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"Michael Eaton's compelling study of Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir situates Chinatown in relation to a history of fictional detectives, from Sophocles to Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. In an absorbing account of the film's narrative development and visual style, he traces Chinatown's relationship to the pessimism of American cinema (and, by extension, in wider American culture) in the mid-1970s, and the source of the film's narrative and visual impact. In his afterword to this new edition, Eaton considers Chinatown's 1990 sequel The Two Jakes and also the movie's changing fortunes in the years since its release"--
Sommario
Acknowledgements
'Chinatown'
Afterword to the 2024 Edition
Notes
Credits
Bibliography
Info autore
Michael Eaton is a screenwriter and playwright. His screen credits include Fellow Traveller, Shoot to Kill, Signs and Wonders and Shipman.
Riassunto
Directed in 1974 by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne, Chinatown is a brilliant reworking of film noir set in a drought-stricken Los Angeles of the 1930s. Jack Nicholson stars as J. J. Gittes, a private eye who, despite his best intentions, can bring only disaster on Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the enigmatic woman he has come to love. Gittes’s investigation into the death of Evelyn’s husband exposes a chaos of political corruption and sexual violence lurking beneath a glittering, sun-bleached surface.
Michael Eaton’s compelling study situates Chinatown in relation to a history of fictional detectives, from Sophocles to Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. In an absorbing account of the film’s narrative development and visual style, he traces Chinatown’s relationship to the pessimism of American cinema (and, by extension, the wider culture) in the mid-1970s, and the source of the film’s narrative and visual impact.
In his afterword to this new edition, Eaton considers Chinatown’s 1990 sequel The Two Jakes and also the movie’s changing fortunes in the years since its release.
Prefazione
A new edition of Michael Eaton's study of Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) in the BFI Film Classics series.
