SOURCE: Maxfield, James. “‘The Injustice of It All’: Polanski's Revision of the Private Eye Genre in Chinatown.” In The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy, pp. 93-102. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Maxfield examines how Chinatown subverts the characteristic features of the classic detective film, noting Polanski's attempts to both work within and expand upon the genre's thematic traditions.

Aside from being filmed in color, Roman Polanski's Chinatown looks much like a classic 1940s detective film, and the protagonist Jake Gittes seems the typical hard-boiled, wisecracking private eye. But such resemblances ultimately turn out to be superficial: Chinatown echoes certain characteristic features of the classic detective film not to emulate but to subvert them. For instance, as in numerous detective films there is a confrontation scene in Chinatown in which the detective, Jake Gittes...