“Kasdan has modern characters talking jive talk as if they’d been boning up on Chandler novels,” Kael wrote, “and he doesn’t seem to know if he wants laughs or not.” But isn’t it almost essential for noir characters to talk in a certain heightened style, and isn’t it possible for us to smile in recognition? On the night they first make love, Ned tells Matty, “Maybe you shouldn’t dress like that.” She says, “This is a blouse and skirt. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he says, “You shouldn’t wear that body.” Chandleresque? Yes. Works in this movie? Yes.
And there is some dialogue that unblinkingly confronts the enormity of the crime that Ned and Matty are contemplating. In many movies, the killers use self-justification and rationalization to talk themselves into murder. There is a chilling scene in Body Heat where Ned flatly tells Matty: “That man is gonna die for no reason but . . . we want him to.”
The plot and its double-crosses are, of course, part of the pleasure, although watching the film again last night, aware of its secrets, I found the final payoff less rewarding than the diabolical setup. The closing scenes are obligatory (and the final beach scene is perfunctory and unconvincing). The last scene that works as drama is the one where Ned suggests to Matty that she go get the glasses in the boathouse, and then she pauses on the lawn to tell him, “Ned, whatever you think—I really do love you.”
Does she? That’s what makes the movie so intriguing. Does he love her, for that matter? Or is he swept away by sexual intoxication—body heat? You watch the movie the first time from his point of view, and the second time from hers. Every scene plays two ways. Body Heat is good enough to make film noir play like we hadn’t seen it before.
Chinatown
R, 130 m., 1974
Jack Nicholson (J. J. Gittes), Faye Dunaway (Evelyn Mulwray), John Huston (Noah Cross), Darrell Zwerling (Hollis Mulwray). Directed by Roman Polanski and produced by Robert Evans. Screenplay by Polanski and Robert Towne.
“Are you alone?” the private eye is asked in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. “Isn’t everybody?” he replies. That loneliness is central to a lot of noir heroes, who plunder other people’s secrets while running from their own. The tone was set by Dashiell Hammett, and its greatest practitioner was Raymond Chandler. To observe Humphrey Bogart in Hammett’s Maltese Falcon and Chandler’s Big Sleep is to see a fundamental type of movie character being born—a kind of man who occupies human tragedy for a living.
Yet the Bogart character is never merely cold. His detachment masks romanticism, which is why he’s able to idealize bad women. His characters have more education and sensitivity than they need for their line of work. He wrote the rules; later actors were able to slip into the role of noir detective like pulling on a comfortable sweater. But great actors don’t follow rules; they illustrate them. Jack Nicholson’s character J. J. Gittes, who is in every scene of Chinatown (1974), takes the Bogart line and gentles it down. He plays a nice, sad man.
We remember the famous bandage plastered on Nicholson’s nose (after the Polanski character slices him), and think of him as a hard-boiled tough guy. Not at all. In one scene he beats a man almost to death, but during his working day he projects a courtly passivity. “I’m in matrimonial work,” he says, and adds, “it’s my metier.” His metier? What’s he doing with a word like that? And why does he answer the telephone so politely, instead of barking “Gittes!” into it? He can be raw, he can tell dirty jokes, he can accuse people of base motives, but all the time there’s a certain detached under level that makes his character sympathetic: Like all private eyes, he mud wrestles with pigs, but unlike most of them, he doesn’t like it.
Nicholson can be sharp-edged, menacing, aggressive. He knows how to go over the top (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and his Joker in Batman). His performance is key in keeping Chinatown from becoming just a genre crime picture—that, and a Robert Towne screenplay that evokes an older Los Angeles, a small city in a large desert. The crimes in Chinatown include incest and murder, but the biggest crime is against the city’s own future, by men who see that to control the water is to control the wealth. At one point Gittes asks millionaire Noah Cross (John Huston) why he needs to be richer: “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” Cross replies: “The future, Mr. Gitts, the future.” (He never does get Gittes’s name right.)
Gittes’s involvement begins with an adultery case. He’s visited by a woman who claims to be the wife of a man named Mulwray. She says her husband is cheating on her. Gittes’s investigation leads him to Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), to city hearings, to dried riverbeds and eventually to Mulwray’s drowned body and to the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Stumbling across murders, lies and adulteries, he senses some larger reality beneath everything, some conspiracy involving people and motives unknown.
This crime is eventually revealed as an attempt to buy up the San Fernando Valley cheaply by diverting water so that its orange growers go broke. Then that water and more water, obtained through bribery and corruption, will turn the valley green and create wealth. The valley has long been seen as a key to California fortunes: I remember Joel McCrea telling me that, on his first day as a movie actor, Will Rogers offered two words of advice: “Buy land.” McCrea bought in the valley and died a rich man, but he was in the second wave of speculation.
The original valley grab was the Owne River Valley scandal of 1908, mirrored in the 1930s by Towne. In the preface to his Oscar-winning screenplay, he recalls: “My wife, Julie, returned to the hotel one afternoon with two quilts and a public library copy of Carey McWilliams’s Southern California Country: An Island on the Land—and with it the crime that formed the basis of Chinatown.” McWilliams, for decades the editor of the Nation, presented Towne not only with information about the original land and water grab but also evoked the old Los Angeles, a city born in a desert where no city logically should be found. The screenplay explains, “Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.” John A. Alonzo’s cinematography, which got one of the movie’s eleven Oscar nominations, evokes the L.A. you can glimpse in the backgrounds of old movies, where the sun beats down on streets that are too wide, and buildings seem more defiant than proud. (Notice the shot where the bright sun falls on the fedoras of Gittes and two cops, casting their eyes into shadows like black masks.)
Gittes becomes a man who just wants to get to the bottom of things. He’s tired of people’s lies. And where does he stand with Evelyn Mulwray, played by Dunaway as a cool, elegant woman who sometimes—especially when her father is mentioned—seems fragile as china? First he’s deceived by the fake Evelyn Mulwray and then by the real one. Then he thinks he loves her. Then he thinks he’s deceived again. Then he thinks she’s hiding her husband’s mistress. Then she says it’s her sister. Then she says it’s her daughter. He doesn’t like being jerked around.