Chinatown at 50: Hollywood’s dark pinnacle

The neo-noir classic Chinatown was released 50 years ago. Despite the controversy surrounding its disgraced director, Roman Polanski, its complex themes and impeccable technical craftsmanship retain all of their impact today. The film is a product of a brief renaissance in 1960s-70s Hollywood, an era that hints at what can be achieved when artists are allowed to freely pursue their ambitions. This period also highlights the contradictions imposed on art by a society enslaved by the market, and poisoned by exploitation.

“They stole the water? And this is how we have Los Angeles? A crime?” – John A Alonzo, Chinatown’s Cinematographer

Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you're worth. More than 10 million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.

The legendary screenwriter and director Robert Towne died on 3 July 2024. His original screenplay for Chinatown is often described as the greatest of all time. In 2010, the Guardian’s film critics named the 1974 classic the greatest film of all time. Chinatown is a devastating murder mystery inspired by the real story of corruption and conspiracy behind the building of Los Angeles. By focusing on a specific case of capitalist scheming, in all its sordid, perverted, personal details, it stands as a brilliant allegory of the alienation and injustice resulting from capitalism in general.

It is a masterpiece of filmmaking in every respect – the plot, cinematography, costumes, locations, acting, and soundtrack, are all brilliant, down to the tiniest detail. 

Despite being exactly 50 years old, it feels extremely modern. The close-up camerawork, which gives the film its realistic and intense atmosphere, precedes the ‘revolution’ in close-shot ‘shakeycam’ cinematography from the likes of the Bourne films by three decades. The narrative is every bit as dark and shocking as acclaimed, modern detective fare like The Wire. 

This highly sophisticated picture marked a high watermark for Hollywood filmmaking, which suffered a marked decline starting almost immediately after its release, thanks ironically to the very same cynical capitalist forces that Chinatown exposes.

[The following contains plot details and minor spoilers.]

Neo-noir

On the surface, Chinatown is a classic ‘noir’ detective story in the vein of Humphrey Bogart vehicles like The Maltese Falcon. It fulfils all the genre’s tropes: it is set in LA in the 1930s, it features a private detective in a sharp suit who goes up against a ‘femme fatale’ living in a grand villa, and it oozes style. 

Towne used the tropes of LA noir to tackle what the classic stories had only hinted at / Image: Sarah Morris, Wikimedia Commons

However, while some classic noir films from Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age (spanning the late 1920s to 1960) are fairly dark and complex in their themes even by modern standards, they have their limits. 

The fact that, in these stories, crimes are being investigated not by the police but by a private detective, hints at the idea of corruption and dark forces at work. But in the end, the culprit typically turns out to be a selfish, conniving woman who must be neutralised by the hero detective, usually after he has seduced/been seduced by her. Greater conspiracies are seldom at work.

Towne turned all this upside down. He used the tropes of LA noir to tackle what the classic stories had only hinted at, inventing the ‘neo-noir’ subgenre in the process. He consciously gave the genre more depth and a greater emphasis on realism, with more naturalistic acting and ‘believable’ scenarios than the elaborate criminal plots typical of early noir. Most importantly, while the story is set in motion by murder, this crime is only one facet of a wider web of systemic evil. 

Towne wrote to himself when writing the story that: “my interest is in the kinds of crimes that society punishes – [the mother] will be punished, even crooked cops, but the business community will enjoy freedom from persecution” (quoted in Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, p95). 

Unlike in ‘classic’ noir, where the criminals always get their comeuppance and the flawed-but-heroic detective walks victoriously into the sunset, the true villain of Chinatown is not one individual but an entire rotten social order, that is not so easily defeated.

Mystery

The film begins with a seemingly mundane case for our private detective, Jakes Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson. A rich woman, Evelyn Mulwray, wants to hire him to find out if her husband, Hollis Mulwray, is having an affair, as she suspects. Gittes takes on the case – although not before trying to encourage the woman to give it up and pretend not to notice the affair, for her own wellbeing. 

But Gittes, and the audience, have been deceived. A few scenes later, after photographs taken by Gittes, apparently showing Hollis in the company of his mistress, receive scandalous press coverage, the detective returns to his office to find an aloof, mysterious-looking woman waiting for him. 

She introduces herself as the real Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway), and asks Gittes why he is investigating her husband. The woman who originally approached him was an imposter, and the real Evelyn threatens to sue. Gittes has been set up, made a fool of. He, and the audience, are sucked into the mystery.

