I recently rewatched Chinatown and The Godfather, both obviously stalwarts of American Cinema, and what I would call “Hollywood cinema” of a certain era. Of course the term, Hollywood, has certainly morphed its definition during different periods–I guess that’s what makes Hollywood, Hollywood. I was struck at just how good these films are and how there is a certain craft to the filmmaking that offers so much impact with its grace and simplicity. They both also benefit from perfect Hollywood scripts and iconic actors that transcend the screen and almost become new words in film language. So this little website post isn’t meant as a deep dive but rather, a wow, these films are so cool…and a film craft that I admire so much. Really, the impetus was just one shot in particular in Chinatown and another in The Godfather.
Chinatown was always a struggle for me. I’m sure I’ve watched it at least 15 times over the years and I never could quite “get it.” There was always something dense about the interaction of story and plot, and it had the Citizen Kane effect on me (or almost any Orson Wells film for that matter); the delicate balance between information and emotion at times falling short. Or put another way, these films suffer from a weight of cinematic density. What I mean is, that while the language makes sense, it becomes too much to process (given an assumed pace of reading the material–the pace at which one reads or the pace at which the film unfolds).
I’m not so sure that, to a degree, this still isn’t the case with Chinatown; there are elements that do require real hard attention-paying just to “get” the story. But for some reason, this time, I was able to process “all” the information. Maybe I was just super focused?
I need to go back to Citizen Kane for this idea of cinematic density, because I’ve always found this film to be so intense that it was almost impenetrable. I mean, I could kind of go along with everyone on planet cinema defining this as a the greatest film of all time (though I can probably never discern anything more finely than a top 20 or 50 as being equally and uniquely great. The genius and alacrity Welles command of cinematic language was clear. But the filmic elements were so dense that I really never could feel and process as much or as fast as I would like–or as much as the film asked me to. I’d have to turn off one side of my brain, and say wow, “how intellectually brilliant that is” or turn on the other and say, wow, “how poignant, it’s about loneliness.”
Chinatown’s plot is something akin to just sitting on the boundary of comprehension (hmmm, just like Chinatown), and if you look up the plot on the world wide web where humans or robots try and make sense of it, you get quite a smattering of confusion and illegibility, not to mention what qualifies as a description of a plot, but I digress. However, not to shoot myself in the foot, I thought it would be useful to recap for myself….
A woman poses as another and hires an interloping private investigator to provide evidence that her husband is having an affair. When the P.I., Gittes (pronounced “gits” by some), investigates, he finds the subject, Hollis Mulwray, the lead water executive for Los Angeles County, has taken a moral and activist stand against plans for a dam that would limit water to farmers in the nearby valley. Nevertheless, he does catch him red-handed with a young girl. But it’s not as it seems. The photos make it to the press and the real Evelyn Mulwray is forced out of the woodwork. When Hollis Mulwray turns up dead, Gittes is convinced that they have been set-up. The investigation becomes personal, and Gittes uncovers a scheme to divert water from farmland so that the worthless land can be bought on the cheap, only to divert it back in the future. He suspects the new chief water engineer, but eventually learns it’s Evelyn’s father, Hollis’ ex-business partner, Noah Cross, who is behind it all. But when he learns the girl in the original adultery scheme is really Noah’s and Evelyn’s daughter. It’s a perverted landscape of personal trauma that exists alongside something as simple as water. Gittes, aims to save Evelyn and the girl from Noah, but his reach proves to be as pervasive as the water he aimed to divert. Only in Chinatown.
Now that that’s out of my system, let’s look at the brilliance of Roman Polanski as a Hollywood director (without referencing Rosemary’s Baby, and leaving aside his sexual deviation, and questionable abuse of women in this film). But first maybe I’ll define what I mean by “Hollywood director,” and my infatuation with it. By this I mean that film is director’s medium, and the director is an auteur. But in Hollywood films, the director’s expression doesn’t veer into the esoteric or inaccessible, it largely adheres to a storytelling structure and style and language that is easily understood, and more importantly felt, by humans, any human. “Hollywood” directing is ultimately a child-like language irregardless of subject matter. It is a picture book for adults and kids alike.
