The 1970s Movie That Explains 2020s America

This spring, I went to see Chinatown in a theater for the first time since its release, on June 20, 1974. The movie was headlining at the annual TCM Classic Film Festival on Hollywood Boulevard. Inside, every seat in the huge IMAX theater was taken. When Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway kissed for the first time, they filled the towering screen with every bit as much star power as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did in Hollywood’s golden age. But the rapid descent into tragedy during the film’s second half had the audience rapt, eliciting audible gasps when the film’s director, Roman Polanski, in a cameo role, slit open the nose of the private eye J. J. Gittes (Nicholson) in one of the movie’s more notorious moments. In the scene when Evelyn Mulwray (Dunaway) admits that her daughter is also her sister, conceived through incest with her father, Noah Cross (played by John Huston), the auditorium was utterly silent.

I was struck by how, after all these years, looks both of its time and ahead of it. The film’s warning that unaccountable power was shaping our lives in ways we couldn’t understand very much reflected the political sensibility of the late ’60s and early ’70s. That mood produced a torrent of transformative laws under both Lyndon B. Johnson and,that he viewed his theme as “the futility of good intentions.”