ROMAN POLANSKI'S Chinatown (1974; 131 mins.)

PRINCIPAL CAST  
actor role
Jack Nicholson  J.J. (Jake) Gittes
Faye Dunaway Evelyn Mulwray
John Huston Noah Cross
Perry Lopex Lieutenant Lou Escobar
John Hillerman Russ Yelburton
Darrell Zwerling Hollis Mulwray
Roy Jenson Claude Mulvilhill
Roman Polanski Man with knife

PRODUCTION CREDITS  
Producer Robert Evans
Director Roman Polanski
Assistant Director Howard Kock Jr.
Screenwriters Robert Towne
Cinematographer John A. Alonzo
Editor Sam O'Steen
Composer Jerry Goldsmith
Production Designer Richard Sylbert
Art Design W. Stewart Campbell
Set Designers Gabe Resh, Robert Resh
Set Decoration Ruby Levitt
Special Effects Logan R. Frazee
Makeup Hank Edds, Lee Harman
Costumes Anthea Sylbert

Director

Roman Polanski was born in 1933, in Paris, to Polish Jewish parents, who raised him in Poland. During World War II, his parents were sent to a concentration camp, but Polanski dodged the Nazis, living with relatives and avoiding school. His mother was killed in a gas chamber; his father survived the war, reunited with his son, and remarried. Polanski worked in the circus and as an actor before being accepted to the prestigious Polish film school at Lodz in the mid-1950s. One of his first student films, Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa, 1958), won a medal at the Brussels film festival.

With his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water (Nóz w wodzie, 1962), Polanski achieved international fame. He went on to make Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968). In 1969, his wife, actress Sharon Tate, was one of six people murdered in Hollywood by Charles Manson and his followers. In 1976, Polanski allegedly drugged and had sexual relations with a thirteen-year-old girl. To avoid possible arrest and trial, he fled the United States, and the case remains pending. With varying degrees of critical and commercial success, he has continued to make films in Europe, including The Tenant (Le locataire, 1976), in which he starred; Tess (1979); Pirates (1986); Frantic (1988); Death and the Maiden (1994); The Ninth Gate (1999); and The Pianist (2002).[1]

Title

Robert Evans, the head of Paramount Studios, produced Chinatown, but from the beginning he and others had problems with the title. After Jack Nicholson recommended Robert Towne's screenplay to Evans, the producer and screenwriter had the following conversation:

Evans: . . . What's it called?

Towne: Chinatown.

Evans: What's that got to do with it. You mean it's set in Chinatown?

Towne: No. "Chinatown" is a state of mind—Jake Gittes' fucked-up state of mind.[2]

In other words, "Chinatown" is a systematic metaphor that infuses the film with meaning. Critic Michael Eaton emphasizes that Chinatown "is, in fact, a perfect title for a complex detective thriller with dimensions which are political (about the nature of power), sexual (about the nature of gender), metaphysical (about the nature of evil), psychological (about the nature of the self) and philosophical (about the nature of knowledge)."[3]

Chinatown is set in Los Angeles during the 1930s, at least ten years before the city began its phenomenal growth. Then, it was a loosely federated group of small towns joined by dusty two-lane roads, not a sprawling megalopolis linked by hundreds of miles of freeways. The two largest ethnic communities in those years consisted of working-class Mexicans and Asians. The Mexicans ordinarily lived in a large area known as Boyle Heights, which bordered downtown Los Angeles on the east; the Asians—mostly Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans—tended to live in Chinatown, which bordered the city on the west. To those in the white majority community, most members of which had moved to Los Angeles from the midwest or immigrated there from Europe, these ethnic neighborhoods were an alien world, with scary reputations owed largely to racial prejudice.

This idea of "Chinatown" hovers over the film like a foul smell, even though we go to the actual place only once, at the end. (Indeed, the last word in the film is "Chinatown.") According to film historian William J. Palmer, Chinatown functions less as a real place than as "a symbol of the futility of attempting to grasp and interpret reality." [4] Just as the jigsaw puzzle is the metaphor at the heart of Citizen Kane's vision of the life of Charles Foster Kane, so Chinatown is the metaphor at the heart of this movie's vision of Los Angeles as the most malevolent, perverse, corrupt, unjust, and meaningless place imaginable.

Literary and cinematic sources

In realizing his vision of Los Angeles, Polanski and his collaborators drew on such literary and cinematic sources as the detective story and film noir.

