CHINATOWN: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Paramount, 1974) Paramount Home Video

The quintessential noir thriller in color, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) falls well beyond the parameters of that classic tradition in darkly lit tales shot in B&W, examining the seedy underbelly of contemporary society. The movement eventually labeled by the French as ‘noir’ was a byproduct of wartime and post-war cynicism about the future trajectory of North American society. That it was to quietly pass into the night after the mid-fifties seems, at least in hindsight, more a reaction to the post-war boom and Hollywood’s desire to be ‘bigger’ though not necessarily ‘better’ at telling stories; also, the inevitable streamlining of studios’ output to keep tighter reigns on the ever-skyrocketing cost of making celluloid art feasible. By 1974, noir was decidedly an afterthought – something one stayed up to watch on UHF channels peddling the past to fill dead air time after the late-late show. And yet, at least in hindsight, noir became ideal fodder for Polanski, still freshly tainted by the heinous murder of his wife, Sharon Tate and their unborn child in 1969, though as yet, not ostracized by his peers and exiled from the U.S. over his alleged rape of a 13-yr.-old girl in 1979. So, Chinatown fits rather succinctly into a chasm between these two great scandals that broke Polanski’s brilliance down to bedrock.

The aegis for Chinatown is a tale of pure luck. Initially, Paramount producer extraordinaire, Robert Evans offered screenwriter, Robert Towne a cool $175,000 to adapt Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1974).  Believing Fitzgerald could not be bested, Towne countered with an offer to be paid a mere $25,000 to write his own story. Evans agreed. The result was Chinatown, a movie Towne also hoped to direct. Alas, these dreams were dashed when Polanski’s name became attached to the project. Towne’s other ambition, to feature his fictional private eye, J.J. Gittes (played with cynical aplomb by Jack Nicholson) in a ‘black market’ bloc of profit-mongering magnates, was also dashed nearly two decades later, when his first follow-up to Chinatown, The Two Jakes (1990) did a colossal belly flop at the box office. Towne superficially fashioned the fictional Hollis Mulwray (Darryl Zwerling) in Chinatown on William Mulholland, the superintendent and chief engineer of L.A.’s Department of Water and Power. Mulholland was largely considered the force behind the engineering marvel of its time – the city’s aqueduct, providing for Los Angeles’ latter-day urban sprawl.  The particulars of the real Mulholland, however, were to be obscured by Towne in Chinatown. Towne also précised the real-life land syndicate into a singular entity - the perverse, Noah Cross (played with fiendish delight by John Huston).

Chinatown’s story is rooted in kernels of reality gleaned from two sources: Carey McWilliams' Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article - Raymond Chandler's L.A.  In reshaping this content, the fictional Mulwray now opposed a dam project forged by Cross on the grounds of engineering safety. This illudes to the real-life St. Francis Dam disaster of March 12, 1928, which the real Mulholland actually approved of and, having declared the dam safe early in the morning, was chagrined later that same afternoon when it collapsed, killing 431 residents in the Santa Clara Valley. Prior to this, Mulholland concurred, underground water was being syphoned by faulty valves in the aqueduct, dumping desperately needed fresh water into the ocean. Towne wrote the character of J.J. Gittes (inspired by producer, Harry Gittes) for Jack Nicholson who, in turn, passed a copy of the script to Roman Polanski, by then, already living obscurely in Europe. While Towne was elated to discover Polanski’s name attached to the project, he fought to keep his original ending intact. In Towne’s version, Cross is killed and Gittes’ love interest, Evelyn Mulwray (envisioned with feline poise by Faye Dunaway) survives. Polanski disagreed with this overture to the usual ‘crime must pay’ morality messages of yore, perhaps, intuitively recognizing that, in life, unlike art, the good guys do not always triumph. And thus, Polanski reconceived the finale to Chinatown to satisfy his own likes, incurring Towne’s ire. Polanski also disliked the relative straight-forwardness of Towne’s prose, including Gittes’ voice-over narration, a holdover from the noir tradition. Polanski cut this, rearranging plot elements into a less linear timeline, so the audience and Gittes unravel the mystery together in ‘reel’ time.

