Chinatown

Jack Nicholson stars as JJ Gites a private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles who, despite both his sleazy profession and the fact that he's the spitting image of Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel when captured in a similarly defeated repose, is completely above board. In fact, Chinatown - written by Robert Towne and directed by a despondent Roman Polanski, following the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate but before he fled to France with a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor hanging over him - cannot unfold quite the way it does if Gites isn't unusually committed to uncovering the truth. This gumshoe doggedly picks at LA's rapacious ruling class as a way of reconciling his own part in a cruel hatchet job. Hired by a middle-aged, moneyed woman to trail after her husband Hollis Mulwray, who she believes is having an affair with a much younger woman, Gites dutifully complies. The paparazzi-style photographs that the PI hands off quickly find their way into a local newspaper, much to Gites' consternation.  

The trailed husband, the Chief Engineer at the Department of Water and Power as it turns out, is found dead in a storm drain; meanwhile Faye Dunaway has arrived at Gites' office claiming to be the real Mrs. Mulwray. Better experienced than described, Chinatown is a guided tour around a powerful, emerging metropolis and the spectral forces who wield both appalling wealth and act with an unconscionable barbarity; power brokers who are, quite apparently, immune to the legal and moral laws that govern everybody else. Dunaway's Evelyn Cross-Mulwray, who would seem to be a manipulative femme fatale, an archetype inextricably linked with film noir, is instead a deeply tragic character. What we learn of her relationship with her much older husband and her father, John Huston's Noah Cross, conjures up despair rather than reassurance. Evelyn's life a commodity that has been traded back-and-forth between men who would presume to own, basically, everything. As Gites presses closer to understanding why Los Angeles is experiencing a manufactured drought, he demands of the creaking Cross what more he could possibly want in this life. The elderly millionaire's answer, delivered and repeated in haste, is that he wants to own the future. And, watching his enormous, arthritic fingers curl greedily around a screaming child's face, you believe him. 

The Trip - Director's Cut

Peter Fonda plays Paul Groves, a successful but emotionally inert ad director experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Reeling from a run-in with his soon-to-be ex-wife - Susan Strasberg's Sally creeps onto set to very patiently remind her husband that he has to actually turn up to their divorce proceedings and make time for their child once in a while - Groves decides to take LSD as a way to gain insight into his personal and professional frustrations. Armed with several cameras, a box of poetry and Bruce Dern's John (a laid-back but still slightly sinister spirit guide), Groves journeys to a seaside squat to take acid. Groves is a bundle of neuroses, approaching his drop in transactional terms - a way to tap into something a little more artistic than the blaring TV noise he usually peddles.

For all its harassed editing and psychedelic imagery, Roger Corman's The Trip is as much about a man puzzling through his inability to maintain relationships with women. Groves craves this kind of insight but he is unable to recognise how his hang-ups influence or pollute his behaviour. He's too busy snooping out something he can sell. As soon as he swallows his pill he's instantly chatting about a violent drug bust, almost willing a swift intervention from all-knowing jackboots. John attempts to gently prod Groves down a path of gentle revelation but the ad-man sees suspicion everywhere. These phantom threats exerting themselves as the deposed, hooded ghouls from counterculture fav The Lord of the Rings or Satanic rites on smokey film sets. The one consistent thread throughout Groves' trip is Sally. Her presence surprisingly comforting, not at all the antagonistic bummer you might expect.

Although Groves attempts to distract himself away from the recollection with umpteen other smiling blondes, he can't help but fixate on a memory of himself and his wife having sex. The reminiscence is fuzzy, like a channel that can't quite be tuned in. Their bodies mix and merge under hot fluorescent lights - different faces bleed in before disappearing - the writhing blobs looking very much like the contents of a Mathmos lamp. This, it seems, is Groves' way into a deeper, more personal form of introspection. Unfortunately the ad-man resists, imagining a murder then fleeing into the night where he eventually meets Salli Sachse's Glenn. When Glenn and Groves have sex Corman ramps up the discomfort. The film thrashes wildly, introducing subliminal imagery and mocking music that jab at Groves' sense of self. The coupling may be exciting, even aspirational, but it leaves Groves none the wiser. Fonda's face remains unshattered in this only lightly altered Director's Cut. Instead we're left with the feeling that Groves, although still psychologically intact, has squandered a real opportunity.