"Chinatown" may be Roman Polanski's best film. It may be Jack Nicholson's best film as well, better than "Five Easy Pieces" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest". It starts out seemingly an ordinary detective story and murder mystery. However, the plot gets thicker and thicker as Nicholson unravels a massive real estate scheme and learns who is behind it.
Nicholson plays a private investigator who works
in Los Angeles during the 1930s. He is hired by a
wife who suspects her husband is cheating.
Nicholson takes incriminating photos of him,
which are used by the client to smear the
husband, who then appears to have committed
suicide.
But nothing is as it appears, not the wife, the
affair, or the suicide. Nicholson knows he has
been duped, and is determined to learn the full
story, which involves murder, real estate fraud,
and an artificial water shortage. His
investigation also uncovers terrible family
secrets involving the murder victim's wife (Faye
Dunaway) and her cantankerous, powerful father
(John Huston).
Nicholson is well cast as the cynical and
hard-working private eye. His character has
similarities to Humphrey Bogart's in "The Maltese
Falcon", but Nicholson's is not as sharp, and is
more willing to con his way into gaining
information.
Likewise, Dunaway's character is similar to that
of Mary Astor's in "The Maltese Falcon". Both
characters seem unwilling to tell the full truth,
and claim to love their hired detective, but
Dunaway's is much softer and better intentioned.
John Huston, more noted as a director than as an
actor, gives a great performance as the grasping
schemer who also wants the daughter he doesn't
deserve to have.
Roman Polanski has a great cameo as the enforcer
with a knife. He will always be known more for
his off-camera life than for the films that he
has directed, but perhaps that isn't as it should
be. "Chinatown" is an outstanding film, perhaps
even the best film of the 1970s. (97/100)
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