Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in My Neck

Films: The Fearless Vampire Killers (Dance of the Vampires)
Format: DVD from North Suburban Library District through interlibrary loan on various players.

I didn’t realize how successful Roman Polanski’s comedy/horror film The Fearless Vampire Killers (originally titled Dance of the Vampires and sometimes accompanied with the subtitle Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in My Neck, hence the title of this review) really was. There’s a musical version of it originally in German that played on Broadway. It’s also, as far as I know, Polanski’s only dip into comedy. That’s honestly probably a good thing, because this is not a comedy that has aged well.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here, though. The comedy hasn’t aged well. The rest of the movie actually has, more or less. The Fearless Vampire Killers is not that funny, and the humor it contains doesn’t translate to the modern age very well. But without the comedy, it’s still not a bad little vampire movie. It’s not great by any stretch, but it’s not bad.

Wednesday Horror: The Tenant (Le Locataire)

Film: The Tenant (Le Locataire)
Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

Yesterday, a great deal of what I wrote about was the problem of effusive praise for someone who may be morally repellent. In that review, I referenced something I wrote years ago about Chinatown. We’re heading into the same territory here, since The Tenant is Roman Polanski’s third film in his loose “Apartment Trilogy,” following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. .In some ways, as is the case with many trilogies, the third film is the weakest. This is not a Godfather III situation, though. In a lot of ways, The Tenant (Le Locataire) is as good as anything Polanski ever did.

In a lot of ways The Tenant explores the same themes as Repulsion, only this time from a male perspective. A man named Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski himself) needs an apartment in Paris and discovers one that is suddenly empty. He more or less bargains his way into the apartment with Monsieur Zy (Melvyn Douglas) and takes up residence despite what seems to be a certain level of hostility from the people around him, particularly the concierge (Shelley Winters). Trelkovsky also learns that the former resident of the apartment, an Egyptologist named Simone Choule has left the apartment vacant because of an attempted suicide. She threw herself out of the window and through a glass awning several stories below.

Off Script: The Ninth Gate

Film: The Ninth Gate
Format: IFC on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’m not necessarily one to judge someone else’s idea of a horror movie, but The Ninth Gate is not an easy fit into the genre. I suppose, since the film deals overtly with Satan, that there is a horror element to it, but this is much more of a suspense and mystery film than anything else. The elements of the supernatural that pop up really only happen once or twice in the middle and then a bit more heavily at the end despite all of the Lucifer this and Lucifer that through the running time. Still, it’s shown up on one of my horror lists, and I am, as ever, a slave to the lists.

Along those same lines, it’s worth saying that Roman Polanski makes interesting horror movies, or movies that at least contain some horror elements. The Ninth Gate fits in nicely with that crop of pseudo-horror films in his filmography. This is a movie that goes more for unsettling and mildly creepy rather than outright scares. Polanski is good at that, and I like The Ninth Gate probably a little more than it warrants.

In the Ghetto

Film: The Pianist
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

(This review is a part of the Blind Spots series. See others in the series for January at The Matinee.)

World War II is a common theme for films, and when it comes to World War II, the most common theme is to investigate aspects of The Holocaust. There are almost certainly more films on The List about this particular terrible part of humanity that any other topic with the possible exception of love and romance, and even then I’m not sure I’d take the bet. Because this is such a common topic for film, it becomes increasingly important for filmmakers to tell different stories rather than the standard tale of survival against crippling odds and horrifying brutality and inhumanity. And yet, in the long run, this is what most of the stories become—triumphs of simple humanity against a truly loathsome evil.

The Pianist is one such story that manages to transcend the idea of a tale about simple survival while essentially being a film about just that. Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a classically trained pianist who plays for Polish radio. On September 1, 1939, German troops cross the border into Poland, and both France and England declare war on Poland’s side. The Poles are convinced that the war will be won quickly and decisively, thanks to their allies coming to their aid.

Of course, this is not the case, and soon Poland is in the same grip of fear that plagues the rest of Europe. For Szpilman and his family, there is greater cause for alarm—they are Jewish, and the laws against them soon become restrictive. As Germany takes over, there are fewer and fewer rights available to the Jews and life becomes harder and harder. As the takeover progresses, so do the increasingly harsh laws, and as these go into effect, the behavior of the occupying forces become more and more openly sadistic. Eventually, the Jews are moved into a walled ghetto, a city within the city of Warsaw.

