“See, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything!”

    Roman Polanski’s Chinatown opens in another case being closed by private eye Jake Gittes—he shows his clients photos of the client’s wife in compromising positions with another man. While his office is made of hard wood décor and his suit as white as the moon, Gittes is a dirty man, with dirty jobs to perform. He’s not the quick witted Sam Spade, nor Jeff Bailey in need of redemption—he’s just out to make a living any way he can.

    There are so many ways to take a stab at deconstructing Polanski’s Chinatown, and its hard to know where the start. A mix of a shockingly grotesque story within a beautiful tragedy, mixing genres, characters, and period sets into a strange swirl of what only could be called American revisionism. Polanski, a Polish immigrant who survived the Holocaust, only made a few films in America before fleeing the country on criminal charges. But his last American film remains a pinnacle of some sort of beast that cannot be described. Written by Robert Towne and produced by superstar mogul Robert Evans, Chinatown thrives on complexity, the grays of both sides, and the vast, morally corrupt zeitgeist of the 1970s.

    Often, Chinatown is mixed in as what is called a neo-noir, revival of the film noir but with color, as well as subverting and understanding the genre in a new context. It all begins with Jack Nicholson as Gittes—that actor, already a superstar from Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider, plays a subtly complex role as Gittes. He’s an update on the film noir hero, much the same way Elliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye from 1973. But unlike Marlowe, Gittes is in the world of the 1930s LA, in the middle of the biggest water crisis of the century. Nicholson in the biggest sense of the phrase, is way over his head. He heads into a story that is so complex and so devastating it is too much for him to handle. He fails, ever too often, and makes mistakes.

    The mystery involves three characters—Mrs. Mullwray, her apparently cheating husband Hollis, who also ends up dead soon into the narrative, and Noah Cross, the father of the Mrs and business partner of the deceased. Without giving away the deadly secrets that inhabit the dark story of Chinatown, Towne builds the film on a double plot—a story of familial corruption, as well as capitalist gains. But which one is which? Cross, played by John Huston, the grand director of The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle, is quite deceptive, even to the point where he often uses Gittes as a fool—consider the scene in which he serves Gittes a whole fish with the eye staring right back as the private eye. Cross, and Huston’s performance, is easily the most enigmatic character of the film, despite his little screen time. His motives are capitalist in nature in both cases—whether he is trying to swallow the water of Los Angeles for his own property, and take his daughter back into his possession. His response for why he does what he does? “The future, Mr. Gittes, the future!” he remarks, as if that too can be possessed. During the final sequence, watch how Huston’s giant arms cover and literally covet his daughter—its beautifully disturbing.

    Mrs. Mullwray then, in this comment of film noir, is our daring femme fatale. But as played by the always brilliant Faye Dunaway, there is nothing simple about her actions. She plays Gittes just the same, though uses her own cunning to hide the real secrets. Unlike Mary Astor in Falcon or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Mrs. Mullwray isn’t out for her own good, as its revealed. She is just as damaged as everyone else, and just trying to survive without the men on top dominating or possessing her.

    These ideas, violence, incest, sex that overtake Chinatown is Polanski’s ability to comment on the 1930s in a real perspective. Instead of hiding everything, which is often what happened under the Production Code, Chinatown fills itself with despicable characters doing despicable things—there is no sense of hope or redemption for Gittes, not even the sense that Sterling Hayden gets in Asphalt Jungle or Robert Michum in Out of the Past. He sits most of the film with a bandage over his nose, showing his own failure to be the perfect detective. That final shot of Nicholson, staring at the horror of his actions and all the trouble that he has caused, is devastating. The final line, “Forget it Jake, its Chinatown,” says it all. Corruption spreads like the plague, and the only thing one can do is run away from it all. There is no escape.

    Creating neo-noir can be a difficult process, especially when film noir based itself on a spread of contrasting black and whites. But Polanski’s palette is something of an awe—it is muted, but expressive. Dark greens, grays, blacks, and browns fill the offices, landscapes, and stages of Chinatown’s actions. Gittes’ white suit is truly unique, but it expresses his character in his truly tragic form—he acts innocent, but plays rough, only to find himself in a conspiracy way over his head.

    It’s hard to place Chinatown in its right context. Its hard to call it a film of the Hollywood New Wave, since Polanski was not a film school buff of the Americas but as a Holocaust survivor, decided it to explore his pain through films. His early films—Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Macbeth—are all about exploring evil, its causes and its roots, and Chinatown is no different. Chinatown was Polanski’s last film made in the United States, and it’s a true tragedy that his crimes have prevented him. If anyone was more fit to explore American character, it was Polanski’s outsider view who had so much of his life effected by this country, including the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson family. Chinatown was thus his perfect goodbye to this country—it simply asks, how much evil is possible, and how much can a single man endure of it?