I thought these reflections on your own personal Los Angeles as a Chinatown of the Mind, were wonderful and I thank you for them.  We do have different interpretations of the movie "Chinatown" but by now I have written so much about this movie that I wouldn't know presume to give you all of my thoughts.  We can both agree that it is a great movie and I would be happy if everybody could come to understand the way it elongates the classical Hollywood style.  But I need to emphasize that "Chinatown" was made in the mid seventies and not in the forties.  I would like to stress this point by saying that the relation of Polanski's "Chinatown" to the classical Hollywood studio's cycle of _film noir_ is about the same as the relationship between John Ford's "Stagecoach" and Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".   If you are a bad movie watcher and watch for the mystery and the plot of "Chinatown" and only for the mystery and the plot then you think the whole of Chinatown is going too-damn-slow.  But if you are a good, attentive, participatory movie watcher, and yet are used to movies post-Star Wars, and only to such movies, there is a constant sense that you are not seeing what really needs to be seen, which the movie keeps telling you, is not really the mystery, but something else.  (Jake's journey into his own "Chinatown"?  His revelation that he is condemned to repeat this same mistake over and over again like some kind of Flying Dutchman?) Everything is stretched out, elongated to reveal the inner workings of the genre and in the case of "Chinatown" to reverse the point of the protagonist's end.  If you will notice, everything that makes a Marlowe or a Spade a good detective - his detachment, his suspicion of the femme fatale - is what leads to Gittes downfall.  Not only that the Hollywood motif system and architecture of style is played with to such an extent that I would never use this as a gateway movie to the genre.  Just the fact that Polanski has to include horses and references to horses in practically every scene should give you pause about what in the world he is really trying to do.  Or the fact that so many of the shots are over-the-shoulder shots from Jake's p.o.v. and that there is always some kind of disjunction between sound and vision.  A good movie watcher, unfamiliar with the genre finds such things pretty confusing.  What exactly is she watching for?  The plot isn't the problem here.  It is the sense that something else is happening and it is happening too slow for the viewer to notice.  "What exactly is happening?  I can figure out the plot but I know that I am missing something but don't know exactly what I am missing?"  It is like the first time reading Oedipus Rex.  Everybody in the original audience knows the story but that is not quite the point.  It is how the story is revealed that is the point of confusion. On this point, I am not sure how many people have noticed how close in style to Chinatown is Hitchcock's baroque and wonderful "Vertigo"? Jerry Monaco <div>On 8/11/06, Chuck Grimes <<a href="mailto:cgrimes@rawbw.com">cgrimes@rawbw.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> JM: 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 CG: 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. </blockquote></div>