Last night's home entertainment was not actually a Netflix rental. That would have have been the third episode in the first season of Mad Men, but we couldn't play the disc, so we substituted my personally owned videocassette of Chinatown: Los Angeles in the 1930s, not Madison Avenue in the 1960s. I'd forgotten Gittes's putdown of the crooked cop Mulvihill, who has had his water service cut off.
How did you know? You don't drink it. You don't bathe in it. Did they send you a letter? Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.
You have to supply the Nicholsonian inflection, the way he hangs on to the vowel sound in "read," drawing it out.
The ending is not focus-group tested. "He owns the police!" Then some shots and the long blare of the horn. So it's not "just Chinatown"; the corruption is pervasive. Roman Polanski has a cameo and directs. You don't have to be a nice man to make a great movie.
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