Chinatown Film Quotes

Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown.

The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York’s Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it part of the time.

He had grown used to the eyes upon him as he and his uncle traveled from their bedroom community in Brooklyn to Chinatown. When one woman dropped her purse at his feet and Shim handed it back to her with “Your handbag, m’lady,” and a flourish, she’d nearly jumped out of her seat in surprise. He mentioned none of this to Chun, because after nearly a month in Hong Kong in her steady presence, the sharp edges of being treated with suspicion were blunted by a film of nostalgia. New York was home; this trip had made him realize that.

Chinatown is a condition. The condition is the terrible awareness of one’s helplessness, what Towne had always called “the futility of good intentions.” If its resonance surpasses the literal, it is due not only to Towne’s overall concept, the thematic rigor and omnipresence of power and abuse in the script, but to Polanski’s cinematic rendering of Chinatown itself. He insisted it must be in the film as a literal location, but he filmed it metaphorically, amid the vacant black limbo of nightmare. It’s hard to see and it’s too quiet. It doesn’t seem real.

If a film needed an exotic backdrop… Chinatown could be made to represent itself or any other Chinatown in the world. Even today, it stands in for the ambiguous Asian anywhere.

I was intrigued by the idea of the “Hollywood ending,” people always associating the term with meaning a happy ending, when in reality it seemed to me that the truly classic Hollywood films—like Casablanca, The Graduate, Chinatown—often had endings that were, at the very least, more uncertain than happy.