The Big Goodbye: Chinatown, by Sam Wasson
LEWIS JONES The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
As its subtitle promises, The Big Goodbye celebrates the last glory years of Hollywood – the decade or so after 1967 – and in particular Chinatown (1974), which Sam Wasson views as its crowning achievement.
The film was made by Hollywood’s ruling coterie under the aegis of Robert ‘The Kid’ Evans, the head of Paramount, who also produced it. Robert Towne wrote the screenplay with his friend Jack Nicholson in mind to star, and it was directed by Roman Polanski, fresh from his succès de scandale with Rosemary’s Baby.
An exquisite homage to the dark glamour of 1930s Los Angeles, Chinatown is a perverse mix of the swooningly romantic and the brutally cynical.
In the grand tradition of noir, it orchestrates intricately related stories with economy and pace, but its ironies are distinctly modern, and it subverts the conventions of the genre. Unlike Philip Marlowe, Nicholson’s J J Giddes does do divorce work, and Evelyn Mulwray, Faye Dunaway’s blonde femme fatale, turns out to be an innocent sacrificial victim. The film seduces its audience with expert audacity and then betrays it with the cool nihilism of its ending, as Giddes loses everything: ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.’
The great director John Huston, who made his debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941), took up acting quite late in life, and was proud of his performance as the affable monster Noah Cross. Addressing Giddes (‘Mr Gitts’) at the Albacore Club, he delivers, with gentle menace and a faint slur, the line that sums up the film: ‘You may think you know what you’re dealing with but, believe me, you don’t.’
Chinatown, Wasson argues, is a state of mind, a condition of helplessness in the face of horror. ‘Dreaming you’re in paradise,’ he writes, ‘and waking up in the dark – that’s Chinatown. Thinking you’ve got it figured and realizing you’re dead – that’s Chinatown.’
Wasson looks minutely at every aspect of the film, from Richard Sylbert’s immaculate art direction to Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score, with its haunting trumpet (‘Play it sexy, but like it’s not good sex’). He tells us that Huston was invariably drunk (which would explain the slur in his voice), that the Albacore Club is based on the Tuna Club, and that Cross’s financial crimes are closely based on the Owens Valley water scandal, whereby a group of oligarchs cheated LA out of an estimated $100 million.
His main focus, though, is the personal Chinatowns of the main players, as they negotiated the transition from the mellow, pot-wreathed 1960s to the harsh, cocaine-edged 1970s. He looks at Evans, holed up in Beverly Hills, obsessing over his hero Irving Thalberg, ‘The Boy Wonder’, who became head of MGM at the age of 26.
He recounts the agonies of Robert Towne in writing the screenplay, and his devastation when Polanksi dispensed with his happy ending. And he tells us that, soon after Chinatown, in a bizarre echo of the film’s crucial plot twist (‘She’s my sister and my daughter’), Nicholson learnt that the woman he had always thought was his sister was actually his mother, and that his supposed mother was really his grandmother.
Above all, Wasson looks at film’s presiding spirit, that tormented imp Polanski, who gives a gleeful cameo as the ‘midget’ with a switchblade, slicing open Jake’s nostril: ‘He-ey, kittycat, you’re a real nosey guy…’
Polanski was ‘a man who had survived too much’. As a child in Warsaw, he watched his father weeping as he was marched from the ghetto across Podgórski Bridge. He ran to him but was ignored, and when he persisted was told in a whisper, ‘Shove off.’ They didn’t meet again until after the war. Before that, the Germans had taken away his pregnant mother – to Auschwitz, where they murdered her.
In Hollywood, he married the gorgeous hippie actress Sharon Tate, who ‘looked like California’. In 1969, at their house in Cielo Drive, she was murdered by the Manson ‘Family’, with several of their friends, while pregnant with their first child. Confirmed in his belief that ‘our destinies are the result of apparently meaningless coincidences’, Polanski has since consoled himself with uninhibited hedonism.
Wasson’s prose has a Hollywoodish tendency to overheat – ‘A broken mind sees … the black chasm of “could”, waiting, smug as gravity, to ravage every newborn thought’ – but in Polanski’s case this is justified. He has supped full of horrors, and in dozens of films has turned his nightmares into art. Chinatown is surely his masterpiece.