The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Roman Polanski · a film · 1974 · about 130 minutes · from an original screenplay by Robert Towne
Mode
Detective film in colour and sunlight; period mystery, public history and family tragedy in one
Mythos
The Oedipal inquiry whose every step draws the catastrophe nearer; the patriarch who owns the water and devours his children; the damaged eye
Phase
Los Angeles in the drought of 1937, from a false client in a detective’s office to a night street in Chinatown
Presentation
Feature film in colour and anamorphic widescreen, about 130 minutes, in English; the camera kept to one man’s knowledge from first scene to last
Register
From a dirty joke and a bandaged nose to incest and murder; cool, ironic and sunlit, rising to dread at the confession and the end
Scale
One detective, one family, one city’s water and the valley it takes
Governing Proposition
A Los Angeles detective who photographs adulteries is hired to follow a water official, and follows the case from a drowned man to a theft of water and land from the farmers of a valley, and from there to a crime inside a family; and everything he learns delivers the people he means to save to the man who owns the water. The wager of the film is that a detective story can disclose the founding of a city as a theft, that the investigator’s partial sight can be the form itself, and that a studio mystery can end with the truth found and nothing done.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Los Angeles, 1937, in a drought. J. J. Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, is a private detective whose trade is marriages and the photographs that end them. A woman who gives her name as Mrs Mulwray hires him to follow her husband, Hollis Mulwray, played by Darrell Zwerling, who works for the city’s water and whose name recalls William Mulholland and the Owens Valley aqueduct. Gittes follows him to a council meeting where sheep are driven into the chamber, and to a dry riverbed by day, where a boy rides a horse across a desert under the city.
Gittes is good at his job and pleased with it. A cheap watch left under a tyre times Mulwray’s night visits; a camera catches him with a young woman. Then the real Evelyn Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, comes to his office, and the client who hired him is shown to have been someone else. Soon after, Mulwray is found drowned in a reservoir, in a city with no rain. The camera has been at Gittes’s shoulder from the start, and it stays there: the film never leaves what he knows for a view from above, and the viewer is deceived when he is.
Roman Polanski directed from an original screenplay by Robert Towne, and Robert Evans produced for Paramount, which released the film in the United States in June 1974. John A. Alonzo photographed it in colour and anamorphic widescreen; Richard Sylbert designed it and Anthea Sylbert dressed it; Sam O’Steen cut it; Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score, a replacement written late in post-production. John Huston plays Noah Cross, with Perry Lopez as Escobar, John Hillerman as Yelburton, Diane Ladd as Ida Sessions and Burt Young as Curly, and Polanski himself plays the hoodlum with the knife. It runs about 130 minutes.
Movement II
Gittes goes to the reservoir at night and is caught there. A small hoodlum, played by Polanski, puts a knife into his nostril and cuts it, as a warning. For half the film the detective wears a bandage across the middle of his face. The wound is a joke and a sign at once: the man who looks for a living has been marked where he cannot help seeing it, and he goes on with his inquiry looking absurd in his own story.
Evelyn hires him in her turn, and her account of her husband and herself does not add up; Dunaway plays the evasions so that a second viewing can read every one of them. Gittes has lunch with Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross, who is served a fish with its head on. Huston plays him genial and monstrous at once, a host at ease with everything on the table.
The water is the hidden plot. In a drought, water is being let out of the city’s reservoir at night, and the farmers of the Valley are being driven off their land. Gittes drives out to the orange groves and is chased and beaten there. The scene does again what the reservoir did, and with more noise. But it brings the public crime into the open: someone is buying the Valley, and the city’s water will follow the purchase.
Movement III
At the Hall of Records Gittes goes through the ledgers of land in the Valley, and finds that great tracts have changed hands, to names he does not know. The obituary column gives him the names again: men who have died, and who are now the owners of the Valley. Clue by clue, the film makes the solution its theme. The fraud is a matter of paper, and paper is where Gittes is at home.
The trail leads to a rest home, where the old residents sit at their crochet, making quilts, and their names are on the deeds. The comedy of Gittes’s visit sits beside the coldest fact in the film: the dying have been made the landlords of the future. The farmers, the rest home and the Albacore Club looked like digressions, and they are the public crime laid out in full.
What is being done can now be stated, and the film states it through the ledgers rather than through speeches. Water released in secret, farmland bought cheap from men driven out, deeds in the names of the dead, and a city that will annex the Valley and bring the water to it: a theft by those who own the future. The police and the law serve the owner. The plot is dense here, denser than the drama needs, and the film does not hurry it.
Movement IV
Gittes spends a night with Evelyn. Lying with her he sees a flaw in the iris of one eye. The damaged eye has run through the film already, in the camera’s lens and Gittes’s binoculars, and it will close the film. When she leaves in the night, he follows her by a taillight he smashed earlier and calls a lens, to a house where a young woman is kept. The young woman of the photographs is there, and Evelyn will not say who she is.
In the Mulwrays’ garden a gardener at the pond says that salt water is “bad for glass”. In the pond Gittes finds a pair of bifocals. The two facts make the hinge of the whole: Mulwray, found in a fresh reservoir, had salt water in his lungs, and he died here, in a salt pond in his own garden. The glasses are not Mulwray’s. They are Cross’s.
