Michael Phillips: Bleak, bittersweet and tough: I miss 1970s movies, the ones for grown-ups before ‘Star Wars’

This column started with a quote-tweet, or whatever we’re calling them now. Last week, film critic Sean Burns posted a comment on X after seeing a screening of “Chinatown.” He wrote: “I love watching audiences who haven’t seen this before stagger out of the auditorium,” adding that the woman sitting behind him “looked like she’d been mugged.”

I knew the feeling. I saw that film when I was 13, and had the same reaction to its devastatingly fatalistic ending, rewritten far, far away from screenwriter Robert Towne’s original ending by director Roman Polanski, who preferred a coda of ashes in the mouth. Fifty years later we’re still debating it.

Another critic, Farran Nehme, reposted Burns’ item and added her own, about another key Jack Nicholson film from the same decade. “My college-age twins watched ‘One Flew