It soon becomes clear that something much bigger, more sinister and political is at work. Mulwray is a powerful man – the head of ‘Water and Power’ – a big deal in a city suffering from a drought, which the colour palette of the film is designed to emphasise. There are no greens, everything is in tones of yellow. Clouds are never shown in the sky. The cinematographer also deliberately shot scenes looking uphill as much as possible, so as to make Gittes’ investigation seem like even more of a struggle in a dry and unforgiving desert city.

Early on, Gittes’ investigation of this mysterious husband takes him to the council chambers, where Mulwray is debating a proposed dam for a reservoir that would help with the drought, objecting to its construction on safety grounds. As he is making his case, Mulwray is interrupted by a flock of sheep, of all things. Their irate shepherd, who has barged into the proceedings, yells at Mulwray:

“You steal the water from the valley, ruin the grazing, starve my livestock. Who’s paying you to do that, Mr Mulwray? That’s what I want to know!”

Later, Mulwray turns up dead in a reservoir, after which Gittes is hired by his widow to investigate his murder. Gittes, like all private detectives, starts off as cynical and ‘hard boiled’. He thinks himself a man of the world, armed with all the clever tricks he needs to uncover the ugly truth. But this case takes him far beyond the world of petty crime and violence that he is used to, and into the very heart of power in LA. His, and the audience’s, journey is one of discovery, of looking behind the curtain of capitalist society to the bitter reality beneath.

While it is not the purpose of this article to summarise the complex, twisting plot of Chinatown (which readers are encouraged to experience for themselves), suffice it to say that it enters very bleak territory. In another subversion, Evelyn is set up as another conniving noir femme fatale, but she is in fact a woman who has been through unspeakable trauma, and is now in great danger, desperately trying to protect herself and those she loves.

When he is eventually revealed, the main villain, Noah Cross, Mulwray’s business partner, is brilliantly portrayed by the legendary John Huston as a man so rich and established, he needs make no effort to appear humble, respectful or honest in any way. Such things are simply beneath him, as he routinely seeks to remind people.

He exudes arrogance and cynicism. He deliberately mispronounces Gittes’ name. He makes no real effort to cover up his criminality, because he thinks he can get away with it. As he says, "Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

Karl Marx once wrote that capitalists become the living embodiment of capital, which seeks to rapaciously propagate itself in pursuit of ever-greater profits. This is certainly true of Cross. His desire to constantly expand his empire is insatiable. His ultimate objective is not to merely own vast riches, but (as he famously puts it) to possess “the future” itself.

The forces of the state (the police) are at his beck-and-call, prepared to kill at his command. His treatment of his associates, subordinates and (most disturbingly) his own family are merely a reflection of his obsession with dominance and control. He is the ultimate exploiter, and a figurehead for a system built on exploitation, which Gittes’ is ultimately powerless to resist.

Los Angeles: a city of alienation

Towne decided to write a film about LA’s history after the shock of the Manson Family murders in the late 1960s. He felt that the city had completely lost its original character after decades of breakneck development, and the Manson murders had revealed the loneliness and alienation that growth had produced.

According to author and environmentalist Richard G. Lillard, “so rapid is the increase in land values, that the life of many structures [in LA] is from fifteen to thirty years… the southern California cities gave way to the motor vehicle. Men tore down buildings to make way for parking lots or service stations” (Eden in Jeopardy).

This rapid growth, in which old neighbourhoods and buildings were erased, meant that the city was particularly vulnerable to corruption associated with infrastructure and construction projects. It had always been a boom town, but its population was never settled and consolidated. In 1938 (around the time Chinatown is set), the average apartment tenancy was just six weeks. It was a transient city, and its ever-newer population lived in detached houses and travelled only in cars. To this day, there is no real city centre, no meeting place. 

The population was therefore very lonely, there were few if any real communities. Not only did it have a high crime rate, but its crimes had a reputation for strangeness and extremity, as encapsulated in the Manson murders. This is why LA is the natural home of the noir genre, with all its cynicism, lonely, desperate people, and absence of easy answers.

The real scandal

As Towne started reading about the old LA, before all this car-driven development, he discovered the history of the ‘Water Wars’, and was astonished that he, and others, knew nothing of this scandal at the heart of the building of his city.

Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland, essentially conned both the residents of Los Angeles, and the farmers of Owens Valley / Image: public domain

In the early 20th Century, Los Angeles was a tiny fraction of the size it was in Towne’s day. Its further development was hindered by the fact that it was essentially located in a desert. Towne learnt that Southern California is naturally barren, and everything had to be imported – energy, soil, plants, and indeed water. Although in his day the LA valley hosted around half of California’s population, it naturally contained only 0.06 percent of its water flow.