Gittes confronts Evelyn in a bright bedroom. He demands the young woman’s name and slaps her each time she answers, and the answers alternate: “She’s my sister... my daughter.” The young woman is the child of Evelyn and her father, her daughter and her sister both. The private crime and the public one are the same act. Cross takes the Valley’s water and his daughter’s body on one principle, possession, and his own statement of it is the film’s: most people never have to face the fact that, given the right time and place, they are “capable of anything”.
Movement V
Everything ends in Chinatown, at night. Gittes has the knowledge and nothing else. Evelyn, with the girl in her car, tries to drive away from her father, and she is shot dead. Her head falls on the wheel and the horn sounds and goes on sounding; the girl screams; the bullet has gone through her eye. Cross takes the girl away, the police confirm the outcome, and Gittes can do nothing. The inquiry has done what every step of it promised: it has delivered the two women to the man it was meant to expose.
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” As the line is spoken the camera, which has stayed with Gittes for two hours, at last rises away from him, up over the crowd in the dark street, and his knowledge stops where the film does. The ending was Polanski’s; Towne’s draft had ended otherwise. In a studio picture the patriarch walks away with his daughter’s child, and the law that should have stopped him confirms it.
The film had eleven Academy Award nominations and won one, for Towne’s original screenplay. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 1991. Nicholson directed a sequel, The Two Jakes, in 1990. Its last line passed into common speech, and its period colour noir opened a line that runs through Body Heat, L.A. Confidential and Inherent Vice. Its director’s guilty plea in 1977 and his flight in 1978 have changed how its central crime is watched, and have not removed it from view. What has lasted is a form: a camera at one man’s shoulder, a solution that is the disclosure, and a truth found by an investigator who cannot act on it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the screenplay’s economy. Run the subtractive test and the plot resists it: almost every object planted is paid. The broken taillight lets Gittes follow Evelyn; a cheap watch under a tyre times Mulwray’s night visits; the obituary column names the dead men who own the Valley; the gardener’s “bad for glass” sends Gittes to the pond, and the bifocals in it are Cross’s, not Mulwray’s. Salt water in a man found in a fresh reservoir is the hinge of the whole. The farmers, the rest home and the Albacore Club, which look like digressions, are the public crime the private one mirrors. What gives: the orange-grove chase repeats the reservoir’s work, and the land fraud is laid out in more detail than the drama needs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: the modern city is founded on a theft by those who own its future, the law and the police serve the owner, and the public crime and the private one are one act of possession by one man. Cross takes the Valley’s water and his daughter’s body on one principle. Beside it stands the investigator’s truth: Gittes’s knowledge is always partial, and his inquiry delivers Evelyn and the girl to Cross. The history of Western water has been argued in the film’s terms for fifty years. Held below the top because “Chinatown”, the place where nothing can be known or done, is a mood more than a meaning, and the film rests on it at the close.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The register is cool, ironic and sunlit, and elevation is not its usual mode. When it rises it is dreadful: the reservoir at night and the knife in the nostril; the slaps and the confession, a terror played in a bright bedroom; the dry riverbed by day with a boy on a horse, a desert under the city; the car horn sounding after Evelyn falls on the wheel, the girl screaming, and the camera rising over the crowd in the dark street. Jerry Goldsmith’s solo trumpet over strings and prepared pianos gives the film a lament it never states. Held at the figure by frequency: the middle hour is procedure, elegant and level, and the summits gather at the confession and the end.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. Its structure is Oedipal: an investigator seeks the cause of a death, every step draws the catastrophe nearer, and the truth when found is a crime within the family against nature. The patriarch is named for the flood and the sacrifice, Noah Cross: the oldest of figures, the father who owns the water and devours his children. The damaged eye runs through the whole: the flaw in Evelyn’s iris, the bifocals, the smashed taillight Gittes calls a lens, the bullet through her eye. The founding of a city in a desert is the myth of origin turned to crime. The particular stays particular: linen suits, a bandage, a dirty joke. Held below the top because the detective form has carried the Oedipal frame since Poe.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the hardboiled detective film, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946), with John Huston, who directed the first, cast as its tyrant; Ross Macdonald’s novels of buried family crime; and the revisionist genre films of the early 1970s, Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) above all. The turns are real: noir in colour, sunlight and widescreen; a detective whose inquiry causes the death he tries to prevent; incest at the centre of a studio picture; evil unpunished and confirmed by the police. The stake was smaller: a star vehicle from a major studio, made by its head of production, and a commercial success. The ending was a real wager. Held below the bar because the form is classical by intention and the revisionism was already in the air.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how little an investigator sees. The camera is bound to Gittes: over his shoulder, through his binoculars, his camera’s viewfinder and windscreens, and never beyond what he knows. The viewer learns what he learns, in his order, and is wrong when he is wrong, about Evelyn above all. Told from everywhere, the film would lose the knowledge that partial sight does harm. The ending completes the form: the camera, bound to him for two hours, rises away from him over the street. Held below the top because, that binding apart, the form is the studio mystery’s inherited grammar, well used rather than remade.