The Detective Story

The typical detective story actually involves two stories: a crime-related mystery—usually a murder—and the solution of that mystery. The plot duration covers the time it takes the detective to move from the earliest moment, when he (and the detective is typically male) has only scant information about the crime, to the conclusion, by which time the detective has learned all about what happened before he was hired. In stories such as Chinatown, the protagonist is a private detective who, as film scholar John Cawelti points out, "occupies a marginal position with respect to the official social institutions of criminal justice." [5] Although the detective is licensed, he is something of a loser (perhaps having been ousted from a position on the police force) and is relegated to low-level snooping into marital infidelities and the like. But he is a man of integrity who believes in justice—a belief that inevitably gets him into trouble.

The private detective is most often given what appears to be a straightforward commission by a client, usually an attractive woman, yet he soon finds himself enmeshed in a far more complex conspiracy. The assignment lures him into a web of corruption and death that seems to involve everyone he meets, a web that links wealthy and seemingly respectable people with corrupt politicians, crooked law enforcement agents, criminals, and ex-convicts. Knowing that the criminal justice system can't successfully prosecute the guilty under these circumstances, he more or less takes the law into his own hands, doing whatever is necessary to achieve some kind of justice. In the process, the detective often continues to earn the scorn of officials.

In addition, the detective tends to become romantically (and sometimes sexually) involved with the woman who brings him the job, a slick operator who is both beautiful and dangerous. Sometimes, this relationship is resolved happily, as in Howard Hawks's 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep (1939); but usually it ends tragically for the woman, as in John Huston's 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon (1930). [6] Edgar Allan Poe—who created the world's first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, in his story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841)—said that the detective exists "to play the Oedipus." In other words, like the protagonist of Sophocles' play Oedipus the King, he eventually will discover that he is the object of his search. The irony of Chinatown is that the film's protagonist, J. J. (Jake) Gittes, not only has to find out something that he doesn't know; he has to find something that he is not aware that he does not know: he has to find himself. [7] Commenting on this relationship between the Greek tragedy and the film, Eaton says: "It is a story which says that, sure, wrongs can ultimately be uncovered but the seeker after truth is not only completely incapable of righting them but his very search will only make matters worse." [8] Chinatown, then, is the classic journey from ignorance to knowledge, from a lack of seeing to seeing. Unlike Oedipus, Jake does not blind himself when he confronts the truth; nonetheless, his life is shattered.

Film Noir

As you know from chapter 1, film noir is a French term, literally meaning "black [or dark] film." It originally referred to Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s that were indebted to or based on detective stories, generally characterized by their somber tones and pessimistic moods. Film noir stories concentrated on crime and corruption; on characters (heroes and villains alike) who tended to be cynical, disillusioned, and often insecure or impotent loners; and on, as screenwriter/director Paul Schrader puts it, "a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future."[9]

Although we call it a genre, film noir can also be considered a style. As Schrader explains, film noir is "not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood" (279). This visual style was influenced by such German expressionist films of the 1920s as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, 1919), Carl Boese and Paul Wegener's The Golem (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920), Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, 1922) and Metropolis (1926), and F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). The expressionist style was brought to Hollywood in the late 1920s and early 1930s by directors such as Murnau and Lang and cinematographers such as Karl Freund, who later became a director. It had a distinct influence both in Hollywood and around the world. We mainly see this influence in the classic Hollywood film noirs, in which the moods of the stories are enhanced by characteristic visual elements, including nighttime settings lighted both to emphasize contrasts between black and white and to enhance the fatalistic mood, the oblique composition of images, and the use of exaggerated camera setups and angles.[10]

By the mid-1950s, Hollywood's production of such films had diminished considerably. Nonetheless, film noir continued to attract American directors. Variations on the genre/style appeared, and critics labeled such generic transformations as neonoir. [11] One of the main differences between the film noirs and the neonoirs is the latter's treatment of "sex in all its forms" [12]; this difference reflects the larger shift in "realistic" content between pre- and postwar films. Its frank treatment of sex is only one way in which Chinatown transforms, for its own purposes, film noir conventions. Perhaps the most visually apparent of these transformations is the fact that it was shot in color, not black and white. Polanski writes, "I saw Chinatown not as a Retro piece or conscious imitation of classic movies shot in black and white, but as a film about the thirties seen through the camera eye of the seventies." [13] Cinematographer John A. Alonzo and lab technicians adjusted the color on the release prints so that it would have a sepia or "soft brownish" texture.[14] The overall visual style of the film, based on Towne's and Polanski's nostalgia for the look of Southern California in the 1930s, perfectly matches the tone and style of the narrative. This is Los Angeles before urban sprawl and smog, a time when the sun was very warm and yellow and the air brilliantly clear; consequently, the colors of everything were distinct, not smudged with air pollution as they have been for decades. The film's use of color—its presentation of bright sunlit landscapes and dim, shadowy rooms—furthers its examination of "beautiful surfaces and corrupt interiors."[15]

