Interestingly, in my personal experience of showing movies to young people today, they "get" the silent films quicker than they get the film noir. I think this is because silent films are deliberately alienating to us, and we make allowances for them the way we automatically make allowances for the artificiality of musicals. It is not as easy to make allowances for the heightened acting, melodrama, and unfamiliar cinematography of films from the 1940s. ... Jerry Monaco
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Based on this idea that a younger generation (say under 35) doesn't `get' cinema noir, I went out last night, half way through a bottle of Sauv Blanc and got Chinatown. I was moderately stewed when I mixed up a faux FDR martinis that Mike Smith thought funny, plunked in an olive and sat on the floor just to be safe. I hit the pause button and mixed another about half way through, about the time Jake Gittes starts to get the idea behind Mulray's murder. By the time the neon lights of Chinatown rolled by, I was mostly all the way stewed.
What a great fucking movie. It still works. I was trying to see what wasn't to get about it. Maybe I should have rented Out of the Past, Sunset Boulevard, Maltese Falcon, but I've seen all those and several other classics of that genre recently, mostly this spring as a matter fact.
Part of the problem, which is behind my complete lack of understanding what's not to get, is I grew up in the metro LA area and started going to movies exactly when these were the second run matinee features. So I remember many of them from my childhood. I would get a quarter and walk from Hoover and 73rd to South Vermont and go to one of those giant, old fashion movie palaces and sit in the dark. This was south central LA, which was pretty rough even back then.
It gets worse. My father worked on the LA Examiner City Desk as a copy editor on the night shift to get out the morning edition. He lived in one of those classic fake spanish renaissance stucco apartments in Hollywood on Gramercy. So his place had all those little details you can see in these movies, even down to the things on his old fashioned dresser: cigarette lighter, nice rectangle wrist watch, fancy fountain pen, large heavy carbon mark up pencils for editing copy and lay out work. He would occasionally take me to the paper on his days off to show me to the guys in his office. He worked in the fancy Julia Morgan building that looked like a hollywood version of Arabic architecture. The roar of the press machines in basement echoed in the utility stairwells---made of steel and painted industrial green. Everything about this place looked like it came straight out of one of those movies. The press guys talked tough, made inside jokes, wore hats and big lapel suits with white shirts and hand painted big ties that were usually pulled down with open collars, their sleeves rolled up to the elbow. The guys down in the linotype rooms wore those funny green shade hats and aprons to cover their clothes. My dad took me down there to get a slug with my name done in 18pt italic so I could stamp my homework. I couldn't go into the press rooms because they were dangerous, but they had a big window I could look in and watch the giant presses of the old Hearst empire roll out their crime in the streets, corruption in city hall dailies, the up scale Examiner and the low down Mirror.
Even the fucking cars. The old man had a four door black Packard (almost the same model shown in Chinatown), later a fancy used Buick convertible. My mother was something like a Fay Dunaway type---kind of pretty, kind of sleazy, kind of sexy, drank too much, liked to hang around men too much, not very domestic, kind of neurotic in that 40s mixed up way---and had married my stepfather who was I swear to god, a double for Gregory Peck. When he got out of the Navy, (after most of the big battles in the Pacific on a destroyer that was sunk when a Kamakasi hit the radio tower) he dropped out of the usual post-war career tracks and became art student on the GI bill. He and his drunk art school buddies drove the cheaper Fords and Chevys. One of them had a Ford convertible with the same kind of weird center dashboard chrome thing, a radio I guess or whatever the fuck it was.
The point? These movies were my childhood idea of `realism' because the people, the places, the dialogue, the characters and the locations looked like everything around me. There wasn't anything to get. I didn't understand the plots to the movies any more than I understood what the fuck the grown-ups were doing most of the time. The whole world was a mystery to me.
