OK, if I had a hard time with trying to find something new to say about The Best Years of Our Lives since I wrote about that one once before, Chinatown should be a much bigger challenge. I covered that in the original AFI countdown, a second Gabbing Geek article where I just outright recommended it, and have said on more than one occasion is it my all-time second favorite film and my favorite American one. Since my goal here is to always try to find something new to say, what do I say about a film that I have spoken up many times before? Is there something I can cover?
Oh yeah, and it was such a small thing I didn’t even think about all that much before. It all comes down to how one man keeps misprouncing a name.
Much of what I would and have said in the past about Chinatown focused very much on the murder mystery aspect and the horrifying secret Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Cross Mulwray has been holding back from private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson). There’s the mysterious, generally mute young girl Katherine (Belinda Palmer) and how she is related to Evelyn, Evelyn’s murdered husband Hollis (Darrell Zwerling), and Evelyn’s morally gross father Noah (John Huston). I’ve seen this film a few times. I know what the twist is. I know who exactly Katherine is and what was implied to have gone down between Evelyn, Noah, and Hollis. I also know that, despite the fact this is a noir where characters are supposed to be much more morally ambiguous at best, that Jake and (from what little we see of him) Hollis both seem to be good men doing the best they can in a corrupt world.
However, Noah Cross more than makes up for that given everything we the audience learn about him in the course of a two hour or so film. His speech on how a person never knows what they might be capable of and how he has no shame over being caught says quite a bit about the man, a bit a friend reminded me of when I discussed the angle I was going to take with this write-up, but it may be at its most obvious and most subtle–given how monstrous Cross is, hardly anything he does can be seen as “subtle”–in one small way, and it’s something he does many times throughout the film, a small thing that only he does: he never pronounces Jake’s name correctly.
“Gittes,” according to Jake and every other character in the film, is pronounced “Git-ees”. Cross always pronounces it as “Gits”. Jake corrects him the first time, but no other time after that. Cross just will not pronounce Jake’s name correctly.
That may be the whole key to the character. He does things wrong, he’s powerful, and not only can no one stop him, but at the same time, he doesn’t really care, particularly since his refusal to do something as simple as pronounce a name correctly is just an exercise in his personal power.
The way I see it, I last wrote about Chinatown five years ago in 2018. Since then, the conversation around billionaires has changed a bit. The very concept of the “good billionaire,” the Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark or even Scrooge McDuck, seems to be an increasingly fictional concept. True, more than a few billionaires do still have fans, and there were also people even then questioning whether or not a good billionaire could exist. But then there’s something like the Knives Out sequel Glass Onion where the big, shocking revelation is something so many viewers might have missed just because of how our culture speaks of such people that even the characters in the movie fail to recognize it right away, namely that a prominent character, spoken of so highly by all, is actually nowhere near as bright as he was made out to be. Watching the Knives Out movie reminded me so much of certain real world figures that I said, at the time, that if I didn’t know better I might suspect that Rian Johnson didn’t just write the script the previous week since his script was actually more relevant thanks to recent events than it might have been when Johnson and his cast and crew actually started to make the movie. I am just, as a person, more aware of how awful so many billionaires are in public, often without even a hint of personal awareness that they might be in the wrong or that they may be nowhere near as benevolent as they like to pretend they are.
Doesn’t that, in many ways, describe Noah Cross? True, Chinatown never exactly says what the general public thinks of Noah Cross, but he is a man who could take credit for bringing water to the desert and making Los Angeles habitable. The film may suggest Hollis Mulwray is the real genius there, and that likewise wouldn’t look too out of place for a lot of people who follow billionaires, where Steve Wozniak should probably get more credit than Steve Jobs in creating what we recognize as Apple Computers today or a host of other similar instances real and fictional. I would even think that the success of something like HBO’s Succession goes a long way towards showing just how the fictional billionaire has fared of late.
That is how age and awareness changed the way I could see and enjoy this film–if “enjoy” is the right word given the subject matter. There’s nothing good or benevolent in Noah Cross. He’s a gross old man, reaching out for the daughter/granddaughter who should be kept away from him, Evelyn dead from a gunshot to the head, Hollis from drowning, and the one man who knows the truth can’t get anyone to do anything about it. It’s not an unbelievable scenario to be sure, but how much more believable is it today when some of the real-world rich and powerful are a lot less inclined to hide their dirty deeds from the public than Noah Cross apparently is.
Besides, when Jake asks how much money a man needs, I would think it’s not that simple. The way I see it, the very sort of drive that makes a person that rich isn’t the sort of thing that they can just shut off. It’s not about the money. It’s about the power and the acquisition. Those aren’t the sorts of things Jake is all that interested in, and it doesn’t look like these are the sorts of things that Jake has the power to even affect anyway.
So, as much as I wasn’t sure I could say something new about Chinatown, I did find something in how my own views have evolved over time. And with all that in mind, what does this say about director Roman Polanski’s actions, ones that are a little too close to what happened in this film? I can still somewhat separate the art from the artist when it comes to Chinatown, but the small detail of a mispronounced name makes that a lot more difficult now than it was just five years ago.
NEXT: Hey, speaking of looking into despicable behavior by powerful people, up next is the 2015 film Spotlight about the reporters at the Boston Globe who dug up the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal.
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