From the BBC, June 21, 2024:
Now 50 years old, Chinatown is one of the all-time great crime films – and that's partly because of a potent story based on the real history of California's so-called "water wars".
"Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown…" is one of the most famous lines in film history. The dialogue closes a lynchpin of post-war US cinema: Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). The 1930s-set neo-noir, which turned 50 this week, is still a regular talking point in popular culture, for everything from its celebrated screenplay by Robert Towne (for which it won its sole Oscar) to its phenomenal score by Jerry Goldsmith, its astonishing lead performances by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, to the subsequent disgrace of its criminally convicted, fugitive director.
Polanski and Towne's story was part of a particular trend in crime cinema of the period. While Watergate-inflected thrillers like Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View (1972), and hyper-aggressive cop flicks like Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) and William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971), were all caught up in present day issues, a new alternative to gritty procedurals and paranoid political thrillers was becoming popular – namely the lavish period crime film.
Arguably peaking with Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), the movement was really kickstarted by the success of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and also resulted in the likes of Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) and Jacques Deray's Borsalino (1970), to name a few. Essentially, these films denied the nostalgic draw of the past to instead explore its dark underbelly – and like a number of them, Chinatown expressed this resistance by actually building on real history.
The real history lent itself to Chandler-esque noir plotting. The aqueduct project was a mystery to the public in its early stages, and money and power drove it – John WaltonThe film looked back to the dirty dealings behind Los Angeles's transformation into a major urban centre, taking inspiration from the original California "water wars" that erupted at the turn of the 20th Century. These occurred when the Los Angeles water department bought up a swathe of land in east California in order to divert water to sate its growing population, to the detriment of the rural community it was taking supply away from. What's more, Chinatown borrows some aspects of the life of civil engineer William Mulholland, the controversial figure who was the first superintendent of the Los Angeles water system and tasked with creating the aqueduct to ensure the city had sufficient water supply; all this aided the film's sense of authenticity to the point where its dark fictions have influenced the perception of the city's real history.
Chinatown begins with a quintessential film noir set-up. In 1930s Los Angeles, private detective JJ Gittes (Nicholson) is hired by a woman who goes by the name of Evelyn Mulwray to prove her husband's infidelity. Believing it's a simple case, he investigates the woman's husband, Hollis (Darrell Zwerling), obtaining photo proof of him meeting a woman. However, things get complicated when these pictures of Hollis and his apparent mistress are splashed in the newspaper, and it turns out that the woman who hired him was only pretending to be Evelyn. The real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) turns up at Gittes' office and threatens to sue him for the scandal.
A journalistic storyGittes learns that Hollis is a senior engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Evelyn's father is Noah Cross (Huston) – the former co-owner of the department with Hollis, who is determined for the city's latest dam scheme to go ahead. From there, he is drawn into a world of corruption, violence and murder. Hollis soon turns up dead in a water reserve, and Evelyn is hiding an even darker secret that may just explain the violence that comes Gittes's way as he searches for the woman who he first saw Hollis meet (at both Evelyn's and Noah's separate and competing requests).
When quizzed about his work in 2001, Towne suggested that he was initially drawn to journalism before screenwriting. "What I thought," he recalled, "was that I was going be a journalist. I've always thought screenwriting is very well served by knowledge of the world. And journalists do nothing so much as report stories… Their eye for telling detail is perfect for screenwriters."Towne took a somewhat journalistic approach to Chinatown, drawing detail from real life but running with it into fictional realms. The history that the film looked back to specifically concerned the issue of the clean water-supply of Los Angeles as it grew in size during the early 1900s, although the film's narrative translates this to the 1930s. Meanwhile where the real-life "water wars" took place over water diverted from Owens Valley, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, with an aqueduct built by Mulholland and team in 1913, the action in Chinatown concerns water in the San Fernando valley, an area much closer to LA, which was subsequently incorporated into the city limits.
But while it doesn't replicate the "water wars" exactly, the scheme at the centre of Chinatown still feels believable – and certainly expands on the exploitation. "The real history lent itself to Chandler-esque noir plotting," says Professor John Walton of UC Davis's Department of Sociology, who researched the real-life history of the "water wars" for his book Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture and Rebellion in California. "The aqueduct was a plan fashioned by a small group of wealthy promoters; the project was a mystery to the public in its early stages; money and power drove it; the 'little guy' was in the dark about his or her exploitation; intrigue enveloped city-valley dealings."
Chinatown reflects how powerful figures in Los Angeles's fight to control natural resources led to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, including farmers, being destroyed.
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