Chinatown Movie Essay

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The first film of the three classics mentioned earlier to be analyzed will be Chinatown. This Roman Polanski mystery centers around Jake Gittes, who meets a woman pretending to be the wife of Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer of LA Water and Power Company. This imposter claims to suspect her husband of infidelity, and asks Gittes to take up the case. Gittes later finds the dead body of Hollis Mulwray and gets caught up in a world of crime and deceit that he never knew before.
The idea of deceit is ever present throughout Chinatown, especially when dealing with authority figures or people in positions of great power. The main murder that sparks the Jake Gittes’ spiral into this complex plot is that of previously mentioned chief engineer …show more content…

This 1949 film centers around and American author, Holly Martins, who is gifted a job in Vienna by an old acquaintance and friend, Harry Lime. However when Martins arrives in Vienna he learns that Lime is dead, supposedly killed in a car accident. Martins meets Lime’s local friends after Lime’s funeral and then vows to investigate what he thought to be a suspicious death. One of the main aspects of film noir seen in this film is its characters’ personalities and how those interact to create the conflict of the film. As the film progresses the viewer learns of Lime’s true character, and how before his death he showed a shocking lack of regard for common decency and didn’t seem to have a strong sense of morality. According to his acquaintances in Vienna, Lime sold fake medication to the families of children with agonizing diseases, and therefore Lime was involved in the deaths of several children in the name of money. This coupled with Martins’ desire to believe in his old friend show that the film utilizes characters with obvious moral flaws (who could even be considered “evil”) but still finds a way to keep the viewer invested and interested in their …show more content…

These long and drawn out scenes where the characters are waiting for the villain to arrive instill a sense of dread and suspense in the viewer which is common in this specific genre (The Third Man).
The final classic of the film noir genre to be analyzed is The Big Sleep. This 1946 crime classic adapted from the 1939 novel of the same name centers around private detective Philip Marlowe who is summoned to the mansion of his new client General Sternwood in order to help solve his daughters extensive gambling debts. Sternwood’s older daughter suggests to Marlowe that her father has started this investigation for other reasons. As people close to the case start to get murdered, Marlowe suspects that the case is more complex that what he first imagined. Similar to the previous two films analyzed, this film centers around a detective case, a common plot point that is seen throughout film noir. As with the other two, this film also incorporates several aspects that are commonly seen in the film noir

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