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Part I of a Trilogy

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It’s impossible to look at a point in time without referencing other points that preceded or followed.  It’s impossible to look at one cultural touchstone without seeking others.  Everything is woven together; nothing exists in a vacuum.

In 1974 Chinatown came out.  The script has been called the greatest ever written, but the movie was not voted Best Picture in 1974.  Jack Nicholson has been noted as the greatest actor of his generation, but he didn’t win an Oscar for his performance in Chinatown.  Roman Polanski directed the film midway between the two great tragedies of his life, the murder of his wife, unborn child, and others in the Manson Murders 1969, and his own self banishment from the country to avoid prosecution for the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

As many tragic figures off the screen as on it, it would seem.  The film takes place in 1930s-era Los Angeles in the middle of a drought.  It follows the sordid lives of people of wealth and power as they ignore their own sins to focus on gaining even more power and wealth.  Even way too much of both is never enough, it seems.  The rarity of a common commodity, water, needed by everyone becomes the collateral for which fortunes are made and lives are lost.

Faye Dunaway drives a 1938 Packard Twelve Victoria in the film.  It would be the perfect metaphor for those who could afford the finest during the period.  The car sported a 424-cubic inch V-12 engine, the Twin Six designed by C.W. van Ranst.  A similar car was clocked at over 101 miles per hour, but Packard would only commit to a top speed “in excess of 85 miles per hour.”  Packard was as tight-lipped about its product as Faye Dunaway’s character was about her daughter.

Sotheby’s description says, “Most bodies emanated from LeBaron and the Murray Body Corporation, but while Edward Macauley headed Packard’s in-house styling department, along with Alex de Sakhnoffsky, Raymond Dietrich was the most influential figure. However by 1937 Dietrich had gone, and the custom bodywork was shared between Brunn and Rollston. The senior-series cars were updated with four-wheel hydraulic brakes and independent front suspension, in common with their junior siblings.”  Those details were all lost on Nicholson’s character, private investigator J. J. “Jake” Gittes, hired to confirm suspicions of infidelity.

Of course the infidelity involved quickly becomes just a sidestory, the real revelations being of a much more catastrophic nature, for Los Angeles and nearly every character involved.  Jake drives a more plebeian Ford, although about as top-end of a Ford as one could get in the mid-thirties, a 1935 Ford V8 DeLuxe Phaeton.  Still no match for a Packard Twelve.

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In 1974, when the film was made, these cars were less than 40 years old.  It was probably easier to see the ’35 Ford eventually destroyed.  You could argue that by 1974 the innocence of the moviegoing public had also been destroyed.  The Vietnam War, the Kennedy Assassination, and the unfolding of Watergate in the press on a daily basis made the public’s mind fertile for a movie involving graft, corruption, abuse, and powerful men doing whatever they wanted to whomever they choose.  

Even a public hardened by events beyond their control had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the heroine of the story had been raped by her father at the age of 15 and ended up giving birth to her own sister.  Perhaps that revelation, the undercurrent of every part of the system being corrupt, and the lack of any kind of a happy ending is what kept the film from winning more awards.  Maybe it’s the last line of the film, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” that sums it up.  The audience would do better to accept the way it’s always been rather than try to fix it or make it better.

Or, maybe the film that took home all the Academy awards fifty years ago found a better way to tell an equally disturbing story in 1974.

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