Michael Eaton – författare

Directed in 1974 by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne, Chinatown is a brilliant reworking of film noir set in a drought-stricken Los Angeles of the 1930s. Jack Nicholson stars as J. J. Gittes, a private eye who, despite his best intentions, can bring only disaster on Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the enigmatic woman he has come to love. Gittes’s investigation into the death of Evelyn’s husband exposes a chaos of political corruption and sexual violence lurking beneath a glittering, sun-bleached surface.Michael Eaton’s compelling study situates Chinatown in relation to a history of fictional detectives, from Sophocles to Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock. In an absorbing account of the film’s narrative development and visual style, he traces Chinatown’s relationship to the pessimism of American cinema (and, by extension, the wider culture) in the mid-1970s, and the source of the film’s narrative and visual impact.In his afterword to this new edition, Eaton considers Chinatown’s 1990 sequel The Two Jakes and also the movie’s changing fortunes in the years since its release.

Our Friends in the North (1996) is the kind of epic drama that has ensured the BBC's peerless worldwide reputation for seriousness and excellence. In nine parts, it tells the life stories of four friends - Mary (Gina McKee), Nicky (Christopher Eccleston), Geordie (Daniel Craig) and Tosker (Mark Strong) - from adolescence to middle age. Their personal triumphs and crises unfold against the backdrop of massive social and political change in Britain - in particular the rise of Thatcherism and the dwindling of socialist ideals. Technically outstanding, Our Friends in the North is truly a 'state of the nation' drama but one which explores its large themes as well as more specific ones (domestic violence, corruption in the police and local government, iniquities in the criminal justice system) while developing its central characters with exceptional subtlety and finesse.