Production on Chinatown was stalled when Evans and Polanski clashed over their choice of cinematographer. Polanski wanted William A. Fraker, with whom he had collaborated on Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But Evans believed bending to Polanski’s request would create a bottleneck in the picture’s artistic control, leaving his influence out in the cold. Polanski then compromised by accepting Evan’s choice - Stanley Cortez, with whom he fought daily until Evan’s agreed to replace Cortez with John A. Alonzo, chosen for his alacrity and deftness shooting in natural light. Polanski and Alonzo found common ground on Chinatown, drawing their inspiration from their telescopically focused creative acumens. This resulted in a more streamlined shoot. Viewing Chinatown today, one is immediately struck by how well all the pieces of its intricate story fit, its hard-boiled, underplayed thriller gradually unraveling into a shocking and tawdry tale of family incest. Towne's screenplay provides for all the necessary hairpin turns of a classic noir, including the devious femme fatale, the embittered anti-hero, a dark underbelly of political corruption, and, a powerful villain who will stop at nothing to have his way.

After its bluesy main title, composed to perfection by Jerry Goldsmith, our story debuts with Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) a woman claiming to be Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray, seeking to hire private investigator, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to tail her husband, Hollis whom she suspects is having an affair with a much younger woman. At first, Jake's surveillance bears out this assumption. Hollis does meet a young woman (Nandu Hinds), though only in very public places. After Jake's innocuous photos are splashed on the cover of a sleazy tabloid, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Fay Dunaway) makes her presence known, serving court papers at Jake's office. Jake's been played for a fool and vows to get to the bottom of things. In the meantime, Hollis' body is discovered badly beaten in a drain near the ocean. Jake pokes around for information, but winds up getting his nose slashed by a petulant thug (Roman Polanski) working for aged tycoon, Noah Cross. A nervous and contrite Evelyn resurfaces. She has decided to withdraw her lawsuit. But Jake is unimpressed – in fact, downright angry and, like the proverbial mad dog, will not let go until his case is solved.

What Jake discovers is a conspiracy between Hollis and Noah to buy up desert land at bargain prices, then irrigate and sell it off for millions to orange growers. But proving this conspiracy will be difficult - if not impossible. Evelyn and Jake become intimate, a seduction that has Jake suspecting a very bizarre association between Evelyn, Noah and the young girl with whom Hollis was preoccupied before his untimely demise. Gittes is warned off the case by Water Department Security Chief, Claude Mulvihill (Roy Jenson). He also receives a cryptic call from Ida Sessions. Later, Jake and Evelyn stumble upon a conspiracy to have huge tracks of California real estate presumably invested with local retirees who know not of their land holdings. Mulvilhill sends goons to thwart Jake’s investigation, though not before Jake also becomes highly suspicious Evelyn is withholding crucial information about the mysterious girl. This turns out to be Katherine (Belinda Palmer) – the product of Noah’s rape of Evelyn when she was only fifteen. Suspecting Noah of Hollis’ murder, Gittes is held at gunpoint and taken to Chinatown where Evelyn is waiting with Katherine. Noah claims Katherine as his grandchild, causing Evelyn to protect her by shooting Noah in the arm. In reply, police open fire on Evelyn, killing her instead. The lecherous Noah insidiously coddles Katherine as Jake is quietly instructed to let the past die with Evelyn. “Forget it, Jake…it’s Chinatown.”

Chinatown is the final jewel in Roman Polanski’s crown, his American tenure cut short by the rape charges that sent him into European exile. The picture has ultimately remained Polanski’s masterwork ever since; so gritty, alive and salacious in its details, it offers a rare and curious glimpse into the director’s own emotional scar tissue, perhaps, revealing too much of the darkness afflicting Polanski’s life and times. Polanski has always claimed no rape occurred. And while there is little to debate the acquiescence of a 13-yr.-old child, in more recent times, Samantha Geimer - the alleged ‘victim’ - has come forth to suggest she never felt threatened to comply with these sexual favors. “Let me be very clear,” Geimer has stated, “…what happened… was never a big problem for me. I didn’t even know it was illegal…The fact…we’ve made this thing up weighs on me terribly.”

Regardless, the aftermath derailed Polanski’s American tenure in films. Even so, his reputation as an artist has endured. And Chinatown is a significant movie – perhaps, worthy of a place in the ‘top ten’ of all-time greatest ever conceived. Towne's screenplay gives a black eye to the sunny California backdrop. The tale is deliciously venomous, with irreprehensible characters plying their own perverse moral compass to the world at large. And Polanski delivers on a riveting saga, steeped in moral turpitude that, with each passing year, seems more apropos to the world in which we presently live. If Chinatown has a contemporary counterpart, it isn’t The Two Jakes – a soft and meandering contemplative piece. Rather director, Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997) – another great exposé loosely grounded in California history, only to shatter, then dismantle its mythology. A moment’s pause here to acknowledge The Two Jakes, made 16 years after Chinatown. It was a troubled production, repeatedly delayed, despite Chinatown’s success and Robert Evans’ enthusiasm to put the sequel into production almost immediately thereafter.

