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Essay On The Movie Chinatown

1165 Words5 Pages

Art of film
Chinatown review by Diana Chmait.
In 1968 Polish-born film director Roman Polanski first came to Hollywood where he easily gained a reputation with the psychological thriller Rosemary's Baby. However, after the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the infamous Charles Manson gang in 1969, Polanski decided to return to Europe. Chinatown marked Polanski's 1974 return to the USA.
Chinatown {Roman Polanski, 1974} talks about: the synopsis “Jake Gittes is an L.A. private eye who specializes in matrimonial strife and infidelity. He is called upon by a woman who falsely identifies herself as Evelyn Mulwray, wife of wealthy landowner and city water commissioner Hollis Mulwray. The imposter has Gittes spy on her "husband" to find out if he is having an affair. Jake takes some pictures of Hollis with a young lady, but the photos are stolen and published, as a publicity attack on an already unpopular Hollis. (L.A. is in the middle of a water shortage as the result of a drought, and Hollis has become something of a scapegoat for the angry public.) Gittes soon comes to understand how he has been used, when the real Mrs. Mulwray appears in his office with her lawyer, trying to …show more content…

Chinatown presents its complex story from Jake Gittes' point of view. That is, the audience experiences the events of the story as Jake does. Jake is in every scene and we are with him. We never know more than Jake knows. Like all detective stories, the meaning of Chinatown is only revealed in the end. Clues are only clues retrospectively. That is, only at the end do we see that certain details --objects, actions, places, bits of dialogue that appeared to be random and trival at the time--were actually filled with significance. They were clues, if only we could have understood them when we first experienced

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