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Chinatown (Special Collector's Edition) 
Actors : Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Hillerman, John Huston, Perry Lopez
Director : Roman Polanski
Studio : Paramount Home Video
by Paramount Home Video
Release Date : 2007-11-06
Publisher : Paramount Home Video
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 0097361224442
UPC : 097361224442
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 219 reviews)
List Price : $14.99
Our Price : $8.18
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Americancivilwar.com essential video |
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Roman Polanski's brooding film noir exposes the darkest side of the land of sunshine, the Los Angeles of the 1930s, where power is the only currency--and the only real thing worth buying. Jack Nicholson is J.J. Gittes, a private eye in the Chandler mold, who during a routine straying-spouse investigation finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a jigsaw puzzle of clues and corruption. The glamorous Evelyn Mulwray (a dazzling Faye Dunaway) and her titanic father, Noah Cross (John Huston), are at the black-hole center of this tale of treachery, incest, and political bribery. The crackling, hard-bitten script by Robert Towne won a well-deserved Oscar, and the muted color cinematography makes the goings-on seem both bleak and impossibly vibrant. Polanski himself has a brief, memorable cameo as the thug who tangles with Nicholson's nose. One of the greatest, most completely satisfying crime films of all time. --Anne Hurley |
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Description |
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Landmark movie in the film noir tradition, Roman Polanski's Chinatown stands as a true screen classic. Jack Nicholson is private eye Jake Gittes, living off the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-war Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite (Faye Dunaway) to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together for one, unforgettable night in...Chinatown. Co-starring film legend John Huston and featuring an Academy AwardŽ-winning script by Robert Towne, Chinatown captures a lost era in a masterfully woven movie that remains a timeless gem. |
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Great film-noir atmosphere |
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Great noir films must have a certain dark, brooding atmosphere and Chinatown has this atmosphere in spades. This film starts as a relatively simple detective story about a philandering husband but slowly the layers of the onion are peeled back and the web of intrigue becomes more complex and seedy. Ultimately, you can see that the story is headed for a train wreck, it is simply a question of how it will unfold. Jack Nicholson plays the shady detective who is digging for the truth about a murder and shady land dealings during a drought in 1930s Los Angeles. In the end, it is hard to feel very sympathetic for any of the characters, most are driven by lust or greed or demons that they cannot purge. There are literally hundreds of reviews of this film, there is no need for me to repeat plot summaries other than to say that I wholeheartedly support the most positive reviews. This film is really a throwback to the great noir era of the 40s. Jack Nicholson would have been great alongside Barbara Stanwyck and any of the other femme fatales of the noir era. This film is in fact better than many of the earlier noir films in some ways in that more complex (and offensive) plot lines (e.g. incest) can be explored to really make the characters miserable and pathetic. If you like any of the noir greats (like Double Indemnity), you'll love Chinatown. Highly recommended. |
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Chinatown |
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My favorite movie of all time. A great purchase. Wish it were on bluray. |
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Yes, Somewhat Overrated |
A good movie, but a great one? I think the Americancivilwar review is a bit heavy on the hype. This was a good movie, even a very good movie, but I often found it somewhat slow, and the ending was less than satisfying. Not what I'd call 5 star material (but maybe I'm using the wrong evaluation criteria - entertainment value counts for a lot with me.. and while there was definitely some, it didn't reach the 5 star mark in my book). Certainly the pace picked up quite a bit in the last 3rd of the movie - which left me all the more frustrated with that sudden dud ending. On the other hand, if Polanski's goal was to be true to noir genre, than perhaps he succeeded there (I wouldn't really know, not being an expert in noir). As for the quality of the dvd, the transfer on my disc was rich and colorful - the tone of the film was certainly something of an acheivement.
Polanski, Nicholson, Dunaway.. ingredients for something great, but go in with low expectations and you'll come away pleased. If you see it for the first time with all the gushing of the Americancivilwar review in mind, you're bound to be disappointed. |
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Truly Over Rated |
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I'm in the process of watching all of the movies on AFI's Top 100 list. This is one I hadn't seen yet and so far it is my least favorite. I just don't get it at all. Why this is on the list is beyond me. The movie was choppy, the acting was hokey, and the plot was weak. |
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A movie that starts off as one thing and changes to another mid-way |
"Chinatown" was recently included on the AFI's Top 10 Mysteries list, and as it was the only film on the list that I hadn't seen, and I liked 8 of the 9 films that I had seen (sorry, I just didn't like "The Third Man"), I thought it would be worth giving it a try. I am now glad that I have seen this film, considering it is so highly regarded, but to say that this is the second greatest mystery movie of all time, and a better movie than "Rear Window", "Laura" and "Blue Velvet" (three of my favourite movies), is giving it far more credit than it deserves.
"Chinatown" starts off as your standard private detective film. Private investigator Jake Gittens (Jack Nicholson) is hired by a woman, claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray, to find out if her husband is cheating on her. What seems to be routine divorce work becomes more complicated when the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) shows up and her husband is found murdered. Gittens investigates and discovers an illegal money-making plot (which I won't give the details of, in order to avoid spoilers) and then something far more sinister.
Although both Nicholson and Dunaway are excellent actors (although, I believe that both have made better films), this film is let down by what I consider to be a second-rate script (an opinion which I will, no doubt, be criticized for, since it won Best Screenplay). Here is why I do not like this script: firstly, the film is called "Chinatown", but none of the characters actually go to Chinatown until about five minutes before the end of the film (and because of this, the final lines of the film just don't seem justified); secondly, the villain barely appears, which makes the revelation of his guilt completely unsatisfactory; but my biggest criticism of the film is that, to me, it felt like the writer had started writing one film, a murder mystery about drought-ridden LA, but three-quarters of the way through, lost interest in that and decided to write a completely different film instead. This leads to the final act of the film feeling hurried and crowded. I also found the ending, in general, to be unsatisfactory, for reasons that will become apparent if you see the film.
The AFI did a pretty good job in compiling their Top 10 Mysteries list, but as far as I'm concerned, "Chinatown" is the joker in the pack. I highly recommend that all mystery lovers watch the movies on this list (the movies are, in order: "Vertigo", "Chinatown", "Rear Window", "Laura", "The Third Man", "The Maltese Falcon", "North by Northwest", "Blue Velvet", "Dial M for Murder" and "The Usual Suspects"), but perhaps save "Chinatown" until last. |
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