Plot, Story, Characters

Chinatown's plot moves relentlessly forward in a cause-and-effect pattern. As you watch the film, note this pattern, the economy of each scene, and how each scene fits perfectly into the whole. The plot is chronological and uninterrupted by such manipulations of time as flashbacks. The story duration is the entire lives of the characters; the plot duration is sixteen days; and screen duration is two hours and eleven minutes. Robert Towne's script absorbs influences from the detective story and film noir, but it is not just another neonoir variation. The scope of its vision sets Chinatown apart from its predecessors: we learn slowly about the depth of the immorality at the heart of this vision, and we see people doing as little as they can to correct it. And what we see, we do not always understand. So while Chinatown resembles the classic "hard-boiled" pattern, it also differs significantly from it. [16] Perhaps the most important of these differences concerns Jake Gittes's growing determination to expose and punish the persons responsible for the political and personal corruption he discovers. In making that attempt, he finds depravity beyond his comprehension. Cawelti observes:

Instead of bringing justice to a corrupt society, the detective's actions leave the basic source of corruption untouched. Instead of protecting the innocent, his investigation leads to the death of one victim and the deeper moral destruction of another. Instead of surmounting the web of conspiracy with honor and integrity intact, the detective is overwhelmed by what has happened to him. . . . Chinatown places the hard-boiled detective story within a view of the world that is deeper and more catastrophic, more enigmatic in its evil, more sudden and inexplicable in its outbreaks of violent chance. [17]

Roman Polanski, not Robert Towne, is responsible for this devastating viewpoint of evil. He explains:

The story was in the best Chandler tradition . . . but Towne and I couldn't agree on the ending. Towne wanted the evil tycoon to die and his daughter Evelyn to live. He wanted a happy ending; all would turn out OK for her after a short spell in jail. I knew that if Chinatown was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die. . . . The right ending was important for several reasons. Chinatown was a great title, but unless we set at least one scene in L.A.'s real life Chinatown, we'd be cheating, pulling in the public on false pretenses. . . . To this day Towne feels my ending is wrong; I am equally convinced that his more conventional ending would have seriously weakened the picture. . . .[18]

Chinatown also differs from the classic detective story in its representation of the two main characters—the male detective and the femme fatale. For example, we learn more about Gittes's past than we do about, say, Sam Spade's in The Maltese Falcon. As a Los Angeles policeman, Gittes has been too independent, too blind to reality, to learn from his numerous mistakes. He is too cynical and indiscreet for his own good, often embarrassing himself unnecessarily, as when he tells an off-color joke to his colleagues without realizing that Evelyn Mulwray is within earshot. Thinking he is smarter than his adversaries, he takes foolish risks in his attempts to outwit them, as when he insults the ranchers who have trapped him. He is contemptuous of those who attempt to obstruct his progress: Mulwray's secretary; Yelburton, the deputy chief engineer; the young clerk in the Hall of Records; Claude Mulvihill; the Mulwrays' butler and maid; and Lou Escobar. Evelyn Mulwray, meanwhile, is both more sophisticated and more vulnerable than her noir antecedents. As film scholar James F. Maxfield writes, she "is dangerous not because she is cool, hard, and ruthless but because she is neurotic, insecure, and vulnerable."[19] Each of these characteristics becomes more obvious as the narrative develops. Evelyn's core is revealed with shocking disclosures at its end, when her moral ambivalence toward these disclosures has no immediate explanation. Interestingly, some lines in the script, omitted in the film, shed more light on her motivations.

