Stockholm Film Festival

Los Angeles in the 1930s. A city of enormous expansion. Convulsive struggle for power and land. Political corruption. Dirty business. A private eye, specialising in shabby divorces, stumbles into a considerably more ruthless world. The murder of the man he has been assigned to follow. An attractive and mysteriously elusive woman. There are no doubts about what Polanski and the to be Oscar-awarded scriptwriter Robert Townes modelled the story on: ''a traditional detective story in a new, modern form'', according to the director himself. And of Jack Nicholson's J.J. Gittes: ''a realistic offspring of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe''. One of Polanski's demands was that John Huston would play Noah Cross, the evil genius of the story, as if to further emphasise the mark of respect towards film noir's great originals. Huston directed the legendary Dashiell Hammett film The Maltese Falcon. For the first time Polanski worked with a finished manuscript, written by someone else. Before that he had always been writing by himself or in co-operation with the scriptwriter. But Chinatown was also worked over. When filming started the ending was not yet written down on paper. Even this very controlled and formulaic genre would not just get an ending with his distinctive style. The precise dialogue remained intact, but out of the late afternoon's suggestive shadows he brought all the latent physical threat and sexual tension which was buried in the exciting and complex main story, in focus is the voyeur Gittes, who relentlessly is drawn towards the forbidden truth. And the subversive ending refused even more than any previous film noir to reinstate a comforting social order. 

Medverkande

Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

Producent

Robert Evans

Manus

Robert Towne

Foto

John A. Alonzo

Musik

Jerry Goldsmith

Talat språk

English

 

Andra filmer från sektionen Tribute

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