The script, as I’ve alluded to, for Chinatown, is particularly challenging despite of and because of its brilliance, and asks a lot of the director. It’s much closer to The Big Sleep or Lady from Shanghai than it is Double Indemnity, just to reference a genre filled with scripts that sometimes require a set of blueprints in order to watch the film. The script just requires a little heavier lift to understand the stakes sometimes. Water being diverted from farmland that will then be re-diverted after dead people have purchased the land from a spiteful water and power executive, with a side dish of incest, isn’t like totally readily accessible.
Directing is always a combination of things you have to do, there’s a responsibility and an onus to it. You have to make sure the audience understands what it needs to understand, and only by doing this can you make them feel. The director has to physically get characters from point A to point B (the MAN enters the apartment after a long day and searches for the drink he left behind in the morning). The plot elements, filled with cause/effect moments also need to be clearly executed. By taking care of this “business” end of things, the director can create a place for themes to come alive and lend meaning and emotion and stakes in between these informational moments. It’s like you have to paint a room; you can’t paint yourself into a corner. But that’s the mechanics of painting, it’s not painting.
A couple things struck me on this latest viewing of Chinatown that inspired my resuscitated appeal to “one of the greatest films of all time label,” and in particular this demarcation of “Hollywood” film
The opening scene is amazingly efficient, overflowing with information. Now this is mostly a nod to the script, but also the directing feels so eloquent and easy. I’m going to kind of leave the acting alone (or try to) because it’s just so special. Both Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway and then Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in The Godfather (Brando in particular) just bring a whole other element to the table. It’s like the continual magic hour in Days of Heaven, something that takes on a life of its own, an element that is just umami.
The film opens on photos of adultery. Then we see the heartbroken man who realizes he shouldn’t have asked the questions he didn’t want the answers to, and finally the P.I. who lives in this dirt for a living but wears a clean suit and trim hair to pretend he doesn’t, and knows that a stiff drink will wash it all away. So we get the main character, what he does, how he does it, and his place in the community, in one tidy little scene made of about four shots. The brilliant efficiency of the script continues into the next scene, where Gittes tries to avoid a repeat with the next client: “Let sleeping dogs lie,” he admonishes the fake Mrs. Mulwray. But money wins out and he takes the case. Both of these scenes in Gittes office are staged and shot with such effortless simplicity and efficiency so as to bring the film into perfect harmony with the informational parts of the script; “Hollis Mulwray? Water and Power?” The shot/reverse shot concept of the Mrs Mulwray scene is particularly poignant and elegant as if Gittes and her are matching wits, or matching imposter-ness. Only later will he realize he’s been duped, a man who fell in love with his own shot, even though he knew better of it.
Then there’s the physical bit of when Gittes sneaks into the water drainage area and nearly gets swept away. Handheld throughout as Gittes climbs the fence, then from an observational but tense position of safety as he nearly gets washed away, and then unnervingly so climbs back over soaking wet and missing a shoe. There’s an immediacy to the realism. Here, I would say, as with the first two scenes, we don’t exactly know what’s going on but we know our lead P.I. is in a pickle. Very film noir but with the human touch of the 70’s and one of my favorite cinematographers, John Alonzo, who first captured my cinematic attention with Vanishing Point, and just my attention with Bad News Bears.
But the main reason I left so inspired from this latest viewing of Chinatown, was a couple little shots of Dunaway and Nicholson. The first piqued my interest and the second sealed the deal.