Towne describes his original ending:

Originally I had Evelyn kill her father. Gittes tried to stop her but was too late. But he did succeed in getting her daughter out of the country. So the ending was bittersweet in that one person at least—the child—wasn't tainted. The one thing the woman had been trying to do—the purest motive in the whole film—was to protect her daughter. When she carried out this motive by killing her father, she was acting out of motherly love. You knew she was going to stand trial, that she wouldn't tell why she did it, and that she would be punished. But the larger crime—the crime against the whole community—would go unpunished. And, in a sense, that was the point. There are some crimes for which you get punished, and there are some crimes that our society isn't equipped to punish, and so we reward the criminals. In this case, greedy men displaced a whole community and took the land. So there's really nothing to do but put their names on plaques and make them pillars of the community. It was this balance I was looking for.[20]

In his ending, Towne balances the triumph of evil with the hope felt by Jake and Evelyn. Polanski saw the world differently than Towne and wrote a new ending, one influenced as much by a vision of existential nothingness as by the conventions of film noir. His ending focuses on an act of meaningless violence that takes place in an urban wasteland. Nothing changes, because the villain prevails. Similarly, in his adaptation of Macbeth (1971), Polanski substitutes a cynicism about politics for Shakespeare's comparative optimism. Chinatown disturbs us with its hopelessness: "Most people don't ever have to face the fact," as Noah Cross puts it, "that at the right time in the right place they are capable of almost anything."

Major Themes and Motifs

Chinatown's narrative develops many interlocking themes, or principal subjects, and motifs, the distinctive and recurring images that develop the themes. By looking for themes and motifs, you can come to fully appreciate the complexity, depth, and multiple meanings of the film.

Theme of Seeing and Knowing

If, as discussed above, the title serves as a metaphor for the incomprehensibility of reality, then the events and conclusion of the film demonstrate that being able to see complex reality does not guarantee understanding it. As Noah Cross tells Gittes, "You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me you don't."

Motif of Photography

Jake does not seem to understand that surfaces are only part of reality; thus he relies heavily, perhaps too heavily for his own good, on what he sees or photographs. He assumes that the photographic image tells the whole story. In the opening scene, Jake and his client Curly look at photographs that confirm Curly's worst suspicions about his wife's infidelity. Here, photography works legalistically to document the truth. Shortly thereafter, carrying through the idea of infidelity, the bogus Mrs. Mulwray seeks Jake's help in confirming her suspicions about her husband's infidelity. Although Jake photographs Mulwray and Katherine kissing, we never learn the true nature of their relationship.

Motif of Sensory Organs

Images involving the eyes include Jake's camera lens, the binoculars with which he observes Mulwray in the dry riverbed, the rearview mirror with which he watches Mulwray near the ocean, the magnifying glass he finds in Mulwray's desk drawer, the single eye of the fish on the flag of the Albacore Club, the dead eye of the fish served to Jake and Cross at lunch, Jake's broken sunglasses, and two pairs of Cross's bifocals: one pair that he left behind when murdering Mulwray and another that he uses to read Mulwray's obituary. Jake breaks the lens on the taillight of Evelyn's car so that he can follow her more easily; he stares at his own tired eyes in the mirror; the dead eyes of Ida Sessions stare up at the kitchen ceiling; Curly gives his wife a black eye after he discovers her infidelity. Jake questions a mysterious Mexican boy on a horse, who tells him that he has seen water flowing at night in different parts of the dry riverbed. In addition, three scenes of people being shot at when they are fleeing in cars are followed by images of flawed eyes. [21] The first occurs after Jake and Evelyn flee the gunmen at the Mar Vista Rest Home; in the following scene at Mulwray's house, Jake comments on the flaw in Evelyn Mulwray's eye and she says, "It's a flaw in the iris . . . sort of a birthmark." The second occurs when Jake, fleeing the outraged ranchers in the orange grove, crashes his car and breaks one lens of his sunglasses. Finally, at the end of the film, a bullet enters through the back of Evelyn's head and exits through her flawed eye: the black, empty eye socket confirms the terrible price she has had to pay for her father's moral flaw. Evelyn's flawed eye indicates that she is the only person in the story who understands reality for what it is, and for this insight she is murdered.

Sound plays an especially significant role during two scenes in which Evelyn falls against the horn of her Packard convertible. In the first, she is startled to find Jake sitting in it, talks with him, and inadvertently sounds the horn. In the second, she is murdered and falls forward against the horn, an ominous sound that signals the end of the film.

Smell also is a significant part of this sensory imagery, in the form of Jake's nose—or, rather, his cut and bandaged nose. When he snoops (or sniffs for clues) around the reservoir where Mulwray was killed, he is confronted by two thugs, one of whom (played by Polanski) slits Jake's nostril to punish him for being so "nosey." Jake then goes through almost two-thirds of the film with a rather comic bandage on his nose. The private eye does not have a private nose; it has been, in effect, partially castrated by a "midget" more potent than he.