How then did it become the notoriously sprawling metropolis we know today? A pair of engineering executives, Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland, essentially conned both the residents of then small Los Angeles in the first decade of the 20th Century, and the farmers of Owens Valley to the north east of the town. They used their connections with powerful people in the federal and California governments to secretly obtain vast amounts of water rights so they could drain Owens Lake by diverting its water to Los Angeles. By 1924, the lake was totally dry. 

As part of their campaign to win support and funding for their grand plans to transform LA, they made sure lots of LA’s then-water supply was dumped into sewers, creating the impression of a drought. They had their friends in the media publish scare stories about the drought and the need to bring more water to the town.

On top of this, they and their associates secretly bought up vast amounts of land in the San Fernando valley, then just outside the city, knowing that the water would pass through and irrigate this land as well. They managed to get the valley annexed into the city, so that it would be legal to irrigate this land with water meant for the city. They then sold this land they had bought up so cheaply back to the city at a tidy profit, since now being irrigated, it was far more valuable.

All of this is depicted in the film, with this or that alteration, and with fictitious personalities instead of the real ones. Chinatown is the story of how cities are really built under capitalism, and how, as Towne said, “the business community will enjoy freedom from persecution”. 

Under capitalism, our very homes, the places we grow up in and make us who we are, are designed, built and controlled by corrupt millionaires and billionaires whose names we don’t even know. Cities and towns are not only built this way, they also die in the same way: capitalists shut down workplaces without a second thought, and a way of life fades away.

This theme of conspiracy by powerful capitalists, and the hoodwinking of a confused and thirsty population, is also the reason for the film’s name. It is not set in Chinatown, nor is the plot about its community. Instead, “Chinatown is a condition. The condition is the terrible awareness of one's helplessness, what Towne had always called the ‘futility of good intentions’.” (Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, p271). 

Towne got this idea from a former cop who had told him that, when he was stationed in Chinatown, his superiors had told him to ‘do as little as possible’, because the language barrier meant the police never understood what was really going on and only made matters worse.

Throughout the film, there is a theme of the inescapable power of stifling bureaucracy. Gittes is shown as incredibly resourceful, brave and intelligent, but he simply cannot contend with this overwhelming bureaucratic indifference. While this might not be the filmmakers’ conscious  intention, this reflects the impotence of the petty-bourgeoisie and their ‘heroic’ attempts to solve the world’s problems on an individual basis. 

As Gittes’ partner solemnly says as he leads the defeated detective away from the site of the film’s finale: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” The meaning of this iconic line is: give up, let go – you have no power here. None of us do. 

Bureaucratic indifference is the complement to Gittes’ isolated struggle, and is precisely what allows the vast capitalist scandal and injustice to take place. In this respect, the film is not only about LA’s Water Wars, but also Watergate, Vietnam, racial segregation and all the other injustices and scandals of the era in which it was written.

The height of New Hollywood

The grounded grittiness and anti-capitalist message of Chinatown have withstood the test of time brilliantly. These attributes are very much in the style of the ‘New Hollywood’ period, which climaxed in the mid-1970s. New Hollywood was one of those brief moments in the history of art in which a few factors came together to enable genuine creativity to flourish, despite market pressures.

After the war, Hollywood entered a serious financial crisis. In 1948, an antitrust court case against Paramount saw the end of so-called ‘vertical integration’, where the big film studio conglomerates controlled both the production and distribution side of the industry by owning chains of theatres. This marked the end of the old Studio System, where the major Hollywood studios churned out hundreds of films a year following an almost factory-style production model.

Meanwhile, the rise of television (which the film studios unsuccessfully attempted to monopolise) and the explosion of pop music gave consumers many other things to spend their disposable income on, creating new competition with the film industry. 

Costly new technologies like 3D and super-widescreen ‘cinemascope’ failed to lure audiences back in big numbers, and a series of flops throughout the 1950s gnawed into the profits of the industry. As a result, the major film studios were desperate, and had to apply austerity measures. In the late 1960s, Paramount hired an up-and-coming producer called Robert Evans, because he had ideas for making cheaper, more experimental films that would appeal to the young generation, and thus make more money.

Evans took inspiration (and drew talent) from B-movies: inexpensive ‘schlock films’ that appealed to audiences with higher degrees of bloodshed and nudity than higher-budget ‘A-movies’, and were heavily marketed with so-called ‘exploitation’ campaigns, teasing this titillating content. Many of the actors and filmmakers who defined New Hollywood (including Jack Nicholson) got their start in B-movies. Francis Ford Coppola spent his early career making softcore pornography.

