Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection, I went with neo-noir… a genre that, along with being simply modern takes on the Film Noir genre, deconstructs many of Film Noir’s traditional elements, focussing more on social and psychological aspects.

THe main reason for this selection was one of the biggest items on my “what do you mean you never saw it?” list, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. 

Jack Nicholson plays J.J. “Jake” Gittes a successful private investigator specializing in uncovering adultery. His latest client is Evelyn Mulwray, (Diane Ladd), the wife of Hollis Mulwray, chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power believes her husband is having an affair and wants Jake to follow him. The case goes pretty routine with Jake and his associates not getting that much luck. However a couple of days the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway)  shows up to tell him his employer is an imposter. Soon after that the Hollis Mulwray shows up dead. Against his better judgement Jake just can’t let the case go the deeper into it he gets.

It’s hard to be a Polanski fan, since he’s one of the most notorious examples of the difficulty of separating the creation from the creator. But his craft excels in this film, providing everything you need to know methodically provided through Jake’s point of view. 

As for Jake, this is one of Nicolson’s best performances and serves as a brutal deconstruction of the hard-boiled detective genre. Jake may talk a good game, but in the end he’s small fry who gets beaten up even more than Phillip Marlowe. 

(On a quick note, this film has nothing to do with LA’s Chinatown it’s just a reference to Jake’s experience working that beat when he was in the police and all of the senseless corruption he dealt with there. )

In the next film on my list, Wim Wenders, Hammett, Frederic Forrest , plays a fictionalized version of Dashiel Hammet. .He lives a relatively secluded life in a cheap apartment, drinks and smokes too much which leaves him with a nasty recurring cough.

Right after finishing his latest  short story, he runs into Jimmy Ryan,Peter Boyle, an associate from his Pinkerton days and agrees to help him. However the two are separated in the middle of chinatown and Hammett has to brush off his detective skills to  find him… To make matters worse he lost his manuscript in the process. 

This was an enjoyable film which did a nice job of recreating the period. While I have a sneaking suspicion Wenders was phoning it in just a little bit, since we’re talking about the guy who did Wings of Desire that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I especially liked how the narrative went back and forth between Hammett’s reality and that the fiction he is righting. It is much simpler both in the characters’ dialogue and the set with a muted color palette with the faint noise of a typewriter in the background.