Director Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) are both Hollywood classics with strong film noir elements. Both are set in Los Angeles (or, more narrowly for Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood), and both contrast a visual love for the city with a dark disdain for the corruption beneath its glamorous facade.
Sunset Boulevard begins in classic noir style. A black-and-white Paramount Pictures logo is superimposed against a sidewalk. The camera pulls back to reveal the street name “Sunset Blvd.” stenciled on the curb in glowing white block letters. The camera continues to pull back, showing the title credits in the same glowing white type, superimposed at an angle against the street. Finally, the camera pans up to reveal a street scene in the 10000 block of Sunset Boulevard, with palm trees in silhouette against a foggy dawn sky. Police cars and motorcycles rush toward the camera, down the street, then turn into a driveway. Photographers and cops run toward a pool, where a man’s body is floating. Underwater, the camera looks up at the man. “The poor dope,” the narrator explains. “He always wanted a pool.”
Chinatown begins with a touch of noir. A Paramount Pictures logo and title credits are superimposed against a monochromatic sepia-brown background. However, Chinatown is a wider film, literally and metaphorically, than Sunset Boulevard. Chinatown is shot in Technicolor, in a widescreen Panavision format with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Sunset Boulevard, by contrast, is shot in black and white with a traditional 1.37:1 format. While Sunset Boulevard deals with personal corruption in a Hollywood where “It’s the pictures that got small” after characters began to talk, Chinatown’s plot involves a wider political corruption in a Los Angeles that was transformed by power that brought water and wealth to a desert city.