The New Hollywood was also inspired by the increasing academic interest in film, with filmmaker-critics central to experimental European cinema, like François Truffaut, writing their ideas about the artform in journals like Cahiers du cinéma. Many New Hollywood directors were recent film school graduates (or dropouts) who ‘borrowed’ a lot of their ideas from the French and Italian New Waves of cinema. 

Truffaut was also a key exponent of the so-called auteur theory of filmmaking, arguing that the best cinema is the product of a singular vision of an individual artist. This contrasted with the Old Studio model, where (barring a few exceptions, like Alfred Hitchcock) directors were basically one hired hand amongst many technicians working on a film. 

Charles Bludhorn, the owner who appointed Robert Evans Paramount’s head of production, was very open about their more laissez-faire approach / Image: public domain

‘Auteurism’ suited the interests of the executives at Paramount and Warner Bros at the time, who decided to take a hands-off approach. They would invest less money in films, but they would also allow young artists, who became known as the ‘Movie Brats’, much more freedom to make the films they wanted. The idea was they would thereby get better films for less money. 

The studios’ other consideration was that smaller, more mobile productions conveniently made it easier for them to circumvent the powerful Hollywood unions, hiring cheaper, non-union crews for shoots in so-called ‘right-to-work’ states, or over the Mexican border. The executives justified this by flattering the egos of New Hollywood auteurs, whose artistic vision they said was above the stultifying constraints of union pay rates and demands around working conditions.

Charles Bludhorn, the owner who appointed Evans Paramount’s head of production, was very open about this more laissez-faire approach. He said that “when [our directors] don't feel like marionettes pushed around by big studios, they become live… They really work like slaves for themselves” [our emphasis]. 

Peter Bart, another Paramount producer at the time, described the freedom this created: “the minute we moved, everything changed. We lost all the committees, and it came down to a tiny group of us. We were all working faster, more closely together… all of a sudden good projects began to come to us.” (both quoted in Wasson, p158)

This low-cost, high-ego method of filmmaking made New Hollywood productions notoriously exploitative and often shambolic. However, the new freedom afforded to directors led to one of, if not the, greatest periods in filmmaking history. 

In a few short years, Paramount alone produced Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather Parts I and II, The Conversation, Paper Moon, and of course Chinatown. Seminal films made at other studios around the same time include Taxi Driver, Easy Rider, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, The Graduate, Mean Streets, Deliverance, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Midnight Cowboy. 

Most of these films also did very well at the box office, especially considering their modest budgets. Such a concentration of classics had never been seen before, nor has it been seen since.

Blockbusters and the end of the New Hollywood

The New Hollywood was a brief opening for creativity made possible by the chaos and bankruptcy of the major studios, and the general atmosphere of cultural innovation and change in the post-war period. It was not planned, but an empirical response to market pressures, and it rapidly accumulated contradictions.

By the mid-1970s (in fact, pretty much immediately after Chinatown’s release) New Hollywood’s time was already coming to an end. The studio executives were increasingly uncomfortable about risking their cash on the creative whims of auteur directors. They were looking for an even-more reliable investment.

The New Hollywood always contained the seeds of its undoing. As noted, despite its ‘high art’ experimental side, it had always taken a certain amount of inspiration from B-movies: both in terms of content, and marketing methods. By the mid-1970s, cinemas had been monopolised by a few big companies, making it easier for studios to negotiate block bookings and release big films on huge numbers of screens simultaneously. 

Universal’s Jaws, which came out exactly a year to the day after Chinatown in 1975, released in over 450 screens, while Chinatown was released initially on only three screens – not unusual at the time. Jaws’ director, Steven Spielberg, was himself a ‘Movie Brat’ who had previously made a name for himself with the acclaimed, low-budget chase/horror movie, Duel. The plot of Jaws (basically a creature feature) and its marketing (which teased both violence and nudity), were in the classic B-movie tradition, but with the weight of a big studio behind it. 

The cost of booking out so many cinemas before the film had even received reviews (or positive word of mouth) was very high. This would have been too much of a risk for cash-strapped studios in the late 1960, when New Hollywood was born. By the mid-1970s, however, balance sheets had recovered – thanks precisely to the success of films like Chinatown and The Godfather.

On top of that, the executives realised that the television didn’t have to be their competition – with enough money, it could be their ally. Jaws’ ambitious release was backed up by a huge advertising campaign on television. The combination of this campaign and the film’s wide availability turned it into a summer sensation, giving rise to the ‘blockbuster’, so called because people were queuing around the block for tickets. The even-greater smash hit of Star Wars in 1977 sealed the deal: Hollywood had found its new formula.

