The neo-noir classic Chinatown was released 50 years ago. Despite the controversy surrounding its disgraced director, Roman Polanski, its complex themes and impeccable technical craftsmanship retain all of their impact today. The film is a product of a brief renaissance in 1960s-70s Hollywood, an era that hints at what can be achieved when artists are allowed to freely pursue their ambitions. This period also highlights the contradictions imposed on art by a society enslaved by the market, and poisoned by exploitation. 

　　The legendary screenwriter and director Robert Towne died on 3 July 2024. His original screenplay for Chinatown is often described as the greatest of all time. In 2010, the Guardian’s film critics named the 1974 classic the greatest film of all time. Chinatown is a devastating murder mystery inspired by the real story of corruption and conspiracy behind the building of Los Angeles. By focusing on a specific case of capitalist scheming, in all its sordid, perverted, personal details, it stands as a brilliant allegory of the alienation and injustice resulting from capitalism in general. 

　　It is a masterpiece of filmmaking in every respect – the plot, cinematography, costumes, locations, acting, and soundtrack, are all brilliant, down to the tiniest detail.  

　　Despite being exactly 50 years old, it feels extremely modern. The close-up camerawork, which gives the film its realistic and intense atmosphere, precedes the ‘revolution’ in close-shot ‘shakeycam’ cinematography from the likes of the Bourne films by three decades. The narrative is every bit as dark and shocking as acclaimed, modern detective fare like The Wire.  

　　This highly sophisticated picture marked a high watermark for Hollywood filmmaking, which suffered a marked decline starting almost immediately after its release, thanks ironically to the very same cynical capitalist forces that Chinatown exposes. 

　　Mystery 

　　The film begins with a seemingly mundane case for our private detective, Jakes Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson. A rich woman, Evelyn Mulwray, wants to hire him to find out if her husband, Hollis Mulwray, is having an affair, as she suspects. Gittes takes on the case – although not before trying to encourage the woman to give it up and pretend not to notice the affair, for her own wellbeing.  

　　But Gittes, and the audience, have been deceived. A few scenes later, after photographs taken by Gittes, apparently showing Hollis in the company of his mistress, receive scandalous press coverage, the detective returns to his office to find an aloof, mysterious-looking woman waiting for him.  

　　She introduces herself as the real Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway), and asks Gittes why he is investigating her husband. The woman who originally approached him was an imposter, and the real Evelyn threatens to sue. Gittes has been set up, made a fool of. He, and the audience, are sucked into the mystery. 

　　It soon becomes clear that something much bigger, more sinister and political is at work. Mulwray is a powerful man – the head of ‘Water and Power’ – a big deal in a city suffering from a drought, which the colour palette of the film is designed to emphasise. There are no greens, everything is in tones of yellow. Clouds are never shown in the sky. The cinematographer also deliberately shot scenes looking uphill as much as possible, so as to make Gittes’ investigation seem like even more of a struggle in a dry and unforgiving desert city. 

　　Early on, Gittes’ investigation of this mysterious husband takes him to the council chambers, where Mulwray is debating a proposed dam for a reservoir that would help with the drought, objecting to its construction on safety grounds. As he is making his case, Mulwray is interrupted by a flock of sheep, of all things. Their irate shepherd, who has barged into the proceedings, yells at Mulwray: 

　　“You steal the water from the valley, ruin the grazing, starve my livestock. Who’s paying you to do that, Mr Mulwray? That’s what I want to know!” 

　　Later, Mulwray turns up dead in a reservoir, after which Gittes is hired by his widow to investigate his murder. Gittes, like all private detectives, starts off as cynical and ‘hard boiled’. He thinks himself a man of the world, armed with all the clever tricks he needs to uncover the ugly truth. But this case takes him far beyond the world of petty crime and violence that he is used to, and into the very heart of power in LA. His, and the audience’s, journey is one of discovery, of looking behind the curtain of capitalist society to the bitter reality beneath. 

