Corruption was hardly a new concept; it was only that America, dreaming for centuries, Polanski believed, was late to the dark awakening. “You find these things in any country,” he said, “where money and power matter,” where good intentions, as Towne might put it, invariably surrender to futility. To powerlessness and defeat. Polanski was making Chinatown about the price of learning that particular truth, “whether about politics or the relationship between a man and a woman,” or the moment when the wall went up around the ghetto, and the phone rang in London and he learned, for all he thought
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