The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Transcript
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Charles Chaplin of the Los Angeles times loved Chinatown. He named it the best of the year. And Roger Ebert plainly hailed it a tour de force. Most critics followed suit praising every facet of the production, the uncompromising intelligence of the screenplay, the design Nicholson and Polanski, the very idea of using an old fashioned genre like a detective movie to touch audiences with unsuspected grandeur, a tragedy of the modern world China Town. It was almost universally agreed was that rare if not unprecedented private eye movie? That was really about something the voice of qualified descent would come from Pauline Kale. The film holds you in a suffocating way she wrote. Polanski. Never lets the story tell itself. It's all over deliberate mauve, nightmarish. Everyone is yellow, lacquered and the evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt since everything is blighted and yet the nastiness has a look and a fascination drawn by the reviews. People came On June 20. The line outside Grauman's Chinese swelled with L adults hip to the movies. They had read Chaplin his praise of Chinatown's vision of a time, a place and a lifestyle. It's total recapturing of a past in its plot, its vivid characterizations. It's carefully calculated and accelerating pace, its whole demonstration of a media mastered a film he wrote that reminds you again and thrillingly that motion pictures are larger, not smaller than life, they are not processed at drug stores and they are not television, not television. No, the adults of Los Angeles would have to go out to see Chinatown kids angling for something more dangerous than television would have to sneak in. They would have to set aside an entire evening to see Chinatown. They would have to spend time and money tickets, nanny, parking, popcorn dinner, an investment that rather than diminish the experience actually dignified the film, the filmmakers and the entire movie going enterprise with value and anticipation, the romance and high talk and longing for something important almost about to happen. Even standing in line was an event as Chinatown opened in only three theaters in L A, the Chinese Westwood's National and a drive in in Van Nuys. None of them multiplexes. The city's adult film goers were all funneled to one of only a handful of common points waiting in line. They were their own society. Greeting, like minded strangers, trading, movie gossip, flirting, passing joints, debating the parallax view blazing saddles, thieves like us the conversation, the Sugarland Express citing Pauline by her first name cannot be by a second gauging the faces of the preceding audience as they flooded from the theater. Would we wear those expressions in two hours time. But what happened to them happened to us, America's morale fell further that summer. But the sidewalk filmgoers kept a sturdier faith. They were adults. They were well informed by informed critics and they went to the movies because the movies were still good longing on a large scale is what makes history writes. Don Delillo Hollywood had answered their call.