Chinatown: The Best Movie of All Times?

The suave, "neo-noir", with an Oscar-winning script by Robert Towne and a superlative performance by Nicholson as detective JJ Gittes, was voted into first place by a panel of Guardian and Observer critics.

But what is it about ‘Chinatown’ that makes it so special?

Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN is a visually lavish trip back into the hardboiled detective genre. The gorgeous costumes and harsh lighting help to capture the seediness lurking behind legitimate society in 1930s Los Angeles. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences recognized the film with Oscar nominations in major performance, design, and technical categories. Robert Towne (Shampoo, Mission: Impossible) ultimately brought home the Academy Award for his original screenplay. (The writing process had been a contentious one, as Towne had originally planned for a happy ending.)

The movie revolves around a private detective named Gittes, who specializes in breaking marriages. Gittes’ involvement begins with an adultery case. He’s visited by a woman who claims to be the wife of a man named Mulwray. She says her husband is cheating on her. Gittes’ investigation leads him to Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), to city hearings, to dried river beds and eventually to Mulwray’s drowned body and to the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Stumbling across murders, lies and adulteries, he senses some larger reality beneath everything, some conspiracy involving people and motives unknown.

This crime is eventually revealed as an attempt to buy up the San Fernando Valley cheaply by diverting water so that its orange growers go broke. Then that water and more water, obtained through bribery and corruption, will turn the valley green and create wealth. The valley has long been seen as a key to California fortunes: I remember Joel McCrea telling me that on his first day as a movie actor, Will Rogers offered two words of advice: “Buy land.” McCrea bought in the valley and died a rich man, but he was in the second wave of speculation.

Boy, Jack Nicholson is a class act. He may have won an Oscar for his performance in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but his turn as a fast-talking gumshoe the previous year in Roman Polanski's searing noir-pastiche Chinatown was, if anything, even better.