And Chinatown itself. My first friend was a Chinese kid, Danny Choy who lived with his dad in a laundry across the street. One of our big treats was taking off our clothes and getting a bath-swim in one of the giant cylindrical washing machines, half filled with water. The inside was lined with these big wooden cages that rotated to tumble the laundry. We stuck our dicks in the little holes drilled in the separators to pretend fuck. Occasionally, Henry (Danny's father) would take us `fishing', which meant going to the mountains in the middle of the night, loaded up in old pick-ups with lanterns, spears and forks to catch frogs and crayfish in the streams by lantern light---men talking and yelling at each other in Chinese.
Those scenes were truly surreal. This is the one part of the movie were I think Polansky missed a little. The Chinese were at the bottom of the immediate post-war social hierarchy along with the Mexicans and the Blacks---but the Chinese were really, really strange, in their own world---and the particular strangeness was missing in Chinatown. The fact that Henry had come here first with his oldest son and left the rest of the family---who got here later---made it doubly strange, because I never saw a Chinese woman or mother any where. Henry hung out with his buddies, who were of course all men, working class with trucks. This was my first real introduction to immigrants and poverty. (I realize now, Henry probably left China at the end of the revolution in 1949). For example he and Danny lived in one room at the back of the laundry and used an two burner gas open frame to cook on. The table in back was covered with newspaper as a table cloth and their dress clothes hung off a rack on the ceiling of this one room with one bed. Shoes, and stacked everyday clothes were in fruit boxes nailed together.
The one thing that was absolutely missing in these memories is any image of the `typical middle class', or what I would later call the all American lifestyle. Whatever that was, it all came later in bits and pieces. But for those first few years of memory there was absolutely none of it any where I lived.
Which brings me to the last point here. That is exactly what is missing in cinema noir. These characters were on the outs, completely alienated and traveled between poverty and wealth with nothing in between. A regular wife, regular kids, regular job were all out of the picture.
Maybe that's what isn't got by a younger generation who never saw anything like an alternative to the US middle class, except some fading hippy imagery of the 60s. There is also the deep urbanity, as in a completely downtown setting, federal buildings, big post office branches, hotels, bars, clubs, dance halls, restaurants, fancy apartments, rundown hotels, police stations, city hall, newspaper offices, bus and train stations, crowded, wide sidewalks, traffic, cabs, street cars.
These locations all set up the world of these movies where a typical domestic life with dinner on the table is completely impossible. If anybody eats at all, they are digging dinner out of can of beans warmed up in a pan of water on the stove, or they are being served drinks in a fancy restaurant, maybe take-out Chinese in waxed cartons on a desk in an office somewhere. Nobody goes home at the end of the day or the end of the movie because there is no home.
The deeper subtext of Chinatown, or rather its over arching theme is that the American dream where the San Fernando Valley was the icon, was build on rottenness, corruption, fraud, murder, robbery, and remains founded on a sleazy capitalist duplicity of respectability and swindle, with only a few law school textbook tissue thin pages in between. Everybody ignores the fine print.
Indeed by the time I was a teenager in the late-50s, we moved from the LA metro area out to the Valley where the last of the orange groves and water district run off channels still cut through new housing tracks. I even had a horse, a nice broken down Mustang, named Faraday after the 19th C scientist--but in much better condition than the horse the Mexican kid was riding in the LA river bed. There were still left-over Mexican neighborhoods, small run down houses from the little dusty towns that used to be rural intersections in the Valley. There were still a few hard ass old white orchard owners who would shoot at me with rock salt if I rode through their groves and broke down the irrigation ditches. The oily stench of DDT was everywhere.
That same year I went on my first Sierra back packing trip with the YMCA. Where did we go? The trip started in the Owens Valley out of Long Pine---a few miles away was the LA Water District's Lake Crowley that housed the water that irrigated the San Fernando Valley--the so-called object of all the crimes in Chinatown.
I love the coroner: ``The Water District Commissioner drowns in the middle of a dought, only in LA.'' That's because LA was a chinatown of the mind, where nothing mattered but money, and lives turn on a roll of the dice as fate or chance. Take your pick..
CG