　　While it is not the purpose of this article to summarise the complex, twisting plot of Chinatown (which readers are encouraged to experience for themselves), suffice it to say that it enters very bleak territory. In another subversion, Evelyn is set up as another conniving noir femme fatale, but she is in fact a woman who has been through unspeakable trauma, and is now in great danger, desperately trying to protect herself and those she loves. 

　　When he is eventually revealed, the main villain, Noah Cross, Mulwray’s business partner, is brilliantly portrayed by the legendary John Huston as a man so rich and established, he needs make no effort to appear humble, respectful or honest in any way. Such things are simply beneath him, as he routinely seeks to remind people. 

　　He exudes arrogance and cynicism. He deliberately mispronounces Gittes’ name. He makes no real effort to cover up his criminality, because he thinks he can get away with it. As he says, “Of course I'm respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” 

　　Karl Marx once wrote that capitalists become the living embodiment of capital, which seeks to rapaciously propagate itself in pursuit of ever-greater profits. This is certainly true of Cross. His desire to constantly expand his empire is insatiable. His ultimate objective is not to merely own vast riches, but (as he famously puts it) to possess “the future” itself. 

　　The forces of the state (the police) are at his beck-and-call, prepared to kill at his command. His treatment of his associates, subordinates and (most disturbingly) his own family are merely a reflection of his obsession with dominance and control. He is the ultimate exploiter, and a figurehead for a system built on exploitation, which Gittes’ is ultimately powerless to resist. 

　　The height of New Hollywood 

　　The grounded grittiness and anti-capitalist message of Chinatown have withstood the test of time brilliantly. These attributes are very much in the style of the ‘New Hollywood’ period, which climaxed in the mid-1970s. New Hollywood was one of those brief moments in the history of art in which a few factors came together to enable genuine creativity to flourish, despite market pressures. 

　　After the war, Hollywood entered a serious financial crisis. In 1948, an antitrust court case against Paramount saw the end of so-called ‘vertical integration’, where the big film studio conglomerates controlled both the production and distribution side of the industry by owning chains of theatres. This marked the end of the old Studio System, where the major Hollywood studios churned out hundreds of films a year following an almost factory-style production model. 

　　Meanwhile, the rise of television (which the film studios unsuccessfully attempted to monopolise) and the explosion of pop music gave consumers many other things to spend their disposable income on, creating new competition with the film industry.  

　　Costly new technologies like 3D and super-widescreen ‘cinemascope’ failed to lure audiences back in big numbers, and a series of flops throughout the 1950s gnawed into the profits of the industry. As a result, the major film studios were desperate, and had to apply austerity measures. In the late 1960s, Paramount hired an up-and-coming producer called Robert Evans, because he had ideas for making cheaper, more experimental films that would appeal to the young generation, and thus make more money. 

　　Evans took inspiration (and drew talent) from B-movies: inexpensive ‘schlock films’ that appealed to audiences with higher degrees of bloodshed and nudity than higher-budget ‘A-movies’, and were heavily marketed with so-called ‘exploitation’ campaigns, teasing this titillating content. Many of the actors and filmmakers who defined New Hollywood (including Jack Nicholson) got their start in B-movies. Francis Ford Coppola spent his early career making softcore pornography. 

　　The New Hollywood was also inspired by the increasing academic interest in film, with filmmaker-critics central to experimental European cinema, like François Truffaut, writing their ideas about the artform in journals like Cahiers du cinéma. Many New Hollywood directors were recent film school graduates (or dropouts) who ‘borrowed’ a lot of their ideas from the French and Italian New Waves of cinema.  

　　Truffaut was also a key exponent of the so-called auteur theory of filmmaking, arguing that the best cinema is the product of a singular vision of an individual artist. This contrasted with the Old Studio model, where (barring a few exceptions, like Alfred Hitchcock) directors were basically one hired hand amongst many technicians working on a film.  

　　‘Auteurism’ suited the interests of the executives at Paramount and Warner Bros at the time, who decided to take a hands-off approach. They would invest less money in films, but they would also allow young artists, who became known as the ‘Movie Brats’, much more freedom to make the films they wanted. The idea was they would thereby get better films for less money.  

