Chinatown: Moral Infidelity of Private Investigations

“Chinatown” by Roman Polanski a neo-noir mystery film that was released in 1974. A film with great complications to the films’ genre. The film “Chinatown” fits more towards a subgenre movie as to the film “The Departed” rather than the film “Les Miserables”. My approach to the genre of the film is best described to be a drama/mystery film. The film “Chinatown” is almost similar to the film “The Big Sleep” since it has a similar story but just different subjects. However, the film is also similar to the film “Big Maltese” as well. Given that in the film a task was assigned to investigate a problem with private investigators.

One of the amazing things about Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” is that it invokes in so many different ways the American popular genre of the hard-boiled detective story. The film seems to strongly associate itself with two films, both of which starred Humphrey Bogart: John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” and Howard Hawk’s “The Big Sleep”. The story begins when the hard-boiled hero is given a task by a client. It is normal that this type of task is a deceptive one. Either the client is not truthful, as Brigid O’Shaughnessy lies to Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon”, or the client himself has been deceived and does not understand what is really at stake when he gives the detective his task, as with General Sternwood in “The Big Sleep”. Often the detective is being used as a pawn in some larger plot of the client’s. Whatever his initial momentum to action, the investigator soon finds himself involved in a very complex conspiracy involving a number of people from several spheres of society.

From the beginning of “Chinatown”, it is made clear that the upbringing of evidence of marital infidelity is Jake Gitte’s primary business. It seems that he is pinched into the affairs of Noah Cross, which is the daughter, and her husband by a commission to document a supposedly secret affair between the latter and a much younger woman. As Gittes becomes more involved with the case, he finds himself becoming romantically involved with a character deeply implicated in the web of conspiracy, the mysterious widow of who was murdered.