Theme of Life and Death

Motif of water

Water imagery not only establishes the sociopolitical facts of life in 1930s Los Angeles but also develops the film's existential, psychological, and sexual meanings. In Chinatown, you have to know how to keep your head above water. During their lunch, at which they eat fish, Jake and Cross talk about Jake's former partner, Escobar:

Cross: This Escobar. Honest?

Jake: As far as it goes. Of course, he has to swim in the same water we all do.

That single line, according to Palmer, "clarifies the meaning of the whole pattern of interlocked symbolic references to water, fish, drowning and breathing which have floated throughout the whole first half of the film." [22] Jake now realizes that he has to immerse himself in the destructive element—to swim in the same water as Cross—if he is to complete his investigation and survive. Of course, he does neither.

Noah Cross is one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles because he controls the source of life: the water supply, the only thing that keeps the city from returning to a desert. Cawelti links the film's real-life story with myth: "Polanski's version of Los Angeles in the 1930s reveals the transcendent mythical world of the sterile kingdom, the dying king, and the drowned man beneath it—the world, for example, of Eliot's The Waste Land and before that of the cyclical myths of traditional cultures." [23] The name Noah immediately reminds us of the biblical flood (Noah Cross also sounds like "double cross"). This Noah is the omnipotent but sinister father figure.

Cross drowns Mulwray so that he cannot block the construction of a new dam, and he attempts to drown Gittes so that he cannot solve that murder. Mulwray had built a pool in his garden. As Cross explains: "Hollis was always fascinated by tide pools. You know what he used to say, that's where life begins, sloughs, tide pools." Ironically, that garden pool is not a tide pool but rather an ornamental fishpond with salt water, which the Japanese gardener says is "bad for glass." Initially, Jake mocks this stereotypical Asian mispronunciation—"Yeah, bad for the glass"—and walks away. As the gardener repeats "Bad for glass, salt water, very bad for glass," Jake stops, thinks, turns around, and returns to the pool. There, he discovers a pair of bifocal glasses in the pool, glasses that link Mulwray's death with Cross and thus are the key to solving Mulwray's murder (he died with salt water in his lungs). This is a rare moment of insight for Jake.

There are other allusions to water and fish. Curly, the fisherman, says he cannot pay Jake until his income resumes when the albacore and skipjack are running again and then agrees to pay off his debts by helping Evelyn and Katherine to escape in his boat. Curly is followed in Jake's office by a woman pretending to be the wife of the head of the water department. Interlinked dams, reservoirs, and channels bring fresh water to the city and divert the runoff to the sea. One of the film's key scenes takes place in an eerily beautiful dry riverbed. Jake, who one character says "has water on the brain," tracks Mulwray and Katherine to a small lake. Several references to albacore provide a series of clues that lead Jake to Noah Cross. Water also contributes to the film's ironic humor, as when Morty, the coroner, says, "Middle of a drought, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A."

Narrative POINT OF VIEW

The thematic roles of knowing and understanding makeChinatown's point of view—the position from which it presents the actions—particularly important. Eaton writes:

Structurally, there are only three possible options for the writer in dealing with the relationship between the protagonist and the audience in regard to what is known: (i) the audience can know exactly what the protagonist knows, and no more nor less; (ii) the audience can know less than the protagonist knows; (iii) the audience can know more than the protagonist knows. . . . Polanski's greatest contribution to the structure of the screenplay [was] to supply the story with a rigorous single perspective: that of the protagonist, J. J. Gittes. We discover as Jake discovers, we are never lagging behind him, we are never way ahead of him. [24]

Chinatown consistently uses a limited, third-person point of view, thus keeping us close to but not apart from the action. This perspective is accomplished mainly through shooting Jake from an over-the-shoulder camera position that enables us to discover things as he does. However, Palmer observes, "as the audience is looking over Jake's shoulder, Jake is looking through some other obstacle which separates him from the reality that both he and the audience are trying to observe."[25] Such obstacles include a camera lens, a windshield, drawn curtains, and window blinds. Since Chinatown is concerned less with stark moral polarities than with variations on the immoral, we are constantly made aware of how hard it is to see what goes on in the shadows. These aspects help set the film's very special treatment of the film noir mood, for nothing in Chinatown's world is black-and-white.

for Further Reading

Copjec, Joan, ed. Shades of Noir: A Reader. London: Verso, 1993.

