 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||||
| Chinatown 7 of 10 |
||||||
| Directed by Roman Polanski Cinematography by John A. Alonzo Jack Nicholson Faye Dunaway John Huston Perry Lopez Darrell Zwerling Roman Polanski |
||||||
| This is a pre-exile Roman Polanski film. And it serves as an excellent exhibit in the discussion of Polanski's organizational greatness. The directing is superb. The story, which has the potential to be quite confusing in different hands, is crystal clear under his direction. And he gets fine performances out of his cast. Nicholson in particular is excellent. His J. J. Gittes is a perfect example of the hard-boiled detective; he also pulls off the difficult task of making a fairly unlikable character fairly likeable. Faye Dunaway, although apparently extremely difficult to work with, does an astounding job as Evelyn Cross Mulwray. She has got to be one of the most complex characters I have ever seen in a film. The script is great. But the story is not. (That's sort of a tricky distinction, I know. But it's a true one.) Quite simply, the film's biggest problem is its ending, which is very, very depressing. Really makes you forget a lot of the great work that came before. The bad guys really do win, and that's very unsatisfying. But there is some great stuff here, no doubt about that. One more little thing: there is never more than a very tenuous connection between the title of the film and the actual story. And that really irritated me. It seemed unnecessarily sloppy, in a film that was anything but. Look, I do matrimonial work. It's my m�tier. When a wife tells me she's happy her husband is cheating on her it runs contrary to my experience. |
||||||