Okay, so, I finally saw Chinatown<\/i> the other day. Roman Polanski, 1974. Colour film noir.<\/p>\n
Turns out the ending filmed wasn’t the end scripted. The screenwriter’s ending was rather different. (This is spoilerriffic, but c’mon, it’s a 1974 film.)<\/p>\n
So let me get this straight, because this is really icky, and I don’t mean that in a funny way…<\/p>\n
…the child-rapist director<\/em> Polanski changed the ending of the script so that instead of being caught and going to jail, the child-rapest villain<\/em> Noah Cross who raped his own daughter not only gets away with it, but the police kill his victim so he doesn’t have to worry about it coming out, the private detective J.J. Gittes who has been figuring all this out walks away when the cops tell him to, and<\/em> Cross gets custody of the granddaughter-and-daughter that resulted from the rape he committed.<\/p>\n And this is considered a classic ending<\/em> – albeit a “down” ending – that people don’t find, you know, really icky and repulsive.<\/p>\n God damn, I did not become a supervillain soon enough.<\/p>\n Also, Paul said he felt it failed as a noir because of the colour cinematography, and it should’ve been shot black-and-white. I don’t think I agree; I actually think that part works. It probably might’ve been better in black and white, but I think it works.<\/p>\n No, I think it fails because Gittes walks away at the end. Not because the daughter-raping villain gets away with his crimes, but because Gittes walks away when he’s told. It breaks his character, and it breaks the film.<\/p>\n Not to mention the whole child-molester-wins thing.<\/p>\n Ugh. Now I just feel gross.<\/p>\n eta:<\/b> To answer a question I suspect might come up: yes, I do avoid Mr. Polanski’s work; somehow I’d missed that he directed this. It was only after the film, in the TCM ‘about the movie you just saw’ segment they usually run, that I found out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, so, I finally saw Chinatown the other day. Roman Polanski, 1974. Colour film noir. Turns out the ending filmed wasn’t the end scripted. The screenwriter’s ending was rather different. (This is spoilerriffic, but c’mon, it’s a 1974 film.) So let me get this straight, because this is really icky, and I don’t mean that [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-peoples-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}