“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”

“I DON’T BLAME MYSELF.” Still Noah Cross talking, still back at the surrogate tide pool. He is talking about a lot of things: murdering his friend Hollis, making love to his daughter Evelyn. “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Huston’s delivery of the line is superbly ambiguous; there’s almost a sense of relish in that “anything.” When everyone meets in Chinatown at last—the real Chinatown as well as the figurative country of guilty legend which, in one way or another, the best films noirs describe—he speaks a variant of the line to Evelyn. It’s almost as though he were impatient with a little girl who just wouldn’t understand adult imperatives: “You’ve never forgiven me all these years”—as though rebuking her failure of vision. I think Roman Polanski is speaking partly through Noah Cross: evil exists; corruption is in the nature of things. Accept it and you survive, after a fashion; the ending of Rosemary’s Baby, perhaps that of Dance of the Vampires, and certainty his very perverse interpretations of Ross and Donalbain in Macbeth all speak to that end. Try to deny your own flaws and you end up at an intersection not knowing which way to turn (Knife in the Water) or receding into your own murderous eye in a family portrait (Repulsion) or sitting on a rock at high tide calling for a vanished dream of an assuredly corrupt reality (Cul-de-sac). Evelyn Mulwray tries to destroy her father, but in her most desperate frenzy she cannot bring herself to shoot true; a moment later she herself is destroyed, her vulnerable beauty—almost hurtful to look upon in certain scenes—exploded as if from within. Noah’s pawing, pleading overtures to her (John Huston’s “Pleeease! Pleeease!” will haunt your dreams) combine rapaciousness and infantile wheedling inextricably; and who is to say that the titanic embrace which engulfs his daughter-granddaughter and shields her eyes from the horror on the car floor is marked any the less by compassion than by triumph?"