The plot of Jaws and its marketing, were in the classic B-movie tradition, but with the weight of a big studio behind it / Image: fair use

This coincided with a number of chaotic, so-called ‘runaway’ New Hollywood productions, which were more expensive and were released late. This, the studio executives blamed on giving temperamental artists a free reign. Some notorious examples, such as Apocalypse Now, still received acclaim and performed well at the box office; while others, like Heaven’s Gate, were catastrophic failures. But when you consider that Apocalypse Now made $104 million on a $31 million budget, whereas Jaws made a massive $476 million on just a $9 million budget, it is clear why the studios felt it was time to shift gear.

This all had artistic consequences. As historian Sam Wasson points out: “The tail would wag the dog. As promotional costs ascended, budgets increased, decreasing the funds once available for script development and preproduction – components ‘fundamental’... to the aesthetic mastery of Chinatown.” (p282).

After Chinatown, Evans left as head of production at Paramount. The studio had noted Universal’s success with Jaws, and the blockbuster mentality took over. Michael Eisner became Paramount’s president in 1976. In 1981, he circulated this very telling memo within the company: 

“We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement. We must always make entertaining movies, and, if we make entertaining movies, at times, we will reliably make history, art, a statement or all three.”

Despite the platitudes about the ‘importance’ of ‘at times’ making ‘art’, the spirit of monopoly capitalism’s crushing domination of creativity is clear. Making movies is simply an investment like any other. And should a formula be hit upon that allows money to be made from movies all the more reliably, without the complication of it having to be art or a ‘statement’, the likes of Eisner could be counted on to adopt that formula.

Stagnation

New Hollywood and Chinatown therefore represent a sort of microcosm of American capitalism’s cultural evolution after the war. There was a brief period of creative flourishing in the new political and economic situation, before the cultural forms created were monopolised and congealed into marketable clichés.

As Thom Mount, head of production at Universal, said in 1978: 

“The sixties are relevant to me in the kinds of business ethics one exercises and in the choice of films to make. Yes, I’m in conflict about working inside a corporate structure, but what we learned in the sixties is that trying to build an alternative structure outside the system—given the power of the system—is never going to work.”

The last part of this statement resonates strongly with the central message of Chinatown.

The reason there was a period of particularly good filmmaking in the late 1960s and 1970s is down to many factors coinciding for a brief period of around 10 years. It was also far from perfect. The sheltering of the great auteur Polanski by the industry is indicative of the negative side of the egoism, exploitation and impunity that defined filmmaking practices in the era, as it does to this day. 

Today, Hollywood is in a creative nadir / Image: Michael E. Arth, Wikimedia Commons

There is no direct and automatic relationship between art and the wider developments in society and the mode of production, but there is nevertheless a relationship. Today, Hollywood is in a creative nadir: spitting out a seemingly endless procession of sequels, prequels, reboots and increasingly formulaic superhero movies. We can see clearly that the general context of commercialisation of life at the hands of enormous monopolies has served to subordinate artistic creativity to tried and tested formulas.

Moreover, according to the Economist, today “Hollywood seems to be growing more timid… trying not to offend important foreign markets”. As an example it gives the new film The Dissident, about the killing of Jamal Kashoggi by Saudi Arabia: 

“No big streamer picked up The Dissident… Bryan Fogel, its Oscar-winning director, described streamers’ calculus as: ‘It’s better to keep our doors open to Saudi business and Saudi money than it is to… anger the kingdom.’ 

The same article points out that Apple “parted ways with Jon Stewart, a comedian, who said the break-up was caused by the firm’s discomfort with his coverage on his Apple TV+ series of subjects such as excessive corporate profits in America.” (Economist, June 29th 2024).

50 years after its release, it is hard to watch Chinatown and not think that filmmaking has largely regressed from this high watermark. On the other hand, as communists, we should recognise that the successes of New Hollywood are largely owed to the removal of interference from the money men, so that the writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, costumer designers and composers could be free to make great art.

The fact that it burned out so quickly was a product of this ‘freedom’ being afforded within the constraints of the market. When this kind of creative liberty is combined with the freedom of humanity from the iron logic of the bosses’ profit system, so that all humanity has the freedom and resources to explore its creative potential, then this kind of cultural flowering, that blossomed and withered in a few short years, will return on an even-higher level. 

That is the future that a communist society promises: the removal of the crushing weight of the market from art so that it may be free, and all the better for it.