Chinatown is a 1940s private-eye movie that doesn't depend on nostalgia or camp for its effect, but works because of the enduring strength of the genre itself. In some respects, this movie actually could have been made in the 1940s. It accepts its conventions and categories at face value and doesn't make them the object of satire or filter them through a modern sensibility. Here's a private-eye movie in which all the traditions, romantic as they may seem, are left intact. And yet, at the same time, Polanski is so sensitive to the ways in which 1930s' movies in this genre were made that we're almost watching a critical essay. He's made a perceptive, loving comment on a kind of movie and a time in the nation's history that are both long past. Chinatown is almost a lesson on how to experience this kind of movie.
