Chinatown is about seeing without understanding, and rushing headlong where angels fear to tread. Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a true-blue American — which is to say venal, well-meaning, blindly stumbling around, certain of his own abilities, confident of final victory, and the unwitting architect of his own defeat.
The mystery (centered on a real-life scheme to profit from L.A.'s water rights) is labyrinthine; the payoff, legendary. And personally, I think this, rather than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is Jack Nicholson's best performance.
Too often people associate the word "masterpiece" with the spinach your tenth grade English teacher made you eat. Chinatown is a masterpiece in the best sense of the word — enthralling, thrilling, moving, and yes, even occasionally thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.
I suppose One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is Jack Nicholson's most famous performance, but I think Chinatown is his best — and it's not close.
As for Roman Polanski, he presents me with a bit of a philosophical conundrum. On the one hand, I think Chinatown is the best movie of 1974 (and maybe of the decade). On the other hand, I also think Polanski, the film's director, is a morally-reprehensible human being who should spend the rest of his natural life in an American jail. Can I hand him an award for what showed up on the screen without also making myself complicit in his crime?
I've written about cognitive dissonance before (here) — that uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously:
The farther I get into blogging about movies and their history, the clearer it becomes that the people who made great movies weren't necessarily great people, and certainly what you see on the screen doesn't reflect what you would have seen in their private lives. John Ford was an insufferable bastard, Henry Fonda was a terrible father, Woody Allen married his girlfriend's daughter. ... Jane Greer, on the other hand, was as sweet as chess pie, as loyal as a faithful dog and as brave as your average Marine, but that doesn't mean she wasn't absolutely riveting as the murderous femme fatale Kathy Moffit in the noir classic, Out of the Past.
There are any number of ways you can handle unpleasant information about the people who make movies. My father refused to watch Jane Fonda because of her politics; my mother-in-law wouldn't watch John Wayne because of his. Which is a pity from the point of view of the movie fan because it means you miss out on Klute and The Searchers ...
You can also go the other way and excuse behavior of your heroes you would never forgive of your enemies. Thus you'll find plenty of petitions seeking to free Roman Polanski despite committing a crime you'd insist your neighbor be buried for. Our brains are hard-wired that way, or so scientists tell us, something to remember the next you (or I) want to beat someone senseless for taking a position we don't agree with. There's not much future for the republic if we're forever choosing to behave like territorial pack animals.
In writing this blog, I have opted for a third way. I have in the past and will continue in the future to distill out the professional from the personal, the on-screen persona from the private one, and though I have written about both, and will continue to do so, I've been choosing awards and reviewing movies strictly based on the former. Some of the winners have been creeps and some have been saints, but all of them have done something on screen that I think is worth your time and attention.
It's either that or stop writing about movies altogether. But then anything you write is guaranteed to offend somebody. After all, I imagine there are still some people out there who insist the world is flat. You can't please everybody.
That was true when I wrote it ten years ago. If anything, it's even more true now.
My good friend Mister Muleboy and I met at the AFI-Silver last night to see the classic 1974 heist flick, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, part of film historian Eddie Muller's annual Noir City DC film series. By the Czar of Noir's own admission, Pelham isn't really noir, but this year's focus is on heist films and Pelham is one of that genre's finest examples — it'd be a crime to leave it out.
If you're not familiar with the story, four heavily-armed men hijack a New York City subway train and hold its passengers hostage; their demands: the city must deliver $1 million in cash within the hour or they start shooting the hostages.
Nobody can quite believe someone would hijack a subway train —
"You know me, I'll believe anything."
"A train has been hijacked."
"I don't believe it."
— but the machine-gun wielding hijackers, led by Robert Shaw's Mr. Blue, are serious. Deadly serious.
We pick up the caper already in progress with four men perfectly timing their boarding of a subway train at four different stops with nothing but David Shire's propulsive industrial-jazz score to clue us into the unfolding drama. And then Robert Shaw quietly shoves a pistol in the motorman's face and announces he's taking his train.
