Savoring a masterwork …

… Don’t Forget It, Jake, It’s Chinatown - Commentary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Chinatown is one of those movies made in so indissolubly collective a way as to make it impossible to ascribe principal creative credit to any one of its makers. A “masterpiece without a master,” Chinatown gives the lie to the “auteur” theory of film, which mistakenly contended that the director was always the primary creative force in studio-system movies.