FAREWELL, MY LOVELY: A review of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.

There’s a moment midway through the film Chinatown (1974) in which the hero, Jake Gittes, hands us a clue—not a clue about the case he’s investigating, the one involving graft and murder in L.A.’s Department of Water and Power, but a more subtextual kind of clue, hinting at the meaning of the film’s enigmatic title. Jake (Jack Nicholson) and his client, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), are standing in her back yard, and she’s prodding him about his life before he became a private eye, when he worked as a cop in Chinatown. What did he do there, she asks? “As little as possible,” Jake replies. This bit of dialogue may seem innocuous, but it was, in fact, the inspiration for the entire film, taken by screenwriter Robert Towne from an actual Chinatown cop, whom he met in the early 1970s. In Chinatown, the policeman explained, you have to do as little as possible, not because you’re lazy per se, but because you never know what’s going on, whether you’re preventing a crime or abetting one. Towne loved this idea, seeing it not only as a good line for a movie but a metaphor for life in Los Angeles, a place where you may think you know what’s going on, but you never really do. If he’d had his way, the film wouldn’t have had a single scene set in Chinatown. The title, he thought, spoke for itself.

Although he was already well known in Hollywood as a go-to script doctor—he had penned scenes for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972)—Towne effectively made his name with Chinatown and has dined off its success ever since. In 1979, screenwriting guru Syd Field dubbed it the “best American screenplay written during the 1970s,” and in subsequent decades the script has made so many top-10 lists that singing its praises can now seem almost trite. Critics point out (quite rightly) that every revelation in the story is doled at precisely the right moment, pushing the plot along without ever spoiling the mystery, and that every event—indeed, every line of dialogue—serves a purpose, from Gittes’s crude jokes to his observation, in the first minutes of the film, that sometimes it’s best to “let sleeping dogs lie.” If only he’d heeded his own advice.

If you loved Chinatown (despite its being directed by a truly repugnant man), definitely read the whole thing.