We almost lost me here everyone. My second spin of the wheel of IMDb’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time almost became my last. When 1974’s ‘Chinatown’ came up as number 24, I was extremely excited at first….. Until I realized I was thinking of ‘Big Trouble in Little China’. Talk about a let-down. Instead, I was about to watch a Roman Polanski film-noir set in the 1930’s during a drought in LA. The thought of a murder-mystery piqued my interest slightly, but film-noir really doesn’t speak to me. I did endeavor to persevere. All in the name of science.
Let’s start with saying that the first 30 minutes of this movie was what really put me to the test. A lot of speaking with dramatic “Private Eye” jargon, and truthfully, I get really confused really quickly. The ADHD in me really struggles to pay attention to films like this, especially when I’m not in a movie theater. Finally, once we got to the actual murder and the who-done-it I did end up getting invested in the story.
Jack Nicholson plays our lead character, private investigator J.J. Gittes, and he really is great. We follow his character the entire time as he attempts to piece together the mystery, and I actually felt like it was a shockingly understated performance from Nicholson. No “here’s Johnny” anywhere to be seen! He made for a reliable and relateable lead. Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the widow of the man who is murdered and a possible suspect. She definitely went more for the late-20’s sex-pot knows-too-much-or-maybe-nothing-at-all type. I would say she was perfectly fine in her role, which ended up being much less than I expected from the beginning.
Thinking about what made this film make it so high into the top 100, I really think that it’s just a tight script set in a really consumer-friendly and digestible genre. Everyone loves a murder mystery, and this really is a great one. There are a lot of layers that get revealed, and it makes for an interesting watch. I do feel like it drags, and I found myself checking to see how much was left as I was watching. I am happy to say that I watched this film though, and I think it does deserve to go down in history as a classic. It won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, and was nominated for Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Picture (which it lost to ‘The Godfather II’ so it had absolutely no chance). I would absolutely recommend this film to anyone looking to dip their toes into some older classic films.
Now, for where this film ranks on my personal list of 100 best films of all time, I am going to put it above ‘An American in Paris’. While ‘An American in Paris’ is definitely more my genre, I felt like I was watching a real film when I was watching ‘Chinatown’, and Jack Nicholson’s performance really makes it a tough one to beat.
- ‘Chinatown’
- ‘An American in Paris’
CinemAddikted 