Many film enthusiasts, including me, consider Robert Towne's Oscar-winning script for the 1974 Paramount film Chinatown to be the best screenplay of all time. But the film as a whole, though universally well regarded, somehow rarely seems to rate the same hyperbolic claim. The implication is that director Roman Polanski failed to fully exploit the potential of that screenplay, or that the casting of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston missed the mark, or the production, personally overseen by Paramount Pictures production chief Robert Evans, didn't live up to the screenplay's potential. No matter the angle of any implied criticism, the praising of this script rather than the entire film becomes ridiculous. Anyone who has actually read Towne's various drafts would surely conclude that the film Chinatown is a perfect realization of one of the richest and most ambitious (but also long and confusing) screenplays ever written. The indisputable contributions of Polanski and Evans to the shaping of the final screenplay, as well as to Chinatown's casting and execution, make it a solid contender for the greatest movie ever made.

I largely reject the auteur theory and much of what it has wrought, so I don't want to take a position that seems to downplay much-deserved credit from a brilliant screenwriter. This reluctance is especially strong since screenwriter Towne's acclaimed image in the annals of film history was tarnished a bit after Sam Wasson's 2020 book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, which revealed that the peerless Towne had (horror of horrors) a secret collaborator few knew about. But it is not my intention to diminish the esteem in which Towne has been and should continue to be held. It's simply that I don't believe movies created by a group of talented people (as nearly all great films are) should be thought of as less significant or artistic than so-called "personal" films. I think Chinatown is a great picture because of the story it tells and the way it tells that story, but part of my personal reverence for this movie comes from the fact that so many key players are collectively responsible for its greatness. Like Casablanca, it epitomizes what magic can result from the artistic collaboration of many diverse talents.

I've always considered the notion that movies are the direct result of one visionary individual who is ultimately responsible for every key creative decision in such a collaborative medium—the way a novelist or painter working in those far more solitary art forms might be—to be a laughably reductive adolescent male fantasy. Were it not for the fact that the auteur theory has had such a profound effect on the way movies have been created and consumed for so many decades, I would give it little more credence than any other theory cooked up by young obsessive men engaged in the human preoccupation of pattern recognition, crafting a belief based on all the patterns that align with their preconceived notion and conveniently discarding all those that don't. Many auteur-minded critics are all too happy to claim Chinatown as an example of the director as author, despite the film being far more famous for Towne's screenplay being the primary contributing factor to this picture's greatness. I delight in the way movies such as this one can break the auteurist brain.

Perhaps the inclination to praise the screenplay over the film itself is because Chinatown is a cerebral movie—neither visceral like a comedy or action picture nor emotional like a romance or a fantasy film. But intellectual stimulation is no less cinematic than thrills, chills, laughs, and tears. The power to provoke thought is one of the most essential things that movies in general, and this one in particular, have to offer. Recently, after the #metoo awakening, I've wondered if the long-standing focus on the screenplay was a convenient ways for programmers to ignore Polanski's status as an admitted and convicted sex offender. Chinatown is still screened in revival houses that would never consider running films by directors who've been accused of similar crimes even if they have not been convicted. Why is that? Does Chinatown transcend its "auteur," or does the theory just not apply in this case? I can't imagine any auteur-centric critic using their dreaded term "journeyman director" to describe Roman Polanski!
I consider Chinatown a perfect film. Like any work of art, especially those that are fifty years old or more, one can easily point to aspects that may seem flawed, but, any issues the film may or may not have are like the flaw in the eye of its lead female character, Evelyn Mulwray. Rather than a diminishment, the flaw is a distinctive mark that fascinates all the more. I think the film is a rare picture that contains the best work of each of its participants. Everyone who contributed to it was at the height of their creative powers. Each choice was improved and augmented by the various collaborators, and miraculously, when there were arguments about key creative decisions, the best idea always seemed to have won.