The project languished from 1976 to 1984 when, after much consternation, Robert Towne finished his screenplay. By then, Nicholson, Evans, and Towne had formed their own indie offshoot with a distribution deal at Paramount and a guaranteed budget of $12–13 million. Alas, internal discord between the partners derailed these plans, despite preliminary work already well underway. This was compounded in grievances filed by 120 crew who had not been paid for their time thus far. And so, again, The Two Jakes slipped into a purgatory by its own design with Towne turning to producer, Dino De Laurentiis for additional financing. Paramount, alas, grew weary and pulled out of the distribution deal, taking a $4 million bath on the project while entertaining a notion to sell off its controlling interests to The Cannon Group. With Cannon’s bankruptcy looming large on the horizon, the rights then reverted back to Paramount. By the end of the decade, the project was back on track, with Jack Nicholson assuming the directorial reigns, rewriting portions of Towne's screenplay, and returning to one of his most iconic roles as J.J. Gittes. Regrettably, at a final cost of $25 million, The Two Jakes became the movie to end Nicholson’s partnership with Towne and Evans – the former, disowning it and refusing to speak to Nicholson for more than a decade; the latter, checking into hospital for a badly needed detox and mental health issues. When The Two Jakes stubbornly refused to click with audiences, taking in a paltry $10 million, Towne considered himself vindicated and/or absolved of all responsibility for its financial fiasco.  

It goes without saying, Chinatown is a great movie. But it behooves us also to reconsider it as bridging the chasm between vintage, forties’ noir and the more gratuitous, neo-noir knock-offs that have been intermittently resurrected on celluloid since Chinatown. The picture’s stylistic elements are bizarrely an amalgam of 40’s kitsch and 70’s coo with neither Nicholson nor Dunaway ever entirely believable, as to have hailed from that golden age epoch in B&W, a la Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. What is monumentally satisfying about Chinatown, then as now, is not how well it apes another decade, but how intimately it justifies the melding of 40’s noir with the ‘then’ contemporary strain of 70’s seedy picture-making. Now, some 50-years removed from its theatrical debut, Chinatown can justly be classified as a movie for all time, rather than merely one from its own time. It has assailed changing tastes with its storytelling veracity. We celebrate such movies, affording them the bon mots of a bona fide ‘classic’. True yesterday. True today. Truer still, and perhaps, even more so, tomorrow. That’s Chinatown. Leave it alone. And never forget it.

Paramount Home Video debuts Chinatown in 4K with its follow-up, The Two Jakes, thrown in almost as an afterthought on standard Blu. The Blu of Chinatown itself, was pretty solid. And while this 4K easily bests those efforts, it really is the higher resolution here that looks stellar in projection. Flesh tones are more refined. Colors are a shade more muted, but spectral highlights advance. Contrast is darker – fittingly so for a contempo-noir. Viewing Chinatown in 4K, by direct comparison to the old Blu, it appears more film-like and of its 70’s vintage film stock origins. The biggest overall improvement in 4K is devoted to detail, and a more natural reproduction of film grain. I have read various reviews to infer DNR has been intermittently applied to soften the image. Respectfully, I disagree. John A. Alonzo’s cinematography was never intended to yield the razor-sharpness of a movie shot last week in digital. This is celluloid, folks, and, stylistically, controlled by varying focal range lens to produce the desired depth of field. And it looks pretty damn fine from cover to credits. Paramount ports over 2 audio tracks – a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 and 2.0 mono – representing the original theatrical soundtrack. Each has been given a sold restoration, with the 5.1 etching out the mono for spatial separation. Like, no kidding!  Paramount has shelled out for one ‘new’ extra – a conversation with author, Sam Wasson on the legacy of Chinatown. It’s solid, but brief. For the rest: we get everything from the old Blu – a commentary featuring Robert Towne with David Fincher, and featurettes starring producer, Hawk Koch, Sam Wasson, as well as a comprehensive ‘making of’ divided into 8 parts: well worth your viewing pleasure. A brief word about The Two Jakes, which I’ve watched but otherwise struggle to regard as Chinatown’s valiant successor. The Blu is competently rendered, but with age-related imperfections throughout. It ought to have been 4K too, and cleaned up for this anniversary release or not included at all. Bottom line: Chinatown is required viewing for anyone considering themselves a cinephile of distinction. The 4K is easily the best this movie has ever looked on home video. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

Chinatown 5+

The Two Jakes 2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

Chinatown – 5

The Two Jakes - 3

EXTRAS

4.5