Faye Dunaway was topless briefly in the iconic 70s noir masterpiece.
I wonder if there was ever an open matte version showing her breasts more clearly. I’m not aware of one.
Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. (1974)
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Uncle Scoopy's world-weary musings about naked celebrities, sports, humor and other important, manly things.
I couldn’t disagree more about the movie Chinatown. The movie leaves me cold. It doesn’t help me that Roman Polanski directed the film, but his small role is rather obnoxious.
Finally, the key reveal in the film did nothing for me because none of the characters except for the P.I were reliable so I didn’t initially know whether the person was telling the truth or not and by the time I found out, the emotional moment had passed.
Also, fwiw, the Los Angeles water wars are a a fascinating story but this movie uses them as nothing more than a backdrop and doesn’t actually explain anything about them.
Imagine how much you would have hated it with Ali McGraw in Dunaway’s part.
As I noted in my review, Robert Towne’s Oscar was totally undeserved. He wrote, to quote myself, “a labyrinthine, mediocre detective story,” which did not even include the powerful “Forget it, Jake” ending.
There’s no doubt that the film is iconic, and I love many things about it, but it is also deeply flawed. In my opinion, Polanski did manage to make lemonade out of a script that was a lemon, thanks to the work of his team.
And he assembled that team.
Faye showed some boob in Barfly too, anything else?
Also, anybody, including scoop, who thinks Chinatown is sub par: you’re blind as bats – it’s arguably the greatest movie of that whole decade
I’m in your camp. Yeah, the plot is intractable (although makes more sense on repeated viewing) but isn’t that supposed to be a nominal selling point for noirs? The Big Sleep famously had a murder that even the writers couldn’t explain.
Chinatown passes the channel surfing test for me. If it’s on, no matter at what point, I stop and watch because I remember a good scene coming up. Also, I usually get annoyed with big up-fron movie soundtracks, but not this one. But yeah, Polanski is a scumbag.
I criticized the Oscar going to Robert Towne’s script. Fortunately, not much of it appeared on screen.
* Weirdly enough, none of Towne’s action took place in Chinatown. Polanski (understandably) found that baffling.
* In the original script, there was a “happy” ending. Evelyn Mulwray shot her father and rescued her daughter/sister from his clutches.
Polanski pulled off a miracle by creating a legendary film from a nothing burger script – a rambling, labyrinthine mess with about a gazillion characters.
As Towne’s wife pointed out, Polanski should have gotten a writing credit, but he didn’t care to try for one. He just wanted to direct the movie, then skedaddle back to Poland.
I find the plot fascinating, and the acting is outstanding across the board, as is the directing. It has unusual, eccentric touches like a bad guy menacingly flapping Jack’s ear with a gun, instead of just standing there idly pointing it at him. And Jack’s retelling of the dirty Chinaman joke, in its entirety, without knowing Faye is standing right behind him. And the way Jack coughs insanely loudly to cover his ripping a page out of a city register. You don’t see little touches like that in most movies.
It’s filled with memorable lines that stuck in my head for decades: “Son of a bitch! Goddamn Florsheim shoe”; “You dumb Okie”; “Your wife got excited. She crossed her legs a little too quick. You understand what I mean, pal?”; “Middle of a drought and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”; “Mrs. Mulwray, I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.”; “Bad for the glass”; “Hello, Claude. Where’d you get the midget?”; “You’ve got a nasty reputation, Mr. Gittes. I like that.”; “I said check him for weapons, not go through his pockets!!”; “Somebody went to a lot of trouble here, and I want to find out, lawsuit or no lawsuit. I’m not the one who’s supposed to be caught with his pants down.” On and on.
Ludicrous to call any part of the script or film mediocre. It’s a unique and highly memorable film, and that’s very hard to do, even back then. Jake Gittes is one of screendom’s greatest characters; almost all his lines having some level of sarcastic humor.
If you’re dead set on finding something to be critical about – and why anyone would be so intent on doing that, I dunno – I can see how Faye’s performance could be seen as annoying. She did only a passable job in a cast that did a great job, and her legendary lateness to the set, diva behavior, and overacting casts a pall to it. When John Huston acts much better than you in a film, maybe you’re not as good as you think you are.
You seem to have missed the point. Towne’s script was mediocre. That’s why Polanski ignored it and made a different film!
Faye also took her top off in NETWORK, prior to a sex scene with William Holden.