Some of film history’s most memorable directors created
films that were obviously autobiographical—for example, Woody Allen’s Annie
Hall (1977), François
Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows (1959), and
Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963). The
heroes in these films often seem to be simply better-looking versions
of the director (with the exception of Woody Allen, who plays himself). Chinatown, released
in 1974 but set in 1937 Los
Angeles and starring Jack Nicholson as a hapless private investigator
battling real estate crooks, doesn’t seem at first glance to fit
into this category. Director Roman Polanski didn’t come to L.A.
until 1968, never worked as an investigator,
and hardly resembles the brash, all-American Nicholson. Nonetheless, Chinatown does
draw heavily on Polanski’s life and experiences. Though the main
character, Nicholson’s Jake Gittes, is not a stand-in for Polanksi,
the director’s biography is fragmented and refracted onto many separate
elements and characters in the film, which both recalls his life’s
tragedies and foreshadows the scandals that would subsequently befall
him.
Polanski was born in Paris on August 18, 1933,
to a Polish father and Russian mother, both Jewish. Some of his
first memories, however, would be of Krakow, where the family moved
three years after his birth to escape rising anti-Semitism in France.
Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and
when Polanski was seven, he witnessed the construction of a wall
marking his neighborhood as a Jewish ghetto. His parents were soon
sent to concentration camps. Polanski escaped the camps by hiding
with a local Catholic family his father had bribed, but he had to
manage largely on his own, cowering in barns and, on at least one
occasion, dodging the bullets of German soldiers. After the war,
Polanski reunited with his father, but his mother had perished in
a Nazi gas chamber.
Polanski entered art school in Krakow when he was around
seventeen years old, spending his free time with acting groups and
in movie theaters, which screened primarily German films. In 1954, the
elite state film school in Lodz welcomed Polanski as one of only six
accepted students. After graduating in 1959, Polanski made several short films, garnering only lukewarm critical
response. In 1962, however, his first feature-length
film, Nóz w wodzie, was well received and even
nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film after its
American release (as Knife in the Water) a year later.
Eager to take the international stage, Polanski left Poland for England,
where he directed three modest successes: Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-Sac (1966),
and Fearless Vampire Killers (1967),
the last of which starred American actress Sharon Tate, who soon became
his wife. The couple settled in Los Angeles, where Paramount producer
Robert Evans invited Polanski to direct Rosemary’s Baby (1968),
based on the novel by Ira Levin. The occult thriller’s huge popularity
secured Polanski’s professional reputation, showcasing his compositional
perfectionism, his ability to sustain a suspenseful and gripping
narrative, and his strikingly bold artistic flair.
The triumph of Rosemary’s Baby, however,
did not last long. On August 9, 1969,
cult leader Charles Manson’s “family” attacked the Polanskis’ Beverly
Hills home, murdering a pregnant Sharon Tate and her four guests.
Polanski, who had been abroad the evening of the murders, was devastated.
Harassed by the relentless American media, he retreated to Europe
to make Macbeth (1971). That
film’s extreme violence reflected aspects of the Manson slayings.
After mistakenly trying his hand at comedy with the little known
and unsuccessful What? (1972),
Polanski reluctantly agreed to return to the United States to work
with his old friend, producer Robert Evans, on Chinatown.
Though it was Robert Towne’s masterful screenplay that had lured
him back to the States, Polanski made many revisions to it. While
Towne fought in favor of an optimistic film, Polanski’s haunted
and pessimistic vision prevailed, marking the picture with a devastating
flourish that signified the hopelessness of a world gone rotten.
Chinatown’s dark theme is one of the
elements that places it in the category of neo-noir, the second
generation of the genre known as film noir. Though the precise history
of film noir is difficult to define (the term was coined in the
journal Cahiers du Cinéma by Nino Frank in 1946),
this genre evolved through a combination of German expressionistic
drama (such as F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu),
American gangster film (Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 Little
Caesar), and popular British mystery novels (by Dorothy
Sayers, H. C. Bailey, Agatha Christie, and the like). Several common
features characterized film noir pictures, which were popular in
the United States during the 1940s and early 1950s:
the presence of a beautiful but dangerous woman (known as the femme
fatale), gritty and generally urban settings, compositional
tension (highly contrasting light and dark colors or oblique camera
angles, for example), and themes of moral ambiguity and alienation.
To prepare for the making of Chinatown, Polanski
studied John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941),
which is accepted as the first full embodiment of film noir. (Huston
himself plays Noah Cross, Chinatown’s most despicable
villain). Polanski also read Raymond Chandler’s mystery novels, several
of which had been made into film noir classics, such as Murder,
My Sweet (1944; originally titled Farewell,
My Lovely) and The Big Sleep (1946).
Many scholars insist that film noir is intrinsically
linked to World War II and the difficult years of postwar reconstruction
(several champion directors of film noir, such as Fritz Lang and
Billy Wilder, fled Nazi-occupied territories for Hollywood), and
thus Polanski’s war-torn history suits him especially well for the
genre. Chinatown, however, is a neo-noir
film, and its departures from classic noir elements help to define
the newer genre. Most obviously, Polanski shot Chinatown with
color film, and though his colors do appear especially vivid (Katherine
Cross’s bright, spotless dress and Evelyn Mulwray’s rich, deep eyes,
for example), color film precludes the contrast intensity that black
and white film offers. In addition, Evelyn Mulwray is emphatically
not a femme fatale like the heartless Phyllis Dietrichson of Double
Indemnity (1944) or the snakelike
Kathie Moffat of Out of the Past (1947).
Though Jake mistakes her for her husband’s killer at first, Mrs.
Mulwray eventually emerges as the story’s most tragic victim. Chinatown also
exemplifies the neo-noir theme of big-money corruption. Though this
theme is also present in classic noir, Chinatown and
its neo-noir progeny (such as 1997’s L.A.
Confidential) emphasize malignant commercialism and obsession
with money to a far greater extent than did their predecessors.
Chinatown was a box office sensation,
and after its nomination for eleven Oscars in 1975,
Polanski was a darling of the critics. But only two years later,
Polanski was charged with the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old
girl, throwing his name into American tabloids once again and connecting
him in the public mind with Chinatown’s child-molesting
villain Noah Cross. Nevertheless, Polanski continued directing,
having fled to France to avoid standing trial. He was nominated
for a Best Director Oscar in 1980 for Tess and
won his first Best Director Oscar in 2003 for The
Pianist, which he could not accept in person because he
is still a fugitive. Polanski now lives in France with his wife,
French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children.