Negotiations ensue. On the other end of the tense back-and-forth is Walter Matthau as the deceptively sluggish and slovenly transit police lieutenant Zachary Garber. He's sleepy-eyed, fashion-challenged, politically incorrect and bored stiff with the public relations aspects of his job.
But as the drama unfolds and the stakes are raised higher and higher, he reveals himself to be a precise, pacing, fidgeting coiled spring — a true professional, a perfect New York match for Shaw's dapper English mercenary.
I won't spoil the ending for you other than to say that the last scene is completely surprising, utterly perfect and absolutely fearless in its quiet simplicity. I can't imagine a Hollywood studio now having the guts and audacity to pull it off.
In some recent reviews (here and here), I've been struck by how little backstory and context you can get away with and still have a coherent movie with three-dimensional characters — Hemingway's iceberg principle played out not on the page but on the screen.
The screenplay by Peter Stone (Charade) is based on a novel by John Godey, but while the novel is larded with typical backstories for the villians and their hostages, and cliched interior monologues all around, Stone wisely trusts good casting to flesh out the novel's characterizations.
Pelham reminded me again how a great actor wears his backstory on his face and tells it in his voice, his walk, his gestures or even in his silences.
With a minimum of exposition, Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam (as the sneezy, wheezy Mr. Green) and Hector Elizondo (as the psychotic Mr. Grey) fully inhabit their characters, leaving no doubt about who what and why they are, and giving you a pretty good guess how they got there and where they're going.
Likewise, with the same lack of fuss, director Joseph Sargent tells the story of the city itself. Filmed in Manhattan, Pelham is down there in the gutters with the garbage at a time when a great city had lost faith in itself.
A scene with Tony Roberts as the deputy mayor and Lee Wallace as an Ed Koch-style mayor (four years before Koch actually held that office) tells you everything you need to know about the dire state of the local government. The comic tensions between the terrifically cartoonishly Tom Pedi as the brash loudmouth "Fat Caz" Dolowicz and Beatrice Winde as the new African-American female hire covers changing social mores. And the subway car full of characters identified in the credits only as The Salesman, The Hooker, The Spanish Woman, etc. speaks to the city's changing demographics.
You can practically taste the grime.
But a movie that's nothing more than a slice of the current reality isn't much of a movie. Pelham is also one of the all-time great heist films, intricate in its planning, taut in its execution. There's a lot of humor and a lot of talk but there's never a slack moment, never a word or gesture wasted. You're wonderfully on edge from beginning to end.
A classic.
Four stars (out of four).
End Notes:
1) The four hijackers have code names based on colors: Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Brown and Mr. Grey. Quentin Tarantino recycled the idea for 1992's classic Reservoir Dogs.
2) Peter Stone's most important contribution to the film's adaptation was to consolidate multiple police detectives into the single character of Matthau's Lt. Garber, creating the perfect counterweight to Shaw's Mr. Blue.
3) Before the movie, I got to meet film historian Eddie Muller, author and host of TCM's Noir Alley, and whom the great James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) has dubbed "The Czar of Noir." I had just bought his book Gun Crazy about the making of the classic 1950 movie when I turned around and there he was sitting alone at a café table. I asked him if he'd be signing books after the show and he said, heck, he'd sign it right now! borrowed my blood red ink pen and whipped off an amusing little note along with his signature — one of the few times I've met a fellow writer and walked away feeling like anything other than a witless hillbilly dilettante. Thanks, Mr. Muller!
This final collection spans two years simply because Lennon put out a studio album of original material in 1974, McCartney in 1975, but not vice versa.
