Chinatown (1974)

I recently had a friend tell me that they did not really think that Jack Nicholson was that great an actor, then she admitted that she had never seen Chinatown. That is unacceptable. I don't think Nicholson has ever been better (even though he didn't win an Oscar until One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest the next year) or better looking. Faye Dunaway had not yet started chewing the scenery as she has in most, if not all, of her post Mommie Dearest roles. Roman Polanski was still living in the United States, and Robert Towne, still one of the best writers in Hollywood, when he feels like it (we won't count Mission Impossible II) wrote one of the best scripts ever.

The basic idea behind the movie was to do a crime drama about the really big crimes perpetrated by men who don't go to jail, instead they get their names on buildings. Towne took the basic narrative of the men who created Los Angeles by solving it's water problem and added some VERY dramatic fictions, then drops a Sam Spade-esque private investigator in the middle of it and in a position where he feels he must unravel it all. It's the 1930s, the depths of the depression and J.J. 'Jake' Gittes (Jack Nicholson), former cop and PI is making a living specializes in sleazy matrimonial work - meaning spying on cheating husbands. Hired for what appears to be just another job catching a cheating spouse by Mrs. Mulwray he instead finds himself in the headlines, threatened with lawsuits, attacked with a knife, attacked by a crazy family of farmers trying to guard their water, falling in love, and threatened by one of the most powerful men in town. It's a fascinating and complicated plot.

Every time I watch this movie (and that's a lot of times) I notice something I never noticed before. A couple of years ago I noticed a song that was playing in a restaurant scene between Nicholson and  Dunaway and in the next scene, which was undoubtedly shot weeks later or earlier, Nicholson is humming that song as if it got stuck in his mind when he was in the restaurant. That's the kind of touch that tells you this is a really special movie. The performances are hard to beat and Polanski's direction is probably why people in Hollywood have been unable to condemn him for his personal faults. The powerful man that Gittes comes up against is played by John Huston, legendary director and father of Nicholson's real-life long term lover Angelica Huston. This adds an interesting dimension to the scene they play together. I cannot stress enough that if you haven't seen this movie you must see it soon.