NEXT SCREENINGS

Join us for an unforgettable journey into the world of New Hollywood and LA noirs at The Castle Cinema! We're thrilled to present two iconic films that have defined the genre:

Directed by the legendary Robert Altman, this masterpiece stars the mercurial Elliot Gould as the iconic Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye" Thursday, September 19th at 7:30 PM 

Immerse yourself in one of the greatest noirs ever made. "Chinatown" Sunday, September 22nd at 1:15 PM & Thursday, September 26th at 7:30 PM

Both films will be shown on 16mm in the unique atmosphere of The Castle Cinema.  Get your tickets: HERE

CHINATOWN (1974)

“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 Dashiel Hammett, and its greatest practitioner was Raymond Chandler. To observe Humphrey Bogart in Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” and Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” (1946) 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 underlevel 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’ name right.)

Gittes’ 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’ investigation leads him to Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), to city hearings, to dried river beds 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’ 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 11 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.

Her father the millionaire is played by Huston with treacly charm and mean little eyes. There is a luncheon where he serves Gittes a fish with the head still on, the eyes regarding the man about to eat it. “Just as long as you don’t serve the chicken that way,” Gittes says. In life and on the screen, Huston (who directed “The Maltese Falcon”) could turn on disarming charm by admitting to his failings: “Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

Like most noir stories, “Chinatown” ends in a flurry of revelation. All is explained, relationships are redefined, and justice is done — or not. Towne writes of “my eventual conflict with Roman and enduring disappointment over the literal and ghoulishly bleak climax” of the movie. Certainly the wrong people are alive (and dead) at the end of the film, but I am not sure Polanski was wrong. He made the movie just five years after his wife, Sharon Tate, was one of the victims of the Manson gang, and can be excused for tilting toward despair. If the film had been made 10 years later, the studio might have insisted on an upbeat ending, but it was produced during that brief window when Robert Evans oversaw a series of Paramount’s best films, including “The Godfather.”

For Polanski, born in 1933 in Paris, reared in Poland, “Chinatown” was intended as a fresh start in Hollywood. After several brilliant thrillers made in Europe in the early 1960s (“Knife in the Water,” “Repulsion”), he came to California and had an enormous success (“Rosemary’s Baby,” 1968). Then came the Manson murders, and he fled to Europe, making the curious “Macbeth” (1971), with its parallels to the cult killings. After “Chinatown” came charges of sex with an under-age girl, and exile in Europe. “Chinatown” shows he might have developed into a major Hollywood player, instead of scurrying to finance bizarre projects such as “Pirates” (1986).

For Nicholson, the role had enormous importance. After a decade’s slumming in exploitation films, he made an indelible impression in “Easy Rider” and followed it with strong performances in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), “Carnal Knowledge” (1971) and “The Last Detail” (1973). But with Jake Gittes he stepped into Bogart’s shoes as a man attractive to audiences because he suggests both comfort and danger. Men see him as a pal; wise women find weary experience more attractive than untrained lust. From Gittes forward, Nicholson created the persona of a man who had seen it all and was still capable of being wickedly amused. He could sit in the front row at a basketball game and grin at the TV camera as if he expected the players to commit lascivious deeds right there on the floor.

“Chinatown” was seen as a neo-noir when it was released — an update on an old genre. Now years have passed and film history blurs a little, and it seems to settle easily beside the original noirs. That is a compliment.

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” (1973) attacks film noir with three of his most cherished tools: Whimsy, spontaneity and narrative perversity. He is always the most youthful of directors, and here he gives us the youngest of Philip Marlowes, the private eye as a Hardy boy. Marlowe hides in the bushes, pokes his nose up against a window, complains like a spoiled child, and runs after a car driven by the sexy heroine, crying out “Mrs. Wade! Mrs. Wade!” As a counterweight, the movie contains two startling acts of violence; both blindside us, and neither is in the original Raymond Chandler novel.

Altman began with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, the legendary writer of “The Big Sleep” (1946), the greatest of the many films inspired by Marlowe. On that one her co-writer was William Faulkner. There is a famous story that they asked Chandler who killed one of the characters (or was it suicide?). Chandler’s reply: “I don’t know.” There is a nod to that in “The Long Goodbye” when a character who was murdered in the book commits suicide in the movie.

Certainly the plot of “The Long Goodbye” is a labyrinth not easily negotiated. Chandler’s 1953 novel leads Marlowe into a web of deception so complex you could call it arbitrary. The book is not about a story but about the code of a private eye in a corrupt world. It is all about mood, personal style, and language. In her adaptation, Brackett dumps sequences from Chandler, adds some of her own (she sends Marlowe to Mexico twice), reassigns killings, and makes it almost impossible to track a suitcase filled with a mobster’s money.

I went through the film a shot at a time two weeks ago at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, sitting in the dark with several hundred others as we asked ourselves, What do we know, how do we know it, and is it true? Many of our questions center on the rich, sex-drenched Eileen (Nina Van Pallandt). Does she desire the death of her husband, Roger Wade, an alcoholic writer played by the gruff old bear Sterling Hayden? Or does she only want free of him? What about that seductive dinner she serves Marlowe (Elliott Gould) on the night Wade walks into the ocean? Does she intend to sleep with Marlowe? She does in the novel, and he is later part of her alibi when she kills Wade and makes it look like suicide. But here she doesn’t kill Wade. What is the link connecting Terry Lennox (the baseball star Jim Bouton), Eileen and the gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell)? Does Augustine owe Wade money, as he claims to Marlowe, or does Wade owe Augustine money, as Wade implies in a Freudian slip? What is the exact connection between any money owed to anyone and the money in the suitcase? Only a final, blunt speech by Lennox, Marlowe’s unworthy friend, answers some of our questions.

