QUAD Derby

The text of the introduction to the Chinatown screening at the QUAD on Wednesday, 18th August 2010.  Simon Kinnear is a Derby-based freelance film journalist with credits in Total Film, SFX and Doctor Who Magazine, and blogs about cinema at http://kinnema.blogspot.com/

Welcome to tonight's screening of Chinatown, the first in the QUAD's season, "You Don't Know Jack."  At first glance, it's an odd choice to kick-off a Jack Nicholson season.  After all, playing J.J. Gittes in Roman Polanski's 1974 film noir classic wasn't Nicholson's breakthrough role.  He already had three Oscar nominations to his name before Chinatown, nor is it one of the three films for which he would eventually win Oscars.

And yet...arguably, this is the film that truly made Nicholson a star.  Caught on the cusp between character actor and a Hollywood icon, it's the best possible introduction to one of cinema's most interesting and unusual actors.
Certainly, success was a long time coming for Nicholson.  After dabbling with a job in animation with Hanna-Barbera, he made his acting debut in 1958, playing the title role in the Roger Corman-produced The Cry Baby Killer.  It started a productive decade as a repertory player in Corman's B-movie factory, starring in a string of under-the-radar cheapies that are regarded today as cult classics: The Little Shop of Horrors, The St Valentine's Day Massacre and The Raven (the latter of which is playing at the QUAD this weekend).  In the everybody-pitches-in atmosphere of the Corman family, Nicholson also found himself writing LSD drama The Trip, before taking a similar credit on Head, his friend Bob Rafelson's movie vehicle for The Monkees.

The latter two films were amongst the first flowering of the 1960s counter-culture in Hollywood, and Nicholson's offbeat charm and anti-authoritarian air made him well placed to capitalise.  A generation of rogues and rebels was threatening to break through into the mainstream and, in 1969, Easy Rider (showing at the QUAD in early September) provided the battering ram that drove Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Nicholson to prominence.  In fact, Nicholson only bagged the supporting role of lawyer George Hanson only after original choice Rip Torn walked out, but the part - an alcoholic introduced to hallucinogens by Hopper and Fonda's hippy characters - fitted Nicholson to a T.  Alone amongst the film's actors, it was Nicholson who scored an Oscar nomination.  

His rise in the early 1970s was meteoric, gaining huge critical respect as Hollywood's most eloquent iconoclast.  Five Easy Pieces, whose 40th anniversary re-release is the centrepiece of the QUAD season, earned Nicholson his second Oscar nomination and his first as Best Actor, and he followed up with acclaimed leading performances in Carnal Knowledge, The King of Marvin Gardens and The Last Detail, which was Oscar nom #3.

By 1974, Nicholson was famous, well-liked but not - quite - a star.  With the debatable exception of Carnal Knowledge, he still lacked a true mainstream hit.  Enter J. J. Gittes and Chinatown.  Nicholson's friend Robert Towne, who had written The Last Detail with Nicholson in mind, now had another part tailor-made for the actor.  The story was inspired by a comment a policeman made to Towne about Los Angeles' Chinatown being a no-go area for the cops, a district left to operate by its own unconventional, lawless system.  Towne turned that anecdote into a metaphor for the dark underbelly of the city's history as a whole.  Loosely inspired by actual events, Towne turned the clock back to the 1930s, revisiting one of L.A.'s major milestones - the damming of the Owens Valley that enabled water to be piped into the city - but unpeeling layers of scandal and sleaze to show how progress is forged, and tainted, by corruption.

Towne's complex, nuanced script attracted a dream team of early-70s talent.  The producer was Robert Evans, the genius mogul who had made unlikely successes from Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and especially The Godfather - a film to which Towne had contributed uncredited script work.  In turn, Evans recognised that Chinatown would benefit from the same outsider's perspective that European emigrees and refugees brought to the classic film noirs of the 1940s, and hired Rosemary's Baby's Polish-born director Roman Polanski.  It was an astute choice for several reasons.  Polanski's family were killed during the Holocaust; his pregnant wife Sharon Tate had been butchered by the Manson family.  Alone amongst contemporary Hollywood directors, Polanski had the life experience not to shy away from the dark heart of the material.  In fact, it was Polanski - against Towne's and Evans' wishes - who dared to actually visit Chinatown (only a symbol in the original script) for the film's devastating climax.

Polanski recruited the best in the business: cinematographer John A. Alonzo captured the heat-haze of L.A., art director Richard Sylbert recreated a city on the make and his sister-in-law Anthea Sylbert designed enviably elegant costumes for an exceptional cast, notably Faye Dunaway as slippery femme fatale Evelyn Mulwray and legendary director John Huston as her courtly-but-sinister father Noah Cross.   But it's Nicholson's show.  J. J. Gittes is a part that requires both charisma and cockiness - the character is in every scene - and yet also a sense of vulnerability and self-doubt.  Nicholson provides an astounding moral anchor, a flawed man in his own way, but decent and incorruptible...which is a bad thing to be in Los Angeles.

The film was a massive critical and commercial success, an instant classic that actually outgrossed the equally revered The Godfather Part 2.  Yet while all four men (Polanski, Towne, Evans and Nicholson) won Golden Globes, on Oscar night it was Coppola's gangster epic that trounced Chinatown six to one, Towne emerging as the only winner from Chinatown's 11 nominations.  Nicholson, for his part, lost out in an obvious long-service vote for veteran Art Carney's performance in Harry and Tonto.  You can almost see the voters thinking, "Well, Jack's obviously got more Oscars coming in the future, so what's the hurry?"

The voters were spot on.  But the irony is that Nicholson was the only person to survive the curse of Chinatown, as his collaborators struggled to recapture the film's perfect storm of talent.  Evans, after leaving Paramount to go independent, crashed and burned with expensive flops Popeye and The Cotton Club.  Towne became a victim of Hollywood's shift from multi-faceted character drama to high-concept blockbusters; in recent years, his most high-profile credits have been on the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films.  Polanski, of course, was forced to flee America after the scandal of having underage sex... in Jack Nicholson's house, of all places.  The shadow of that indiscretion, an act that might have been scripted by Towne, looms so heavily over Polanski's subsequent career that even his belated Oscar for The Pianist cannot eclipse it.  As for the actors, Faye Dunaway won an Oscar for Network and then cancelled it out with a Razzie for her barking mad portrayal of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.  Meanwhile, John Huston stepped back behind the camera to variable effect; for every The Man Who Would Be King, there was also an Annie.

As for Jack?  Well, he didn't have to wait long for that Oscar. The year after Chinatown he made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and there was no mistaking that here was a bona-fide, 24-carat movie star.  Since then, he's never looked back, blowing away some of the best actors in the business in The Shining, The Witches of Eastwick, Batman and A Few Good Men, not to mention Oscars #2 and #3 for Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets - the latter being the final film showing in the QUAD season.

Arguably, stardom has hindered Jack's true greatness, and in retrospect Chinatown is as much the zenith of his career as any of the other talents who worked on the film.  Certainly, when Nicholson agreed to reprise the role of Gittes in Towne's 1990 sequel The Two Jakes, he was unable to recapture the same magic.  Hollywood - and its audience - had moved too far from the dark, foreboding atmosphere of Chinatown for the sequel to succeed.  Then again, perhaps Nicholson himself had lost the hunger and the taste to make great films regardless of whether anybody would see them, the ambition that drove the extraordinary run of performances that led to Chinatown.