The most obvious examples of the ways things worked out are the ways in which each key collaborator did not get their way. Towne didn't get the ending he felt was critical to making the themes in his screenplay come through. Till his dying day, Towne felt that the fatalistic ending of Chinatown was not the correct conclusion and that no scene should have taken place in that part of LA because Chinatown, as he intended it, was a state of mind rather than a location. But I'll be forever thankful that Towne hunkered down with Polanski to condense and rewrite his epic tome into a feasible shooting script that accommodated most of the things the director wanted to see in the movie, including a climax set in Chinatown. There's no reason the titular Chinatown can't be both a state of mind and the place all the action builds to. In fact, the theme works better when it is shown as both.

Similarly, Evans didn't get to make Chinatown in a style that directly mimicked classic 1940s film noirs. When he read the script, the producer-turned-studio-head-turned-producer-and-studio head, thought the whole picture should be shot on black-and-white film stock in the Academy ratio with high key lighting, a somber orchestral score, and all the other trappings of a 1940s noir. This approach would surely have diminished the picture, focusing it on externalities of style or even gimmickry. Fortunately, though Evans was a narcissist with a very high opinion of his own options, he was also a savvy producer who always considered the script to be the true star of a movie. Evans knew what he had in Towne's screenplay, and he wisely believed that this quintessentially American story should be helmed by a director with a European sensibility—specifically Polanski, whom he courted onto the project as he had with Rosemary's Baby.

Polanski's script battles with Towne and on-set arguments with both his lead actors have become legendary, and the director lost many of the fights right up to the final weeks before the premiere. For example, Polanski's insistence on using avant-garde composer Phillip Lambro was famously thwarted at the last minute when everyone watched the final cut and convinced the stubborn director the score didn't work and was going to sink the movie. Evans famously hired veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith to write and record a new score in the ten days they had until the scheduled release. It's hard to imagine how this picture would play without Goldsmith's evocative, mournful, romantic musical themes.

Similarly, what would the movie be like without the production design of Richard Sylbert, the costumes of Anthea Sylbert, and John A. Alonzo's photography? The relatively young Alonzo (Vanishing Point, Harold and Maude, Lady Sings the Blues) was himself a last-minute replacement when acclaimed cinematographer Stanley Cortez (known for shooting Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, and Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor) butted heads with Polanski. In references to shooting Magnificent Ambersons, Welles once referred to Cortez as "criminally slow," which was, by all accounts, an apt criticism. Alonzo's approach and style were much more in line with the production and Polanski's rhythms.

With all these key players, and the brilliant film editor Sam O'Steen (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby), each of whom was reaching a creative peak in their respective careers, Chinatown became far more than one of the best pictures of its year, or best movies of its decade, and is rightly considered one of the best American films ever made. Much like Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather did with gangster movies a few years earlier, and like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark would do with fantasy and adventure serials a few years later, Chinatown took a defunct, B-grade genre from Hollywood's "golden age"—the film noir—and revitalized it with all the grandeur, scale, and moral ambiguity of the "auteur age" of the 1970s.

The film noir style had fallen out of fashion by the mid-1950s, and it was beginning to become a kind of joke, as in Robert Altman's authentically hard-boiled but playfully sarcastic The Long Goodbye, which preceded Chinatown by a year. But in contrast to the wonderfully cynical and whimsical deconstructionism of The Long Goodbye, Chinatown does a great deal more than update or comment on an old genre. It is the first and best example of an entirely new kind of movie: a modern, historical noir. Shot in Technicolor and Panavision with an A-list cast and budget, Chinatown is a film about—and somewhat in the style of—Los Angeles in the 1930s. And because Chinatown is an authentic period piece, rather than a homage or a modernized retelling of an old story, the film is also an examination and illumination of the cinematic genre that inspired it. There's nothing ironic or retro about Chinatown; it feels like it could actually have been made in the 1930s—albeit by a director and crew who went back in time with film equipment from the 1970s.

Chinatown is, first and foremost, a terrific story. As in all the best detective fiction, the investigation of a current case uncovers the long-buried secrets of a crime from the past. No movie accomplishes this uncovering as masterfully as Chinatown. Its rich and complex plotline brims with deceptions, red herrings, clever reversals, and parallel mysteries about familial, civic, and environmental violations.

Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private detective whose investigation of a murder leads him to uncover a shady land development deal and an attempt to steal control of Los Angeles's water rights. While these topics might seem like unexciting fodder for a crime story, the subject matter, based loosely on the real history of Los Angeles's Owens Valley, becomes an ideal vehicle for conveying the film's principle themes of power and greed. What Chinatown is really about is how wealthy men manipulate the weak, the government, and even nature itself to make themselves even more powerful. The movie lays out for us how the ultra-rich elite play by a different set of rules than the rest of society and how they can get away with murder (and worse). We become acutely aware that the unscrupulous events that took place in the smoke-filled rooms, government offices, and back alleys of early 20th-century Los Angeles have happened in every city, at every time in history, and that they are still happening today.

Robert Towne was a long-time friend of Jack Nicholson—the two young men met while taking acting classes together—so Towne was able to write the role of Jake specifically for Nicholson's talents. This role made Jack Nicholson the star he was destined to become, and his controlled performance in the movie is his best ever. A hero and a genre picture are only as strong as their villain, and John Huston's performance as Noah Cross, a larger-than-life capitalist whose dangerous amorality lurks just beneath the surface of his prepossessing respectability, is dynamic and thrilling. Huston, who directed one of the quintessential film noirs of all time, The Maltese Falcon (1941), and who was still a vibrant and vital remnant of the old Hollywood system, had his own larger-than-life and morally dubious persona, which enriched his characterization of Cross and contributed greatly to the role's unique cinematic symbolism. He appears in just a few scenes, yet those scenes carry the thematic power of the movie.

Nicholson spends much of the film in bureaucratic environments that, by all rights, should be as dull as plaster: municipal offices, a morgue, a police station, and the hall of records. Through Roman Polanski's unrivaled eye for composition and the sumptuously detailed production design of Dick Sylbert, these cold settings become rich environments that we want to revisit again and again, especially when unexpected things happen in them. The startling early scene in which a farmer lets a herd of sheep loose at a city council meeting establishes that the movie will be unpredictable and, as Nicholson's mischievous reaction to Rance Howard and his woolly intruders makes clear, a lot of fun.
Polanski is a master of film technique. There is not a single unmotivated shot, cut, or move in this picture. The camera is always perfectly positioned, often just over Nicholson's shoulder with his hat and the back of his head off to one side of the 2.35:1 frame. I don't think there has ever been a film that has spent so much time on the back of the lead actor's head. This bold technique locks the audience into Gittes' perspective so that we always process the story’s complex narrative at the same time he does. While the audience is never ahead of the main character, Polanski challenges us to keep up with Gittes as he tries, but never fully succeeds, to uncover the truth and react to it in time.

The brilliant camera work and lighting never draw attention to themselves; you could watch Chinatown fifteen times before you really notice how intricately its shots are designed and photographed. No other director—not Hitchcock, not Kubrick, not Spielberg, not Scorsese—has made anything that even comes close to Polanski's command of mise-en-scene in this film.

Chinatown demands to be seen on a big screen in a real cinema. It moves at a deliberate pace and is filled with far too much detail to be appreciated without giving it full attention. By 1993, when I finally saw Chinatown in the gorgeous main theatre of the Coolidge Corner Movie House in Boston, I had already seen it at least six times on VHS and laserdisc. But seeing it in 35mm and with an audience made it feel like an entirely different film than the one I thought I knew well. My eyes and mind were fully opened to the awe-inspiring accomplishment that is Chinatown. That screening remains one of the top five cinema-going experiences of my life.

To be truly great, a film must keep an audience interested by staying ahead of us and never condescending to us. It must hold up to repeat viewings and offer new insights each time we watch it. It must capture a truth or make us think about a truth in a way we haven't before. It must work on multiple levels without ever allowing the secondary themes or cinematic concepts to overpower the main narrative. No film does all these things as well as Chinatown. It's time to stop limiting the praise for this picture to its screenplay and recognize the movie for what it is: one of the most perfect pieces of cinema ever.