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over fifty-two years. The questions stay open: whether Evelyn was victim alone or, as she half says, complicit; what “Chinatown” means, a place, a figure for the unknowable, or an orientalist screen with Chinese servants at its edges; the authorship divided between Towne’s script and Polanski’s ending. The director’s life has changed how its central crime is watched: the murder of Sharon Tate in 1969 before it, and after it his guilty plea in 1977 to unlawful sex with a thirteen-year-old and his flight in 1978. Formally it yields on return, in the rhymes of eye, glass and water. Held at the figure because part of the yield is a mystery’s, which closes once solved, and much of the writing on the screenplay is craft study rather than new reading.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is strong: the film made the detective story a vehicle for the hidden history of a city and for the failure of inquiry itself, in a classical form so complete that it became a standard. It perfected the genre more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the period colour noir that followed at once, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and the neo-noir line after it, Body Heat (1981), L.A. Confidential (1997) and Inherent Vice (2014); Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), built on its plot of a city’s transit and land; a sequel; a screenplay taught in the schools; and a last line in common speech. The reach lies largely within its genre and its craft.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: one version, no loss, its restorations repair only. Presence across fifty-two years is continuous and wide: revivals, television, home video in every format, the National Film Registry, teaching in film and screenwriting programmes. The surface ages little, since a film of 1937 made in 1974 does not date as a contemporary surface does, though its gloss, Faye Dunaway’s styling and John A. Alonzo’s colour, now reads as the seventies as well as the thirties. The director’s later crime has narrowed some exhibition and colours reception; it has not removed the film from view. Held short of the widest figure because its presence, wide in cinema, has not passed far beyond it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Towne’s screenplay, whose clues and lines carry character and theme at once; Alonzo’s sunlit compositions, his camera at Gittes’s shoulder; Richard Sylbert’s Los Angeles of bungalows, dry riverbeds and offices with Venetian blinds, built from the period rather than dressed in it; Goldsmith’s score, spare, late and exact; Nicholson’s Gittes, vain, funny and out of his depth; Dunaway’s Evelyn, whose evasions are legible on a second viewing; Huston’s Cross, genial and monstrous at lunch over a fish served with its head. The charges fall on small shares: the land-fraud exposition is dense, Dunaway’s mannerism shows in places, and the Chinese characters are props, a choice of the screenplay that costs the frame.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Gittes telling his operatives a dirty joke about a Chinaman while Evelyn stands behind him, and Evelyn’s death in Chinatown. One law governs both: Gittes is always a step behind what is happening in the room, and his confidence is the measure of his blindness. The comedy of the nose, Gittes’s jokes and the rest home’s crocheted quilts obey the same law as the slaps and the shot. The public crime and the private one are one law of possession, and the police confirm it at the close. The range is wide for a genre film, from comedy of manners to incest and murder. The strain is slight: the orange grove leans to action-picture rules, and the last crowd is staged more loosely than the rest.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held in one structure: the state, in the water department, a city council with sheep driven into its chamber, the police and the courts; the economy, in land, water and the speculation that makes a city; the natural order, in drought, reservoir, tide and desert; the family, in a marriage of convenience, incest and a daughter; history, in the founding of Los Angeles; and consciousness, in Gittes. The plot integrates them: the drought, the fraud and the incest are one discovery. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is Gittes’s surface only, with no way into Evelyn or the city’s people; the sacred is absent; Chinatown, the film’s name, is held as a sign rather than a society; and labour appears only in the farmers.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.8, then The Inevitable, The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 8.7. A making in which screenplay, light, design, score and three performances all bear weight; a presence continuous and wide across fifty-two years; one law, Gittes a step behind, from the dirty joke to the shot in Chinatown; a plot whose planted objects are almost all paid; a disclosure of the city’s founding as a theft; an Oedipal inquiry built into the plot; and a camera bound to one man’s partial sight.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.1: the state, the economy, the natural order, the family and the city’s history are held as one discovery, but consciousness is Gittes’s surface only, the sacred is absent, Chinatown is a sign rather than a society, and labour appears only in the farmers. Above it, The Swerve at 8.2, real turns on the hardboiled film taken at small cost in a form classical by intention, a year after The Long Goodbye; and The Sublime at 8.3, a cool and sunlit register that rises to dread only at the reservoir, the confession and the end.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls three tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is closed twice: by The Swerve, and by the aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Chinatown as released by Paramount in the United States in June 1974, about 130 minutes, in colour and anamorphic widescreen, from the photographs on Gittes’s desk to the camera rising over the street: directed by Roman Polanski from an original screenplay by Robert Towne, produced by Robert Evans, photographed by John A. Alonzo, designed by Richard Sylbert, edited by Sam O’Steen, with music by Jerry Goldsmith. One version is in circulation, and it is the object; restorations for home video repair it and are not a different film. Towne’s drafts are not part of the work, and the ending he wrote is named only as different from the one filmed. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only in short lines whose words are certain. Facts that could not be verified, among them what Towne’s draft ending contained, whether Gittes appears in every scene, the count of scenes and shots, and the screenplay’s standing in the screenwriting manuals, are not given.