Stephen Farber

"The masochistic side of the women's lib literature has been represented in such films as Play It As It Lays and Buster and Billie, one-note chronicles of the exploitations, subjugation, and defeat of women. But there are no screen heroines who have been awakened to new possibilities by the women's movement. It is revealing that the most interesting heroines can be found in movies set in the past. Roman Polanski's Chinatown, an overpraised, pretentious detective story, creates a heroine in the femme fatale mold of the forties movies and almost brings off the conceit. Faye Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray is obviously modeled on Mary Astor's treacherous, duplicitious Brigid O'Shaugnessy in The Maltese Falcon, but there is one crucial difference: Brigid was a ruthless, scheming murderess, while Evelyn lies because of her neurotic helplessness. Her disdainful, aristocratic manner is only a facade; she is actually ravaged, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed. Although in her first scenes she resembles the thirties and forties heroine--the woman of style, power, and mystery--she is really a seventies figure, woman as victim. But if she is finally little more than a bundle of familiar feminine neuroses, she is still the only character in the cardboard world of Chinatown, and thanks to Faye Dunaway's eloquent performance, we remember her after everything else in this posturing movie has faded."

Stephen Farber
"The Vanishing Heroine", The Hudson Review, issue? 1974, p. 575