Chinatown

Writer Robert Towne’s 1930s Los Angeles is a parched landscape of corruption just waiting to be washed clean by a flood down the concrete Los Angeles River. Roman Polanski borrows Chinatown less for a setting than for a state of mind. Jack Nicholson is the private eye whose sleepy gaze unravels layers of private depravity behind a public waterworks scam involving gentleman farmer John Huston and his skittish daughter, Faye Dunaway. There are echoes of LA lore here, but Chinatown is pure fiction. “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” (Jerome Hiler).