We follow Szpilman as he attempts to survive in the ghetto, tries to maintain a life with his family, and as he learns that there really is very little help from the outside world. A few friends do assist him, managing to get him out of the ghetto shortly before the uprising. He is moved into an allegedly abandoned apartment right across from the ghetto, which gives him a bard’s-eye view of the battles that go on there as well as the complete destruction of everything inside the walls.

Food becomes scarce, forcing him to go “prospecting” in other apartments with the hope of finding anything to eat. He is eventually found in a hiding place by a German officer named Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who allows him to survive and even brings him food and clothing before the tide of the war turns in favor of the Allied forces.

The story is based on the real-life experience of the real Wladyslaw Szpilman, which makes touches like this one easier to believe. I have no idea how much, if any, of the film was based on the real story and how much was tweaked to better fit a particular narrative. But knowing that there is some basis in fact on the events depicted does lend a certain air of authenticity to the story.

Adrien Brody is perhaps the perfect person to play this role. He has an unusually expressive face, and his natural gauntness makes him ideal as Szpilman begins to starve. He looks like a man who is starving already. Put him in clothing a few sizes too big, and it looks as if he hasn’t eaten in a week. Toward the end of the film, with a full beard grown in, he looks positively decrepit. The beard doesn’t fill out is face but instead enhances the appearance of emaciation.

What’s interesting here is the starkness of the environment. Forced to move from location to location, Szpilman regularly encounters areas of Warsaw that have become blasted landscapes on which he appears to be the only living thing. We witness depraved acts of inhumanity that are shocking at the start of the film and become simply a part of the environment by the end. It is this that makes Hosenfeld’s behavior so noteworthy and, in its own way, beautiful. He asks Szpilman to play, and sits enraptured by the man’s talent, and then acts to save him. It is as if saving this one thing of beauty—a man’s talent—is a way to repay for the complete destruction of a people, a culture, a society, and a country.

I have a tendency to like or love Polanski’s films. I like this one. Perhaps on a second, future viewing I will love it.

Why to watch The Pianist: It’s a World War II story that is very different from the standard.
Why not to watch: How much time do you want to spend in the Warsaw Ghetto?

Make Room for Satan!

Films: Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria
Format: DVDs from personal collection on laptop.

It’s October, which is uniquely associated with horror. This, naturally, is because of the presence of Halloween at the tail end. Well, Halloween happens to be my birthday, and it’s been awhile since I’ve had a good scare. That being the case, I’m going to look at some scary stuff today. I’m in that kind of a mood.


Roman Polanski is, or at least was at one point in his career, associated with horror of a sort. Repulsion, which I viewed earlier this year, is a slow descent into madness—an existential horror. This was the first in a loose trilogy of films recounting the horrors of living in the city, and of the three, the most believable. His second is Rosemary’s Baby, famous for any number of reasons, and most of them warranted. The third film in the trilogy is The Tenant, and while plenty weird, is the weakest of the three.

But let’s talk about Rosemary’s Baby, shall we? We have a delightful young couple named Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse (Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes) apartment shopping. The find a nicely furnished place in an old New York building (shown to them by character actor Elisha Cook, Jr.), and Rosemary falls in love with it. The price is high, but Guy, who works as an actor, thinks they can handle it, and the two move out of their old place and into the new one. However, before they go, their former landlord Hutch (Maurice Evans) warns them that their new building has something of a morbid history, the most gruesome being a former tenant named Adrian Marcato. Yes, that will be important.

Once in the apartment, Guy throws himself into his work, in part to afford the new place. Rosemary is lonely; we discover that she married the Jewish/Protestant Guy against the wishes of her Catholic parents. While she does have friends, she is alone much of the time, and soon strikes up an acquaintance with Terry (Victoria Vetri). Terry is a former addict rescued by the Castevets, who live on the same floor as the Woodhouses.

Shortly after their first meeting, though, things go south for Terry in a big way. She is discovered having committed suicide by leaping from the seventh floor of the building. Her guardians, Roman (Sidney Blackmer) and Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), now bring the Woodhouses into their lives and quickly become surrogate parents for the young couple. Shortly thereafter, Guy’s career gets a huge boost when his main rival for an important role is suddenly struck blind. He throws himself into his work even more, further isolating Rosemary. Despite this, the couple decide that they are ready to start a family. On the night they plan to start, Mrs. Castevet gives them a chocolate mousse (which she pronounces as “mouse”), which may well have something wrong with it. We’re certainly led to believe that it might be drugged. This is presaged by some strange chanting the couple here early in their tenancy.