Elliott Gould says on the DVD that Altman made many changes to Brackett’s screenplay, but that when she saw the movie not long before she died, she said she was “more than satisfied.” One change is to make Philip Marlowe, that laconic loner with a code of honor, into what Altman and Gould privately called “Rip Van Marlowe.” When he awakens at the beginning of the movie, he’s a 1953 character in a 1973 world. He wears a dark suit, white shirt and narrow tie in a world of flower power and nude yoga. He chain-smokes; no one else smokes. He is loyal to Terry Lennox and considers him his friend, but the movie establishes their friendship only by showing them playing liar’s poker, and Lennox is no friend. Marlowe carries a $5,000 bill for most of the movie, but never charges for any of his services. He is a knight errant, and like Don Quixote imperfectly understands the world he inhabits.

The earlier movie Marlowes (Humphrey Bogart, James Caan, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell) are terse and guarded. They talk, as Chandler wrote, “with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.” And they talk a lot, because they narrate the novels. Gould’s Marlowe has these qualities, but they emerge in meandering dialogue that plays as a bemused commentary to himself. In the novel, Marlowe has no pets, but here he has a cat, and in the famous pre-credit opening sequence he attempts to convince the cat he is supplying its favorite cat food, but the cat is not fooled. In a movie that throws large chunks of plot overboard, there is no reason for this sequence, except that it establishes Marlowe as a man who is more loyal to his cat than anyone is to him.

The plot can be summarized in a few words, or endlessly. The rich playboy Lennox asks Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana. Marlowe does, and is questioned by the cops and jailed after Lennox’s wife is found beaten to death. Released by the cops after Lennox’s suicide in Mexico, Marlowe is visited by the gangster Marty Augustine and his goons. Augustine thinks Marlowe has money Lennox was carrying. In one of the most shocking moments in movie history, he commits an act of cruelty and says, “Now that’s someone I love. Think what could happen to you.”

Marlowe follows him to the Malibu beach house of the writer Roger Wade and his wife Eileen, and is later hired by Eileen to track down Roger after he runs away to a shady drying-out sanitarium. How are Lennox, the Wades and Augustine connected?

I don’t think the answer to that question concerns Altman nearly as much as the look and feel of the film. He wants to show a private eye from the noir era blundering through a plot he is perhaps too naive to understand. The movie’s visual strategy underlines his confusion. Altman and his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, “flashed” the color film with carefully calculated extra light, to give it a faded, pastel quality, as if Marlowe’s world refuses to reveal vivid colors and sharp definition. Most of the shots are filmed through foregrounds that obscure: Panes of glass, trees and shrubbery, architectural details, all clouding Marlowe’s view (and ours). The famous Altman overlapping dialogue gives the impression that Marlowe doesn’t pick up on everything around him. Far from resenting the murkiness in his world, Marlowe repeats the catch-phrase, “It’s all right with me.” The line was improvised by Gould, and he and Altman decided to use it throughout the story as an ironic refrain.

There is another refrain: The title theme, which is essentially the only music heard in the film. Altman uses it again and again, with many different performers (even a Mexican marching band, with the sheet music pinned to the shirt of the man in front of them). At Boulder, the musician Dave Grusin, who worked on the film, and told us Altman gathered a group of musicians on a sound stage and had them spend an evening playing around with different arrangements of the song. Why did Altman only use the one song? I’ve heard a lot of theories, of which the most convincing is, it amused him.

The visuals and sound undergo a shift after the suicide of Roger Wade. There is a scene on the beach where Marlowe pesters people with questions and accuses them of dishonesty; he sounds like a child, a drunk, or both. But then color begins to saturate the pale visuals, the foregrounds no longer obscure, characters start talking one at a time, and finally in the vivid sunlight of Mexico, Marlowe is able to see and hear clearly, and act decisively.

Casting is crucial in film noir, because the actors have to arrive already bearing their fates. Altman’s actors are as unexpected as they are inevitable. Sterling Hayden, a ravaged giant, roars and blusters on his way to his grave. As his wife, Altman cast Nina Van Pallandt, then famous as the mistress of Clifford Irving, author of the celebrated fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. She could act, but she did more than act, she embodied a Malibu beach temptress. Mark Rydell, the director, seems to be channeling Martin Scorsese’s verbal style in a performance that uses elaborate politeness as a mask for savagery. And Elliott Gould is a Marlowe thrust into a story were everybody else knows their roles. He wanders clueless and complaining, and then suddenly understands exactly what he must do.

“The Long Goodbye” should not be anybody’s first film noir, nor their first Altman movie. Most of its effect comes from the way it pushes against the genre, and the way Altman undermines the premise of all private eye movies, which is that the hero can walk down mean streets, see clearly, and tell right from wrong. The man of honor from 1953 is lost in the hazy narcissism of 1973, and it’s not all right with him.

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