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The Two Jacks: Chinatown
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Paramount)
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Chinatown (1974)
Directed by Roman Polanski
(Paramount)
The Two Jakes (1990)
Directed by Jack Nicholson
(Paramount)
Review by Nathan Kosub
Jack Nicholson met Anjelica Huston at a party in 1973. “When I was working in New York it was very difficult to meet real men,” she told Interview magazine. “It’s so easy to become a fag hag if you’re a successful model.” In his biography of the Huston dynasty, Lawrence Grobel quotes a friend of Nicholson’s, Sue Barton, on Nicholson’s excitement at meeting Anjelica, 14 years his junior: “He was thrilled that he, from Neptune, New Jersey, could have captured this princess whose father was John Huston.” Anjelica was on the set of Chinatown the day her father and her new boyfriend met as characters Noah Cross and Jake Gittes for the first time.
“Do you sleep with my daughter?” Cross asks Gittes. “Come, come, you don’t have to think about it to remember.”
That is the Chinatown story I like best. There are few films for which the opinions of so many of the major players in the creative process — scriptwriter, producer, director, star — are solicited so earnestly, and with such admiration, by fans. If Chinatown is considered the last “studio” picture, in the old sense, then the mutual hosannas passed between Robert Towne, Robert Evans, Roman Polanski and Jack Nicholson in each interview since are perhaps the gentlest of refutations to the predominant academic theories concerning auteurs. But still there is John Huston, who as a director was both auteur and studio man.
Central to Chinatown is Huston, the man as much as his character, Noah Cross. (Huston’s weakness for adapting literary giants like Melville and Joyce is to me the definitive trope of a particular generation which sought to venerate movies by conquering the most universally admired of man’s many artistic pursuits.) Huston died in 1987, three years before The Two Jakes was made. In Chinatown, Huston is the abiding, abhorrent anchor at the center and behind the scenes of each cruel narrative machination. Cross kills the woman Gittes loves. Cross wins the future.
In a truly great picture, in which every moment is demonstrative of a medium at its best (what can I possibly add to the praise for Chinatown?), the moment I remember most is Noah Cross pulling his daughter Katherine from the car where her sister, Evelyn, lies dead. Katherine is hysterical, screaming, the rigor of shock upon her. Cross has been looking for Katherine for some time. As he approaches the car, his old body shudders and his eyes go wide. With his hand — and it’s the hand I remember, a meaty blinder — he covers (or consumes) Katherine’s face and eyes, then puts an arm around her waist and leads her away.
Earlier in the movie, Cross inhales a meal of fish while Jake barely forks his own. Cross wears a colorful sash around the waist of his brown suit, or an embroidered guayabera with suspenders. “Somebody who’s rich,” Polanski said, describing both Cross and Huston, “who lives sort of western style, close to horses, who’s got this Mexico culture, who likes the pussy.” That vulgarity is the heart of Huston’s appeal. It is the myth of the lionized Hollywood director, of five wives and countless affairs, and still they remember you by brooding black-and-white portraits and the warmth in your baritone.
The rich stink is exactly what The Two Jakes, although a much better companion piece to Chinatown on DVD than it probably seemed in theaters in 1990, never musters. Nicholson assumes the role of patriarch, both as Gittes to Meg Tilly’s Kitty Berman and as director of Towne’s melodramatic script. Gittes wears sport coats cut big, without a vent in the back — more like a robe, really, to ash with cigars — and never quite emerges from them. I admire Nicholson for getting the movie made at all; his dedication to Roger Corman is one of his true charms. But Nicholson the actor was always too much of a loner to play dads. He was lean and good-looking, and then suddenly heavier and out-of-breath just snooping around in The Two Jakes. Nicholson’s early frame was a kind of reactionary privacy (the easy-to-anger “real man” of Anjelica’s fantasies); with heft, he became more of a personality, like Huston’s friend Orson Welles, and less the scrapper from Neptune than the wily interviewee, boasting — as he did to Rolling Stone last year — of his generous sexual prowess.
Huston would never talk to reporters about that sort of thing. Nicholson never hid it. “Honestly, I’m trying to be a gentleman about this,” Gittes tells Lillian Bodine (Madeleine Stowe) in his office in The Two Jakes. “Now, just get down on your knees. Down on your knees. Stick your ass up in the air, and don’t move until I tell you.” Strange, maybe, in the same way his “Use it until you’re numb” entreaty seemed in The Departed, but true vulgarity is unexpected. The secrets are, of course, what makes Chinatown so powerful. The Two Jakes has secrets, too. But by then, Hollywood was a little more open about them. Noah Cross raped his daughter, and Gittes eventually makes sure that the child she bore is safe. If Nicholson’s humble efforts at realizing Towne’s trilogy are the most admirable intentions in the two films, Huston’s mighty paw over the eyes of the innocent represent the very worst. Together, they make for wonderful stories, where Huston, more than Nicholson, might argue that the best intentions always reside.