　　The studios’ other consideration was that smaller, more mobile productions conveniently made it easier for them to circumvent the powerful Hollywood unions, hiring cheaper, non-union crews for shoots in so-called ‘right-to-work’ states, or over the Mexican border. The executives justified this by flattering the egos of New Hollywood auteurs, whose artistic vision they said was above the stultifying constraints of union pay rates and demands around working conditions. 

　　Charles Bludhorn, the owner who appointed Evans Paramount’s head of production, was very open about this more laissez-faire approach. He said that “when [our directors] don’t feel like marionettes pushed around by big studios, they become live… They really work like slaves for themselves” [our emphasis].  

　　Peter Bart, another Paramount producer at the time, described the freedom this created: “the minute we moved, everything changed. We lost all the committees, and it came down to a tiny group of us. We were all working faster, more closely together… all of a sudden good projects began to come to us.” (both quoted in Wasson, p158) 

　　This low-cost, high-ego method of filmmaking made New Hollywood productions notoriously exploitative and often shambolic. However, the new freedom afforded to directors led to one of, if not the, greatest periods in filmmaking history.  

　　In a few short years, Paramount alone produced Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather Parts I and II, The Conversation, Paper Moon, and of course Chinatown. Seminal films made at other studios around the same time include Taxi Driver, Easy Rider, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, The Graduate, Mean Streets, Deliverance, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Midnight Cowboy.  

　　Most of these films also did very well at the box office, especially considering their modest budgets. Such a concentration of classics had never been seen before, nor has it been seen since. 

　　Blockbusters and the end of the New Hollywood 

　　The New Hollywood was a brief opening for creativity made possible by the chaos and bankruptcy of the major studios, and the general atmosphere of cultural innovation and change in the post-war period. It was not planned, but an empirical response to market pressures, and it rapidly accumulated contradictions. 

　　By the mid-1970s (in fact, pretty much immediately after Chinatown’s release) New Hollywood’s time was already coming to an end. The studio executives were increasingly uncomfortable about risking their cash on the creative whims of auteur directors. They were looking for an even-more reliable investment. 

　　The New Hollywood always contained the seeds of its undoing. As noted, despite its ‘high art’ experimental side, it had always taken a certain amount of inspiration from B-movies: both in terms of content, and marketing methods. By the mid-1970s, cinemas had been monopolised by a few big companies, making it easier for studios to negotiate block bookings and release big films on huge numbers of screens simultaneously.  

　　Universal’s Jaws, which came out exactly a year to the day after Chinatown in 1975, released in over 450 screens, while Chinatown was released initially on only three screens – not unusual at the time. Jaws’ director, Steven Spielberg, was himself a ‘Movie Brat’ who had previously made a name for himself with the acclaimed, low-budget chase/horror movie, Duel. The plot of Jaws (basically a creature feature) and its marketing (which teased both violence and nudity), were in the classic B-movie tradition, but with the weight of a big studio behind it.  

　　The cost of booking out so many cinemas before the film had even received reviews (or positive word of mouth) was very high. This would have been too much of a risk for cash-strapped studios in the late 1960, when New Hollywood was born. By the mid-1970s, however, balance sheets had recovered – thanks precisely to the success of films like Chinatown and The Godfather. 

　　On top of that, the executives realised that the television didn’t have to be their competition – with enough money, it could be their ally. Jaws’ ambitious release was backed up by a huge advertising campaign on television. The combination of this campaign and the film’s wide availability turned it into a summer sensation, giving rise to the ‘blockbuster’, so called because people were queuing around the block for tickets. The even-greater smash hit of Star Wars in 1977 sealed the deal: Hollywood had found its new formula. 

　　This coincided with a number of chaotic, so-called ‘runaway’ New Hollywood productions, which were more expensive and were released late. This, the studio executives blamed on giving temperamental artists a free reign. Some notorious examples, such as Apocalypse Now, still received acclaim and performed well at the box office; while others, like Heaven’s Gate, were catastrophic failures. But when you consider that Apocalypse Now made $104 million on a $31 million budget, whereas Jaws made a massive $476 million on just a $9 million budget, it is clear why the studios felt it was time to shift gear. 

