Chinatown review essay

The woman is Faye Dunaway, looking pale and neurotic and beautiful, and justifying for us (if not always for him) J.J.’s trust in her. And then there are all the other characters, who revolve around a complicated scheme to float a bond issue and build a dam to steal water from Los Angeles, in a time of drought.

Certainly the wrong people are alive (and dead) at the end of the film, but I am not sure Polanski was wrong. He made the movie just five years after his wife, Sharon Tate, was one of the victims of the Manson gang, and can be excused for tilting toward despair.

Roman Polanski ’s “Chinatown” is not only a great entertainment, but something more, something I would have thought almost impossible: It’s a 1940s private-eye movie that doesn't depend on nostalgia or camp for its effect, but works because of the enduring strength of the genre itself.

For Polanski, born in 1933 in Paris, reared in Poland, “Chinatown” was intended as a fresh start in Hollywood. After several brilliant thrillers made in Europe in the early 1960s (“Knife in the Water,” “Repulsion”), he came to California and had an enormous success (“ Rosemary’s Baby ,” 1968).