Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films
by John G. Cawelti
Chinatown invokes in so many ways the American popular genre of the hard-boiled detective story. Two main films associated with this tradition, both starring Humphery Bogart are:
- John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941)
- Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946)
- Next to the western the hard-boiled detective story is America's most distinctive contribution to the world's stock of action-adventure stories
- Our contemporaneous embodiment of the drama of heroic quest which has appeared in so many differenct culturesin so many different guises.