　　This all had artistic consequences. As historian Sam Wasson points out: “The tail would wag the dog. As promotional costs ascended, budgets increased, decreasing the funds once available for script development and preproduction – components ‘fundamental’... to the aesthetic mastery of Chinatown.” (p282). 

　　After Chinatown, Evans left as head of production at Paramount. The studio had noted Universal’s success with Jaws, and the blockbuster mentality took over. Michael Eisner became Paramount’s president in 1976. In 1981, he circulated this very telling memo within the company:  

　　“We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement. We must always make entertaining movies, and, if we make entertaining movies, at times, we will reliably make history, art, a statement or all three.” 

　　Despite the platitudes about the ‘importance’ of ‘at times’ making ‘art’, the spirit of monopoly capitalism’s crushing domination of creativity is clear. Making movies is simply an investment like any other. And should a formula be hit upon that allows money to be made from movies all the more reliably, without the complication of it having to be art or a ‘statement’, the likes of Eisner could be counted on to adopt that formula. 

　　Stagnation 

　　New Hollywood and Chinatown therefore represent a sort of microcosm of American capitalism’s cultural evolution after the war. There was a brief period of creative flourishing in the new political and economic situation, before the cultural forms created were monopolised and congealed into marketable clichés. 

　　As Thom Mount, head of production at Universal, said in 1978:  

　　“The sixties are relevant to me in the kinds of business ethics one exercises and in the choice of films to make. Yes, I’m in conflict about working inside a corporate structure, but what we learned in the sixties is that trying to build an alternative structure outside the system—given the power of the system—is never going to work.” 

　　The last part of this statement resonates strongly with the central message of Chinatown. 

　　The reason there was a period of particularly good filmmaking in the late 1960s and 1970s is down to many factors coinciding for a brief period of around 10 years. It was also far from perfect. The sheltering of the great auteur Polanski by the industry is indicative of the negative side of the egoism, exploitation and impunity that defined filmmaking practices in the era, as it does to this day.  

　　There is no direct and automatic relationship between art and the wider developments in society and the mode of production, but there is nevertheless a relationship. Today, Hollywood is in a creative nadir: spitting out a seemingly endless procession of sequels, prequels, reboots and increasingly formulaic superhero movies. We can see clearly that the general context of commercialisation of life at the hands of enormous monopolies has served to subordinate artistic creativity to tried and tested formulas. 

　　Moreover, according to the Economist, today “Hollywood seems to be growing more timid… trying not to offend important foreign markets”. As an example it gives the new film The Dissident, about the killing of Jamal Kashoggi by Saudi Arabia:  

　　No big streamer picked up The Dissident… Bryan Fogel, its Oscar-winning director, described streamers’ calculus as: ‘It’s better to keep our doors open to Saudi business and Saudi money than it is to… anger the kingdom.’  

　　The same article points out that Apple “parted ways with Jon Stewart, a comedian, who said the break-up was caused by the firm’s discomfort with his coverage on his Apple TV+ series of subjects such as excessive corporate profits in America.” (Economist, June 29th 2024). 

　　50 years after its release, it is hard to watch Chinatown and not think that filmmaking has largely regressed from this high watermark. On the other hand, as communists, we should recognise that the successes of New Hollywood are largely owed to the removal of interference from the money men, so that the writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, costumer designers and composers could be free to make great art. 

　　The fact that it burned out so quickly was a product of this ‘freedom’ being afforded within the constraints of the market. When this kind of creative liberty is combined with the freedom of humanity from the iron logic of the bosses’ profit system, so that all humanity has the freedom and resources to explore its creative potential, then this kind of cultural flowering, that blossomed and withered in a few short years, will return on an even-higher level.  

　　That is the future that a communist society promises: the removal of the crushing weight of the market from art so that it may be free, and all the better for it. 

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Deng Panyi 

　　From:https://www.marxist.com/chinatown-at-50-hollywood-s-dark-pinnacle.htm//(2024-8-7)