In the first, Gittes and Mulwray lunch together at a fancy place–more hers than his. He’s not after the food though, he’s got more of an appetite for the truth, and on this count he leaves hungry. At the valet after lunch, they arrive in a long two shot that where the tension of the frame veers between intimacy and prison. While they are on the same plane physically, Gittes clearly aims to cut her down to size. Evelyn has the pearls and nice make-up and the fancier car and a veil. But Gittes isn’t letting up and none of this will protect her. She’s not going to wiggle out of this. He directs the valet as a show of strength for how he he might handle her. She starts off wanting to put a quick end to this lunch, but she is silenced into submission. Only after he leaves does she find the strength to retort. Viewing this in hindsight, you can piece together Nicholson’s and Dunaway’s choices, and the staging makes more sense. Nicholson’s “abusive” behavior is comfortable to her. Only after her oppressor is gone can she find the strength to speak. The tight two shot in a long take keeps the pressure on. There’s nowhere for Evelyn to go. Not with Gittes anyway.
Then in the second shot of note to me, in a simple little scene after the two pose as husband and wife (the classic foreplay game), and some spirited get away driving, Evelyn gets her groove back. We see her gesturing her face or eye or nose(?) in the car just before we cut to Nicholson’s profile with the bandaged nose front and center. Evelyn enters with drinks and returns to her place of comfort; host, seductress, and damsel in distress…How to express this? Polanski lets Dunaway join Nicholson and serve him a drink, the idea of intimacy reignites and it both excites and repels her, and she tries to get away. The camera follows her as she finds a momentary single shot, before returning to an even more intimate two shot. And this time, unlike the lunch, Nicholson’s got the stronger position and Dunaway is smaller and shorter in the frame. The dynamic has shifted.
I just loved the grace of this shot. It made me happy and satisfied.
There were others too, of course. I remember the Noah Cross character always being hard to understand in my previous viewings. I still found the intricacies of the plot opaque but that may be because John Huston practically seems to swallow the scene whole like the fish he dines on at lunch with “Gits.” His smarminess pervades even his speech. When Gittes meets Noah Cross at the end of the film to confront him about Hollis’ murder and show off the glasses he found as proof, the two shot motif is most striking…
Gittes is waiting at Evelyn’s abandoned home when Noah wanders in, towards camera, towards the shadows, towards Gittes and the first two shot is formed. But as Gittes slowly relinquishes the power and Noah sucks it away like the last juice from the fish, the shot too slips away. Noah leaves Gittes behind.
Gittes must reframe, but here Noah is in the stronger position. He feels imposing too. And finally when the rouse is up, the two shot becomes a three shot with Noah’s henchman there to put an end to things. This is all one shot made of about four compositions. Beautiful. Just very graceful filmmaking and command of camera and staging.
For no reason I can think of, but I’m happy I did, I rewatched The Godfather, the other night, about two weeks on from Chinatown. Where Polanski was driving a fiat up Mullholand Drive, Coppola was steering an 80 foot yacht in the Mediterranean. However both films moved me similarly. I was struck by many of the same aspects of the filmmaking, very poignant compositions, camera, and staging that danced with the script and let the actors move. A brilliant script–this story lending itself to greater character arcs and more set pieces–and iconic acting that almost served as an extra filmic element. But the clincher and what made me connect it with Chinatown, was a two shot in the garden with Michael and Vito Corleone.
Brando’s performance aside, which is just so commanding with simple authenticity that it’s remarkable, this shot struck me. Here is a very genuine heart to heart moment between father and son. Vito was clearly in poor health living on numbered days. Michael was probably in a feeling of mid air free-fall, having just jumped off the cliff of civilian life and not yet landed in the family business. A generation apart, but a lifetime of separation, and yet closer than ever. This scene was all expressed with such unique staging. Brando was in foreground sort of facing Michael, but also looking past him. Michael, on the outside looking in on his own conversation, as much hanging on every word as a man, and lingering on the outskirts of an adult conversation as a child. They were facing each other but on two different planes. The art of cinema kept them connected.
Later, at the time of this writing actually, I would learn that this scene was written, or punched up, by Robert Towne, the screenwriter of Chinatown. Ah, the golden age of Hollywood.