What follows is one of the two most famous sequences from the film. Rosemary finds herself at the center of what appears to be a Satanic ritual, and disturbingly, she is the real attraction. Essentially, this is a supernatural rape scene, and Guy is not the rapist. Instead, the man in the center of the ring is the Prince of Darkness himself. She thinks it might be a dream, and she awakens with scratches, which Guy attributes to himself being a little wild the night before while she was passed out.

Shortly after this sequence, delusional or not (and despite her protesting), Rosemary discovers that she is pregnant. And everything in her world starts to fall apart. Much like in Repulsion before it and The Tenant after it, paranoia becomes the watchword. Rosemary begins to suspect that her delusion of being raped by Satan is not so much a delusion, but a fact. Things start happening around her and to her. She loses weight and is stricken by terrible pains. The doctor everyone tells her to see, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) prescribes bizarre treatments. She becomes more and more convinced that everyone in the building is a Satan worshipper, and even begins to suspect her husband. This is reinforced by the fact as the film continues, Rosemary looks more and more like she is wasting away.

While the initial set-up of the film is good, it really takes off after the rape sequence. Before this, especially in the opening, it’s a domestic drama. It might just as well be about Rosemary’s boredom and seeking a soulmate, looking in the apartment for someone to have an affair with. But slowly edges into weird, and then takes that hard left turn, and it never comes back. Rosemary slips in and out of paranoid delusions, and as the film continues, we’re led to believe that they aren’t so much delusions or altered reality as they are evidence that her world has slipped entirely into another, much darker and despairing reality. It’s no coincidence that Rosemary’s severe haircut happens just when she begins to feel more vulnerable; it’s almost as if she’s lost a piece of the armor that protects her.

Mia Farrow is also the perfect choice for the role, despite not being originally desired for the part. In this film, particularly with that little haircut, she is elfin and tiny, and always looks so frail and ready to snap. Her perceived frailty is just another thing for the audience to worry about as her paranoia deepens.

Say what you’d like about Polanski. The man can direct a hell of a film. Chinatown might be my personal favorite of his, but Rosemary’s Baby is in many ways a more effective (and affecting) film. What’s most impressive about it is that it so effectively scares the hell out of the audience without showing a single thing, other than a few flashes during the rape. We never get to see the baby, and so we never learn which of several possibilities is the reality. Instead, we only learn Rosemary’s reality. It’s genius.


On the other end of the scare spectrum is Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Where Polanski holds back everything from our vision and leaves the scare entirely in our minds, Argento gives us blood, guts, and some of the most creative murders ever filmed, and these are shown from stem to stern, with nothing left to the imagination. Often, it seems like filmmakers show us the blood and guts when they don’t trust themselves to do a good enough job of scaring us without it. That doesn’t seem to be the case with Argento, who uses it to push the scares over the edge into true creepsville.

I can vaguely remember this film coming out. Vaguely in the sense that I remember seeing a trailer for it on television. The trailer shows a woman from the back in a luridly colored sweater brushing her hair as a lullaby plays. Then the figure turns around, and we see that it’s a skeleton with luxurious black hair. Weird. Totally Argento. That trailer always intrigued me, but I forgot about the film for a long time until I came across it while Internet surfing. That intrigued me even more, and I hunted it down. While I was interested because of that memory of the trailer, it was hearing that Argento’s goal was to make a film that looked like a horror film made by Walt Disney. That I had to see.

The story takes place in Germany, although that’s not terribly important—it’s just sort of vaguely Europe-y. Our heroine, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper, who is very Karen Allen-y) is a young dancer, who has chosen to come to Europe to an exclusive conservatory of dance. She arrives late at night and during a rainstorm just as another girl is leaving. This girl is Pat Hingle (Eva Axen, who looks nothing like Pat Hingle, the actor), and she’s leaving because the conservatory has expelled her. She’s convinced that something terrible is happening at the school, but she lives long enough only to tell (and doom) a friend. Pat is killed in one of the most gruesome screen deaths I’ve ever seen. She is attacked through a window, repeatedly stabbed, and then a rope is thrown around her neck. Her body is then placed on a stained glass skylight. She breaks through, and when her body falls, the rope tightens around her neck, finishing the job. Her friend, meanwhile, is diced by the falling shards of stained glass.

