Chinatown

"Michael Eaton's compelling study of Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir situates Chinatown in relation to a history of fictional detectives, from Sophocles to Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. In an absorbing account of the film's narrative development and visual style, he traces Chinatown's relationship to the pessimism of American cinema (and, by extension, in wider American culture) in the mid-1970s, and the source of the film's narrative and visual impact. In his afterword to this new edition, Eaton considers Chinatown's 1990 sequel The Two Jakes and also the movie's changing fortunes in the years since its release"--