The Beatles Solo: 1974-1975
SIDE ONE
● Venus and Mars/Rockshow – Paul (3:46) (A favorite pastime of the press is to build someone up to ridiculous heights, tear him down because he gets a nose bleed way up there on that pedestal, then write a lovely redemption story after he bounces off the bottom — or a "whatever happened to" story if he doesn't. It's a lazy narrative arc and we could surely do with something better, but in the mid-1970s, McCartney was riding his redemption story to the toppermost of the poppermost, with five straight number one albums. Critics eventually went back to ripping him with the release of Back to the Egg in 1979, but he wrote hit singles into the 1980s, hit albums to the present day, and has won every award known to mankind. This is the single edit, which made it to #12 in the U.S. charts.)
● Whatever Gets You Thru the Night – John (3:28) (Lennon's only solo #1 hit during his lifetime, part of me thinks even that was only because Elton John sang vocals with him. The song came to him one night when he stumbled across a sermon by Reverend Ike while channel surfing. Elton predicted this track would hit the top of the charts and got the skeptical Lennon to agree that if it did, they would play live together during Elton's upcoming concert at Madison Square Garden. The rest is rock n roll history.)
● Stand By Me – John (3:28) (From John's oldies album, Rock 'n' Roll, this cover of the Ben E. King classic was a top twenty hit. For such a simple recording, there's a long, tortuous history behind it, including accusations of plagiarism, lawsuits and countersuits, stolen tapes and gunfire in the studio. You can read about it here. All you really need to know is that this was the last record Lennon released before his five-year self-exile from the music scene.)
● Magneto and Titanium Man – Paul (3:16) (Actually, even though Venus and Mars hit number one on the charts, it did so for only a week, and compared to the success of Band on the Run, was considered something of a disappointment. This song, based on the Marvel comic book characters, was the flip side of "Venus and Mars/Rockshow," the third single from the album.)
● (It's All Down To) Goodnight Vienna – Ringo (3:01) (The title tune to Ringo's fourth album, Lennon wrote it — that's him on the count-in. Appearing twice on the album, this version combines elements of both and was released as a single in the U.S. It only reached #31 in the charts. Apparently nobody was in the mood to buy this paean to the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
SIDE TWO
● #9 Dream – John (4:47) (Appropriately enough, the lyrics came from a dream. Lennon later dismissed this as a "throwaway," but it's the best thing on Walls and Bridges and it cracked the top ten as a follow-up to "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.")
● Dark Horse – George (3:55) (The title tune from George's worst solo album. He was suffering from laryngitis but recorded a record anyway, an effort the critics dubbed "Dark Hoarse." A failed marriage, a return to drugs and alcohol, and the pressure of having to fulfill a recording contract were all getting to him. Still, I love the single, which hit #15 in the U.S. If you like anything else from the album, I'm happy for you.)
● Listen to What the Man Said – Paul (3:57) (A #1 hit in the U.S. Recorded in New Orleans with what I think was the fifth iteration of the Wings lineup, with Joe English joining the group on drums and Tom Scott sitting in on saxophone. Looking back at the contemporaneous reviews, the critics wanted to hate this but grudgingly conceded it was really good pop music — damn those catchy melodies! This is the version from Wingspan without the unintelligible muttering between tracks.)
● Bless You – John (4:38) (A love letter to Yoko during their long separation. Lennon also offers words of encouragement here to David Spinozza, a session musician from the Mind Games era who may or may not have been sleeping with Yoko in his absence. Certainly John was sleeping with May Pang with Yoko's encouragement. John and Yoko had a very strange relationship, but then they were very strange people.)
● Scared – John (4:37) (This is also about Lennon's separation from Yoko, but the other side of the coin. "Hatred and jealousy, gonna be the death of me / I guess I knew it right from the start / Sing out about love and peace / Don't want to see the red raw meat / The green eyed goddamn straight from your heart.")
SIDE THREE
● Junior's Farm – Paul (4:24) (Written at songwriter Curly Putman, Jr's farm, recorded in Nashville. Released as a standalone single in 1974, it hit #3 on the U.S. charts, just #16 in the U.K.)
● Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox) – John (2:55) (A love song for May Pang, that's Elton John on backing vocals. According to the Beatles Bible, it took three hours of takes for Elton to match Lennon's phrasing. "People were leaving the room," Elton said later. "Razor blades were being passed out!")
