The curious timing and conspiratorial goings-on surrounding Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland this week bring to mind, for me, the Polish director’s most fascinating film, Chinatown. Arrested for a crime he confessed to thirty-two years ago, but the punishment for which he has avoided ever since, Polanski appears to have been drawn into a world of smoke-and-mirrors and legalese, finally bought down by the very system that has permitted his freedom from extradition since he fled the US in 1977. It promises to be a distorted and confusing affair and like that experienced by Jake Gittes, the increasingly buffeted and bewildered detective protagonist in his 1974 neo-noir masterpiece, one that might prove impossible to truly unravel.

Chinatown was, and remains, a dazzling exercise in cinematic intelligence and, even in that golden era of post-classical Hollywood, when directors as spiky and gifted as Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, Kubrick and Malick were at their towering, ruthless best, it remains a benchmark against which few others measure up. It also helped to disprove, alongside Bonny & Clyde, Badlands, The Conversation, Mean Streets and others, the erroneous belief that the Hollywood studio system was incapable of producing the kind of “thinking” cinema that had, until then, been the sole preserve of the French New Wave and Italian neo-Realists.

Directed by Polanski and written by the brilliant Robert Towne, it is a film that appears at first glance to be a traditional detective story but, as it slowly, agonisingly unfurls, reveals layer after layer of internecine drama, illusion and genre shattering complexity. It is a film that credits its audience with the intelligence to follow its tangled plot without resorting to stock-in-trade, formulaic devices. It takes a popular genre, the film noir, and toys with and defies expectation time and again. It is grim, brutal and intense and yet remains so enticing, almost fragile, that it openly challenges the audience to recoil at what is opening up before them, to pull back from the deep human tragedy emerging from the Californian sunlight and shadows. And yet it is impossible to do so.

Brilliantly cast  - Jack Nicholson at his imperious, youthful best, Faye Dunaway at the height of her fame, the great director/actor John Huston, himself a legend of film-noir direction (The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo and others) delivering a dark master class in amorality, villainy and corruption – pitch-perfectly scored, stunningly designed and, of course, so tightly directed, Chinatown is as near to perfect as Hollywood filmmaking gets. 

Polanski’s film career, like his personal life, has been a chequered affair and it is difficult to defend against charges of inconsistency, from the erratic Rosemary’s Baby to The Ninth Gate and Bitter Moon, but Chinatown, a film of its time but one for all ages, is his apotheosis. Whatever happens in his current legal predicament we should hope he is best remembered as the man that brought it to our screens.