Mysterious and terrible happenings continue at the school. Suzy suffers a swooning spell after a servant at the school bewitches her, and that night, all of the girls are attacked by a horde of maggots falling from the ceiling. The next day, the school’s blind piano player’s dog attacks a child and the pianist is released. That night, the dog attacks him brutally, killing him.

Following this, Suzy and her friend Sara (Stefania Casini) begin to investigate the school, but still under the spell, Suzy cannot awaken at night. Sara goes on her own and gets her own brutal death involving a room filled with razor wire, and yes, this is exactly as brutal as you’re imagining, and Argento shows it in gruesome detail. Her disappearance is simply explained away, leaving Suzy on her own to discover the terrible secret of the school.

Originally, Argento conceived of this film as taking place in a school for young girls, but realized (or was told) that with the brutality contained within, no one would release or show it. The killings are horrific, and seeing this done to children would immediately squash any distribution. So he changed the ages of the girls, but changed nothing else. What that means is that much of the dialogue appears geared for pre-teens, and listening to the girls bicker with each other like junior high school kids requires a mental leap. Argento also rearranged the set so that things like doorknobs were set higher, making the girls appear smaller, and more childlike. Additionally, the film is shot with huge blocks of primary and secondary colors. There are huge blocks of blue, red, and green light. Everything is hyper-colorized. The blood looks not like blood, but a thick, red syrup, almost like strawberry ice cream topping or unset Jell-O. It creates a strange non-reality for the film that, to me, adds to the experience even as it makes the film less scary. It’s unsettling and disturbing, though.

The most frightening part of the film is the soundtrack created by Italian prog-rock band Goblin. At times childish, like a music box, at other times the soundtrack pounds with a demonic intensity with wild drums and howling, incoherent vocals. This, almost as much as the bizarre and unsettling visuals, is the driving force behind the film. Listen for yourself—this is the international trailer for the film, and it features Goblin’s work: Suspiria International trailer(This is not safe for kids or those with tender tummies.)

Suspiria is an aggressive film. The shots are intended to be visually unsettling, and they are. A few minutes into the film, there is really no safe harbor for the audience because the world constantly skews further and further away from typical reality. Because of this, there is a haunted quality here, but not a romantic one. There’s nothing romantic about this film. Argento’s demons and witches are hungry ones, rampant, aggressive, and terrible, and stop at nothing to get what they want, both on screen and from the audience watching.

While not the scariest film I’ve seen, or even the most disturbing of this year, Suspiria is absolutely worth watching. There is no other film like it, and few that went this far to be visually innovative. That, and the soundtrack, is what will haunt you, not the action on the screen.

Why to watch Rosemary’s Baby: Terrifyingly scary and showing virtually nothing.
Why not to watch: It’s nightmare fuel.

Why to watch Suspiria: Horror, Disney-style.
Why not to watch: The characters don’t always fit the dialogue.

Crazy Scary

Films: Sien Nui Yau Wan (A Chinese Ghost Story), Repulsion
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library projected on big screen (Sien Nui), DVD from Rockford Public Library projected on big screen/finished on big ol’ television (Repulsion)

It’s April Fool’s day, which means that I’m watching comedies, right? Well, April Fool, constant reader, we’re watching weird stuff from other lands. Comedies would be far too predictable for this day. Anyway, there’s a need for me to continue watching films that are new to me and foreign films as well.


We’ll start with Sien Nui Yau Wan, known as A Chinese Ghost Story in the U.S. This film is based on a traditional and popular Chinese folk tale of a young man and a ghost who fall in love. The man, Ling Choi Sin (Leslie Cheung) is a debt collector who ends up spending a night in a haunted temple. There he meets Lit Sin Seen (Joey Wang), who is a ghost in the service of a powerful and evil tree demon.

The tree demon needs the flesh of men to stay powerful, so it is Lit’s job to lure men to their doom. Additionally, the tree demon has promised Lit in marriage to a much more powerful demon, and the wedding is in three days. Ling falls for the beautiful ghost, though, and wants to save her from her terrible fate. To do so, he must face all of hell with the help of a Taoist swordsman named Yin Chek Hsia (Ma Wu).

