Chinatown (Polanski, 1974): Screen on the Green, 10.30pm
This 35mm screening is part of a 70s season screening from prints. Chinatown also screens on April 12th at 10.30am. Details here.
Time Out review:
'The
hard-boiled private eye coolly strolls a few steps ahead of the
audience. The slapstick detective gets everything wrong and then
pratfalls first over the finish line anyway. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson)
is neither - instead he's a hard-boiled private eye who gets everything
wrong. Jake snaps tabloid-ready photos of an adulterous love nest
that's no such thing. He spies a distressed young woman through a window
and mistakes her for a hostage. He finds bifocals in a pond and calls
them Exhibit A of marital murder, only the glasses don't belong to the
victim and the wife hasn't killed anyone. Yet when he confronts
ostensible black widow Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) with the
spectacular evidence, the cigarette between his teeth lends his voice an
authoritative Bogie hiss. Throughout, Gittes sexes up mediocre snooping
with blithe arrogance and sarcastic machismo. It's the actor's default
mode, sure, but in 1974 it hadn't yet calcified into Schtickolson, and
in 1974 a director (Roman Polanski), a screenwriter (Robert Towne) and a
producer (Robert Evans) could decide to beat a genre senseless and dump
it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. 'You see, Mr Gits,' depravity
incarnate Noah Cross (John Huston) famously explains, 'most people never
have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place,
they're capable of anything.' As is Chinatown. The last gunshot here is
the sound of the gate slamming on the Paramount lot of Evans' halcyon
reign, and as the camera rears back to catch Jake's expression, the
dolly lists and shivers - an almost imperceptible sob of grief and
recognition, but not a tear is shed.'
Jessica Winter
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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