Word: nicholson
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Chinatown, Roman Polanski's homage to 1930s detective movies, is one of the few really good films playing in Boston this week. Jack Nicholson is no Humphrey Bograt, but he does make an extremely convincing badass private eye. When Faye Dunaway is good, she's very good, and in this one she's excellent. The plot is fun but ultimately insignificant. Worth traveling out of Cambridge for, Chinatown is playing at Cleveland Circle...
...Nicholson is superb as a detective hired by a wife who's a phony, does his job well enough to break a front-page story, and finds himself in the middle of a great conspiracy involving the water supply of thirsty Los Angeles--rendered here with delicate eye and choice of color filters. Enter Faye Dunaway, older than you remember her, as the real wife of the man, soon murdered, her thick dark lipstick granting her what Joyce somewhere calls red mollusc lips...
...foreground. But the background is continually in use as well. Polanski often has the shot divided in half down the middle, and while a character talks in one half the other is left for out-of-focus entrances, clues, touches of atmosphere. Faye Dunaway comes in that way, behind Nicholson telling a dirty joke. And in the background, literally and figuratively, is where the thirties settings stay, unpretentious, accessory: a blurry old Coke sign reminded me how much more obtrusive the nostalgia bit is in some other recent films, say Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us with its repeated Coke...
...pace under superb control and frames the shots with a touch that is most deft for being so unarbitrary: Polanski cuts skillfully into shots through windows, mirrors, bamboo curtains, cameras, binoculors, but the only cut that seems personal, intrusive, cruel, is the one he applies in character to Nicholson, but he does that with finesse...
...Nicholson is a natural as the tough detective, aggravating lackeys with quick come-backs, putting the key questions, and he's just hateful enough to stay really elusive and unknown, in the best tradition committing himself only for the next clue, walking out on Dunaway in the middle of the night. Dunaway herself has never seemed fuller or more powerful. A sense of maturity controls her tension, carries off her partial duplicities. John Huston is also surprisingly good--and better directed, I'd guess--in the dirty old rich man's role...