
Waiting for stylish, brittle women to break is one of the enduring pleasures of movies. Bette Davis built a great career on that dark device. Dunaway built a great performance on it as Evelyn Mulwray, the woman raped by her perfectly powerful, perfectly evil father (screenwriter Robert Towne thought the father’s sexual predation perfectly matched his rape of the virginal California landscape). Her breakdown (“She’s my sister, she’s my daughter”) is perhaps the iconic moment in post-modern American cinema.