‘Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown’ - Jerry Goldsmith became the composer for Roman Polanski’s greatest film to date Chinatown after the original score by Phillip Lambro was rejected, writing the music in only 10 days. Its magnificent jazz-blues theme is an important part of this classic homage to 1940s film noir, says Selwyn Harris

It’s no exaggeration to speak of events in Roman Polanski’s life as being as colourful as those in his films. That’s not forgetting that the director is renowned for ploughing gruesome, often taboo themes. The recent holocaust feature The Pianist (2002) is his only film that bears a direct relation to the autobiographical, alluding to the terror of Polanski’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland in which his mother was murdered. But otherwise it’s perhaps a little facile, if only natural in Polanski’s case, to attempt to plot a trajectory connecting the two.

In 1968, he enjoyed success with his Hollywood debut, the seminal occult chiller Rosemary’s Baby (Jazzwise 85) in which Mia Farrow character’s newborn baby is usurped by a demonic cult. Bizarrely, just a year later, Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was savagely murdered at the hands of the Charles Manson “family” cult. Polanski retreated to Europe, aborting a potentially lucrative career in the US. On returning to Hollywood in 1974 he made his biggest hit to date Chinatown, a tale of corruption and child incest and the first neo-noir thriller to be filmed in colour. Then only a few years later he was convicted of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in the spa bath of the film’s star Jack Nicholson. Again he fled to Paris and has remained a fugitive ever since.

To read the rest of this article subscribe here