Polanski's Los Angeles is a parched landscape of cor- ruption just waiting to be washed clean by a flash flood (preferably down the proverbial L. A. River). Jack Nicholson is the private eye whose sleepy gaze unravels, in Chinese-box fashion, layers of private depravity behind a public waterworks scam involving gentleman-farmer John Huston and his skittish daughter Faye Dunaway. If Nicholson's J. J. Giddes is the Son of Sam (Spade) or even Philip (Marlowe), Dunaway's Mrs. Mulwray and her dad more likely crawled out of James M. Cain's moral gutter. But, with an extraordinary script by Robert Towne, Chinatown is a film in a class, if not a genre, of its own. Jerry Hiler wrote, for PFA's 1985 Celebration of CinemaScope: "A film about Los Angeles in the thirties by a Polish director looking through a 'Scope lens in 1974 seems an anachronistic admixture. But, on its visual terms alone, Chinatown (filmed in Panavision) displays one of the most stylistically cohesive uses of the 'Scope format to date. It might be seen as the artistic vindication of CinemaScope. The superb camera work and, more surprisingly, the editing-a feature which is considered incompatible with the wide screen-combine so powerfully that one wonders if CinemaScope died too soon."