Polanski returned to the US and embraced the country that had taken everything from him; he replaced the cameraman after a week, cut subplots from Towne’s script, smashed heads with Evans repeatedly, and a clash with leading lady Faye Dunaway even lead to shooting being shut down for a spell. In many ways, she's never gotten her due. In the finished movie, Jack might steal your attention but Dunaway’s performance as Evelyn Mulwray gets better and better every time you watch Chinatown. And you’ll need to watch it more than once, because, well, what’s it all about? Really? Clue: look at Dunaway’s face. The screenplay may be Towne’s, but the ending is Polanski’s. Towne always hated it. But if his eventual one-sentence answer for what his script was about is to be believed, it’s all there in J.J. Gittes' eyes in those final moments: the futility. The futility of good intentions.
Watch: The complex history of Hollywood classic Chinatown
Chinatown was beaten at the Oscars in ten of its eleven nominated categories. It was to be Francis Coppola’s year, The Godfather Part II won almost everything. It was Robert Towne’s night though, the Best Original Screenplay prize went to the former tuna fisherman. Chinatown wasn’t about winning awards; though it went on to win plenty around the world. And if it wasn’t for the Corleones it would’ve swept the boards that night in Los Angeles. It was about the end of something intimate, innocent even, and the wash of something vast and cold: money.
This applied to both the LA of Chinatown and the Hollywood of 70s California. With the explosive success of The Exorcist the year before, and rise of disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, the New York-based studio financiers' eyes were opened to just how much money they could make from a certain type of product.
If the sun rose on the ‘spectacle’ movie - the permanent high noon twin suns of Jaws and Star Wars were only a couple of years away - and set on all that came before, there was one final ‘golden hour’ .
It had happened in 1973. Chinatown was back shooting interiors at Paramount. In another space across the lot, Francis Coppola was filming The Godfather Part II. Further along the row, John Schlesinger was shooting his ill-fated Day Of The Locust. Due to union rules, all three productions tended to break for lunch about the same time. So for just a few days, the studio commissary and its surrounding roads were filled with waves of buzzing period-garbed actors and extras. It was noticed by some at the time, the likes of studio carpenters, cooks, electricians, stage managers, Paramount felt briefly once again just like the glory days of the movie business.
"Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown." Towne famously closed his tale with this now-iconic line. But fifty years later we’re still remembering the time a 1930s hard-boiled detective met 1970s filmmakers to tell the corrupt tale of the birth of the modern city of angels. Art and commerce, fingers entwined, in near-perfect matrimony. Hooray for that Hollywood.
Chinatown has just been released on 4K & Blu-ray, newly restored for its fiftieth anniversary. For the full story of its years-long inspiration, creation, filming and legacy, Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood is an essential read.
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