Word: chinatown
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...aliens find their way to restaurant kitchens, lovers of Oriental cuisine can expect their eating expenses to skyrocket--and even achieve parity with the prices of a less-interesting European diet. Joyce Chen, who long ago began providing Chinese food to Cambridge students wary of a venture into Chinatown, is leading this drive to respectability and the higher prices that come with...
...CHINATOWN...
...during that time long ago that Chinatown, an exotic and cunning entertainment, takes place. It is very much molded, too, in the Chandler style, intricately written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski with a sort of edgy placidity that breaks into moments of sudden violence. Jack Nicholson, sporting a sort of drowsy panache, appears as a private investigator named J.J. Gittis, hired to tail the Los Angeles water commissioner, who is suspected by his wife of being unfaithful. But the commissioner is soon victim of a highly unlikely accident, dead of a fall into a reservoir drain...
Towne's script makes a nod to another Los Angeles mystery writer, Ross MacDonald, most markedly in its use of familial trauma in the plot solution. But it is to Chandler that the movie is very deeply indebted. No film has ever succeeded quite so well as Chinatown in conveying the ambience of Los Angeles before the war-sun-kissed, seedy and easy. The city was a central metaphor for Chandler, and it is brought alive here by Polanski and his collaborators, Production Designer Richard Sylbert and Costume Designer Anthea Sylbert. The film was photographed by John Alonzo...
Most of the Asiatic folk medicines sold in San Francisco's Chinatown are harmless. Sliced deer horn and powdered tiger penis, which believers in mystical medicine take to increase virility, are unlikely to hurt anything but the buyer's pocketbook. Neither are any of the 58 listed ingredients of another Chinatown favorite for aches and pains: ginseng rejuvenating pills, which are made in Hong Kong and contain such exotica as male mouse droppings, silkworm, rhinoceros horn, amber, turtle shell and myrrh. But this ancient Oriental panacea also contains an unlisted substance: the powerful Western painkiller phenylbutazone, a drug...