Chinatown into a mirage: golden light on the hills, dust on the cars, shadows that swallow entire rooms. There’s something rotting in all that light. Every time Nicholson steps outside, you can almost hear the sweat under his collar.
4. A Story That Sinks Its Teeth Into You
The plot is a thing of perfect, creeping dread. Screenwriter Robert Towne wrote a detective story where the detective’s questions don’t fix anything, they just uncover uglier questions. Water rights, greed, and family secrets play out like snakes in a sack. You think you’re getting The Maltese Falcon. What you get is something colder, darker, and merciless. There’s no tough-guy victory here. Just stacks and stacks of lifes ruined.
5. The Line That Sticks in Your Teeth
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The movie ends with that line, and you can argue about what it means all night. Is it nihilism? Resignation? Or just the knowledge that some things are too big and ugly to fight? You leave the movie knowing Gittes has been here before. He’ll be here again. The universe just works that way.
Chinatown is an educational journey down through the darkness of a city that has one of the largest corruption scandals in America every decade or so. It’s not for the faint of heart.
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