The 1930s and 40s were a great time for film noir. This genre basically dealt with hardboiled men living in corrupt times and places, often corrupt themselves, the women who tempt them and the odds they face to even begin to do the right thing. It's not a genre that sees a lot of usage today. The most recent, popular example I can think of is 2005's Sin City, though that one comes across as more cartoon than anything else, even with the stylish flashes of color and the highly hardboiled dialogue spoken by, oh, every character onscreen. Perhaps there is simply too much trust in various institutions in this day and age, along with the predominance of the idea that most private detectives these days are hired to find evidence of adultery or something much less glamorous, and its no small wonder why this style of film seems to have disappeared.
Maybe this is why 1974's Chinatown works so well. First, the movie's private eye, Jake Gittes, specializes in the aforementioned divorce cases. Second, the time period puts it squarely about the time of the Watergate scandal forcing an American president to resign for the first and to date only time in our history, making it easier to believe our institutions might be corrupt. Third, even with all this, the movie is set in the same time period the best and best-remembered film noirs were produced, the 30s.
Chinatown is actually one of my favorite movies. The only movie I love more than Chinatown is the Japanese samurai/unsolved murder mystery Roshomon. It turns out my grandfather's favorite movie was The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, so for all I know this is genetic (it probably isn't). But for all that at least one friend of mine can't watch this movie in light of both director Roman Polanski's personal scandals and the big reveal about Faye Dunaway's character near the end of the movie, I still find this a compelling film that holds up to mutliple viewings.
The movie opens with one poor, working class slob finding out his wife has been cheating on him, as he suspected. Had he not, he wouldn't have hired Jake "J.J." Gittes to look into it. From the second Gittes, played to perfection by Jack Nicholson back in the days when he didn't just ham it up onscreen most of the time, enters the frame and begins talking he pretty much never leaves our sight for more than a few seconds at a time. Even when we don't see him, he's just off-frame somewhere. This accomplishes something for the audience worth noting: the first time viewer only ever knows as much as Gittes does at any given moment in the movie. The clues come out, slowly and surely, parceled out bit-by-bit as needed.
And what a mystery! Two, actually. The more obvious one is who killed the honest water company engineer, and former owner, Hollis Mulwray. The second, tied to it, is who was the young girl Hollis was hanging out with, and why do so many people seem so interested in her.
The answers point to the standard for noir films: corruption in the higher ranks of society. Dishonest cops on the take are one thing. Downright evil public works executives, who apparently can never have enough money, are something else.
The Chinatown of the title barely features in the movie. Instead, the place is more symbolic, a place where corruption happens and there isn't anything an honest person can do about it. It's the reason Gittes went from being a cop to a private eye. Gittes, unlike Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, actually is a moral person, and his righteous indignation can only be calmed with an associate's reminder of where he is when the climactic showdown goes down. Like any good noir, good doesn't really triumph here. The best any noir hero can hope for is for a slight improvement in the world around him, and Chinatown doesn't even offer that much.
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