Durgnat, Raymond. "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir." In Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 37–51. New York: Limelight, 1997.

Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1978.

Palmer, R. Barton. "Chinatown and the Detective Story." Literature/Film Quarterly 5, no. 2 (spring 1977): 112–17.

---. Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Tuska, Jon. Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Vardac, A. Nicholas. Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.

Wexman, Virginia Wright. Roman Polanski. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

BACK TO TOP

[1]Polanski recounts his life through 1984 in his autobiography, Roman / by Polanski (New York: William Morrow, 1984).

[2]Qtd. in Michael Eaton, Chinatown (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 13. Eaton's book is an excellent analysis of the film. Towne wrote the screenplays for The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), The Firm (1993), and Mission: Impossible (1996), as well as for Personal Best (1982), Tequila Sunrise (1988), and Without Limits (1998), the last three of which he also directed. As a "script doctor," he has also done uncredited script work on, among other films, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), Marathon Man (1976), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Frantic (1988), Crimson Tide (1995), and Armageddon (1998).

[3]Eaton, Chinatown, 43.

[4]William J. Palmer, The Films of the Seventies: A Social History (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 119. Palmer's essay, to which I am indebted, offers many insights into the film.

[5]John Cawelti, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation," in Film Genre Reader, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 184. My summary of the characteristics of the detective figure is based closely on Cawelti's analysis.

 [6]There were also two earlier film versions of Hammett's novel: Roy Del Ruth's The Maltese Falcon (1931) and William Dieterle's Satan Met a Lady (1936). In Chinatown, of course, Huston plays the villain, Noah Cross.

 [7]See Deborah Linderman, "Oedipus in Chinatown," Enclitic (Fall 1981/Spring 1982), 190–203.

[8]Eaton, Chinatown, 21.

[9]Paul Schrader, "Notes on Film Noir," in Awake in the Dark: An Anthology of American Film Criticism, 1915 to the Present, ed. David Denby (New York: Vintage, 1977), 285. On film noir, see also Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1979); Robert Ottoson, A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir, 1940–1958 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981); and Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader (New York: Limelight, 1996).

[10]Among the most distinctive Hollywood film noirs are John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Stuart Heisler's The Glass Key (1942), Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (1946), Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Henry Hathaway's Call Northside 777 (1948), Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948), Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), Rudolph Maté's D.O.A. (1950), Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and Gerd Oswald's A Kiss Before Dying (1956).

[11]Among the most distinctive neonoirs are Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Roger Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), Peter Yates's Bullitt (1968), Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Benton's The Late Show (1977), Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Wim Wenders's Hammett (1982), Joel Coen's Blood Simple (1984), Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot (1990), Stephen Frears's The Grifters (1990), Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again (1991), and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997). Remakes of film noir classics include Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Taylor Hackford's Against All Odds (1984), Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel's D.O.A. (1988), James Dearden's A Kiss Before Dying (1991), and Irwin Winkler's Night and the City (1992).

[12]Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Free Press, 1997), 241.

[13]Polanski, Roman, 349.

[14]See "The Cinematographer: John A. Alonzo," in Filmmakers on Filmmaking: The American Film Institute Seminars on Motion Pictures and Television, ed. Joseph McBride (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1983), 2:122.

[15]Gerald Mast, Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 42.

[16]Cawelti discusses the significant ways in which the script deviates from the hard-boiled formula (Chinatown, passim).

[17]Cawelti, Chinatown, 186–89.

[18]Polanski, Roman / by Polanski, 346–49. The best way to understand the different endings is to compare the film with Towne's screenplay; see Robert Towne, Chinatown; The Last Detail: Screenplays (New York: Grove Press, 1994); also Chinatown, 3rd draft (Hollywood: Script City, [1973]). James F. Maxfield, The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, 1941–1991 (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 128–29, comments on several of Polanski's changes.

[19]Maxfield, The Fatal Woman, 126.

[20]Robert Towne, in McBride, ed., Filmmakers on Filmmaking, 2:63–64.

[21]Palmer, The Films of the Seventies, 133.

[22]Palmer, The Films of the Seventies, 174.

[23]189–90. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) expresses the anguish and barrenness of modern life, the isolation of the individual, and the failure of love.

[24]Eaton, Chinatown, 32–35.

[25]Palmer, The Films of the Seventies, 136.

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