What follows is a film that either wants to be everything to all people or can’t decide on what it truly is. Is it a romance? Yes. Is it a martial arts film with amazing stunts and effects? Yes. Is it a comedy? Yes. It plays very much like an homage to early Sam Raimi films, particularly the first two Evil Dead films throughout. Some of the effects are wonderful. The black demon, for instance, when pierced with a weapon, reveals hundreds of disembodied heads beneath his cloak. These fly out and attack the group in a scene that is a bit disturbing.

What really doesn’t work is most of the comedy. It doesn’t blend as seamlessly into the rest of the film the way it does in Raimi’s work, and the comedy especially feels like a harkening back to much of what Raimi has done in the past. Whether that’s intentional or simply a merging of two similar styles, I can’t tell. Some of the pieces are funny, but they just don’t seem to blend well with the story the film is telling.

The stunt work is tremendous, though. It’s important to remember that while in this day and age, a lot of what we’d see in a film like this would be CGI or similar trickery, this is all real stunt work performed by real people. Much of it is wonderful to watch and performed beautifully throughout. The battle sequences, and the traditional “people flying through the air with swords” expected in Hong Kong films are certainly here, and they are beautifully done as well.

I’ll grant that it’s a good story—it was a popular Chinese story for a reason, after all. But I’m completely flummoxed as to how this ended up on this list. It’s fun, but I have no desire to ever watch it again, and see no need to watch it again. There wasn’t enough there. There are other more interesting ghost stories in the world (El Espinazo del Diablo, for instance), and more interesting martial arts films (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) to make this anything more than a simple curiosity. Sorry Hong Kong cinema; your actors may fly, but the film doesn’t.

It’s worth noting that the English subtitles on at least the version that I had are ridiculously terrible. Sometimes, it was easier to try to just follow the action on the screen than to try to parse the Engrish along the bottom.


Repulsion is a whole different story. While the film is in English, it feels very much like a foreign film. This is in part due to the heavy accent of Catherine Deneuve, and in part due to the direction of Roman Polanski. It is his first English-language film, and it feels like it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a true thing.

The film tells the story of the meteoric descent into insanity of Carole (Deneuve). A Belgian girl living in England with her sister, Carole works in a spa doing the nails of women with enough money to spend their days in spas. Her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux) is the opposite of Carole. While Carole is shy, retiring, and timid, Helen is outgoing and sexually independent. She is in the middle of a relationship with a married man (Ian Hendry), who attempts to be nice to Carole.

However, Carole is incredibly repressed. While she has a boyfriend named Colin (John Fraser), Carole shrinks from his touch and almost refuses to talk to him. She frequently forgets dates with him because the idea of sex, let alone intimacy, terrifies her. Helen, on the other hand, has loud sex with her boyfriend in the apartment, forcing Carole to listen in.

Helen and her boyfriend go on vacation together leaving Carole home alone. And this is where things start to go wrong. Carole quickly spirals into a combination of depression and insanity, where every noise is a stalking predator and every thought is of rape and murder. As she spirals further and further into this mental quagmire, events get out of control, leading to a terrible but inevitable climax.

There are two things worth saying about Repulsion, both of them conscious choices by Polanski. First is that the film stock is incredibly grainy and at times difficult to watch. I’ve seen grainy films before (Clerks and Man Bites Dog spring to mind), but it bothers me a lot more here. I’m certain that Polanski had a reason to place the film on such stock—as Carole’s world becomes detached from reality, so too is our ability to accurately see what is happening made difficult. Okay, artistically valid, but that doesn’t make it easy to watch.

Second, this film is slow. This is actually the second time I’ve tried to watch Repulsion; I fell asleep the first time a month or so ago. When things happen, they happen suddenly and shockingly, but part of this shock is that nothing seems to happen for a really long time otherwise. For all of the rapidity of Carole’s descent into madness, it seems like we’re watching it in real time.

This isn’t unusual for Polanski. The Tenant worked very much the same way. I guess for a film that has been selected so often as such a dangerous and threatening film, I expected things to move faster.

Why to watch Sien Nui Yau Wan: A cool, traditional Chinese story.
Why not to watch: You’ve seen it all somewhere before, just maybe not all in the same place.

