Chinatown
Director: Roman Polanski Run Time: 130 min. Format: 35mm Rating: R Release Year: 1974
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
Roman Polanski takes the real life California Water Wars as inspiration in his neo-noir masterpiece, Chinatown. At the center of it is Los Angeles, a city that originated as a desert therefore being a place where he who controla the water, controls the town. It’s precisely this ring of corruption that private investigator Jack Gittes (Jack Nicholson) uncovers when he’s on a not-so-typical adulterer case for a beautiful young wife named Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Polanski excels at making a familiar city like Los Angeles strange; in Chinatown it becomes extraordinarily mysterious and the site of very unexpected happenings.