● No No Song – Ringo (2:34) (Ringo's last unalloyed commercial success, a #3 hit in the U.S. He never cracked the top twenty again. Not being a songwriter himself, Ringo had to rely on the kindness of strangers for his material, and unfortunately, with each passing year strangers and friends alike grew more and more careless, palming off indifferently-written dreck that left Ringo's limited vocal talents very much exposed. I suspect it didn't help that he started chasing musical trends — Ringo does disco! — or, if you'll pardon me for saying so, that he was drinking like a fish. His next album, Rotogravure, limped in at #28 in the charts, the three after at #162, #129 and #98, respectively. In the 1980s, he was the narrator of the Thomas the Tank Engine series.)
● Old Dirt Road – John (4:12) (Co-written with Harry Nilsson. Along with the Who's Keith Moon and ex-Beatle Ringo, Nilsson was one of John's drinking mates during the Lost Weekend. Compared to those legendary boozers, Lennon was a relative lightweight. And yet he could fall down with the best of them.)
● Letting Go – Paul (4:32) (This is the album version of a song that was later remixed and edited for release as a single. It hit only #39 in the charts, McCartney's first single to miss the top twenty in the U.S. since "Mary Had a Little Lamb," which hardly counts. He wouldn't suffer another flop until "Mull of Kintyre," the biggest selling single in U.K. history at that time but which failed to chart altogether in the U.S.)
SIDE FOUR
● You – George (3:43) (George followed up 1974's critically-panned Dark Horse with Extra Texture, the second worst album of his career. Released as a single, "You" made it to #20 in the U.S. The follow-up single, "This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying)" — no, really, that's what it was called — failed to chart at all. Harrison would eventually regain his form, if not all of his commercial appeal, and would make some great records as part of the Traveling Wilburys.)
● Sally G – Paul (3:41) (The flip side of "Junior's Farm," this was in itself a top twenty hit. A country-and-western love letter to Nashville where McCartney recorded the single, this got a lot of radio play in my hometown back in the day. That's Johnny Gimble on the fiddle, Lloyd Green on the pedal steel guitar.)
● Steel and Glass – John (4:38) (Most people assume this is about Allen Klein, John's choice to manage the Beatles after the death of Brian Epstein, and whom Lennon would later sue, but John said it wasn't that simple. "[L]ike a novel writer, if I'm writing about something other than myself, I use other people I know or have known as examples. If I want to write a 'down' song, I would have to remember being down, and when I wrote Steel And Glass I used various people and objects. If I had listed who they were, it would be a few people, and you would be surprised. But it really isn't about anybody ... For sure, it isn't about Paul and it isn't about Eartha Kitt.")
● Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out) – John (5:10) (Lennon wrote this one with Frank Sinatra in mind who, unfortunately, never recorded it. Would have made a great companion piece to "One For My Baby.")
● Call Me Back Again – Paul (4:59) (McCartney doing a soul number in New Orleans with Jimmy McCulloch on guitar. A live version appeared on Wings Over America.)
Total Running Time: 79:42.
What have we got here — 9 Lennon's, 7 McCartney's, 2 Harrison's, 2 Starr's. The final totals: John 37, Paul 37, George 20, Ringo 9. 103 total.
That's it. As usual for the Monkey, this has been an exhausting exercise in overkill. I hope the nineteen people who read it get a small modicum of pleasure from the effort.
Chinatown, not One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is the best performance of Jack Nicholson's career, and I almost gave him the award for best actor of 1974. But The Conversation is the best performance of Gene Hackman's career and that's who I'm going with. But fret not, Jack wins next year.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:Chinatown (prod. Robert Evans)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Young Frankenstein (prod. Michael Gruskoff)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats The Soul) (prod. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Gene Hackman (The Conversation)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Gene Wilder (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Gena Rowlands (A Woman Under The Influence)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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