Why to watch Repulsion: A gripping descent into insanity.
Why not to watch: A gripping descent into insanity and gritty film stock.

Separating the Man from His Art

Film: Chinatown
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.
















It is nearly impossible to discuss the films of Roman Polanski without at some level discussing Polanski himself. As a filmmaker he’s often lauded with great and deserved praise. He’s a hell of a filmmaker, and at least four of his films—Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist, and today’s current offering, Chinatown are on this list. It’s possible that there are more on the list and I’m merely forgetting them. There’s little question that Polanski is one of the great directors of the modern age.

It’s his personal life where things start to get a little fuzzy. In his personal life, Polanski’s best known for two things. First, he was married to Sharon Tate when she was brutally killed by the Manson family, and he reportedly committed statutory rape on a 13-year-old girl and fled the United States. It’s difficult to distinguish between the man and the man’s art, and for some, it can be nearly impossible. It’s unfortunate to consider that, for instance, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Ezra Pound, was also a fascist sympathizer. He was, and his poetry is still worth reading despite this. It’s critical to separate the craft from the man—while he may be repugnant or terrible, his movies are ballsy and terrific, Chinatown no less than any other. It’s important to note this particularly with Chinatown, since this was Polanski’s last American film.

Polanski’s films worth watching. Perhaps only Rosemary’s Baby is better known and admired than Chinatown, which also contains one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest and best-known roles. Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private investigator who is hired by a woman to follow her husband. She suspects him of having an affair, and wants the truth revealed. The man in question, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) also happens to be the chief engineer for the L.A. water and power division. Since the city is currently suffering from a drought and many local crops are dying on the vine, there is pressure for him to build a new dam—which he refuses to do because the land can’t support the weight.

Gittes tails the man and discovers some interesting things. Primarily, he discovers that at night, desperately needed fresh water is being dumped into the ocean, undoubtedly to make the crisis worse. Things get extremely interesting when the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) appears in his office and accuses him of investigating her husband (and accusing him of infidelity) when she never hired him to do anything. It gets even more confusing and perilous when Gittes, trying to make everything right, goes to find Hollis Mulwray and discovers instead that the police are investigating his murder.

This is merely the start of this film, which plumbs very convoluted depths of human depravity and evil, particularly in terms of greed and sex. As Gittes gets deeper and deeper into discovering exactly what is happening with the water of Los Angeles, the death of Mulwray, and how much money really is tied up in getting water to the farms, he finds himself pulled further and further into something he can’t step away from. This is classic detective noir. Once on the trail, Gittes can’t stop until he knows everything, regardless of the cost.

One of the most memorable scenes is Gittes heading to one of the reservoirs and being on the business end of an opened sluice. When he reclimbs the fence to leave, he is accosted by a pair of threatening men, one of whom Gittes knows. The other (played by Polanski himself) slits Gittes’s nose with a switchblade. Gittes spends the middle of the film with his face bandaged, which makes him appear far more vulnerable. What is more interesting here is that while Gittes appears more vulnerable with the bandages in place, he doesn’t truly become vulnerable until the bandages are removed.

What is disturbing about Chinatown is how much it is an indictment on American justice in addition to being a great, twisting and convoluted mystery. As the plot shifts and changes, it quickly becomes evident that what is happening is because of money, and the money is what allows it to continue to happen. Those who are wealthy in this world of the film are capable of anything. Their money truly is power, and that power only gives them more money—and nothing can be done about it.

Chinatown was originally planned as the first movie in a trilogy, and while The Two Jakes was a sort of sequel to this, the original plan was quite different. It would have been interesting to see the films that were planned here, because this is the sort of story that leaves no one involved in it untouched. Gittes could never have been the same man after this experience.

While this is absolutely Nicholson’s film, it is astonishing how much of the film is dominated by the character of Noah Cross (John Huston). In only a trio of scenes, Huston looms large over this film. With maybe 15 minutes of screen time, he nonetheless controls almost all of the action, and is a presence felt in nearly every frame after his first appearance.

Polanski, guilty of whatever crimes he was after the making of this film, still made one hell of a film. The great film doesn’t excuse the crime, and the crime doesn’t affect the quality of the movie. Hate me for this or not, Polanski's movies work for me.

Why to watch Chinatown: An easily followed but complex plot, and one of Polanski’s best.
Why not to watch: I honestly can’t think of a good reason.