I like this film better than anything Francis Fraud Crap-ola ever made, and better than Scorcese's 70s pictures (with the exception, maybe, of New York, New York). It's got a good story, a fantastic score, great cinematography, and of course, bravura performances (I fault the art direction a bit: everything looks too new, too unused, like we're looking at displays in a museum). Nicholson is great, Dunaway was never better, Burt Young is Burt Young, and Huston is . . . well, the bit where he says , "Mr. Gittes, I drink your milkshake," always gives me goosebumps. Easily the best Hollywood film in its year of release.
Francis Ford Crapola? You're nuts.
If you ask the question "what was the best American film of the 70's" most people would say Godfather or Taxi Driver as their answer.
The "OUATITW of film noir" question you pose is very intriguing and to give an answer, I don't think it's quite the post-modern farewell/love letter to the genre. Like you said, the film is too pretty; and while I think it's one of the finer American movies I've seen, I think the fact that it's not filmed in B&W makes it void of that claim alone. Chinatown is also idiosyncratic in how it was made. It's almost if someone described the genre at length to Polanski and Towne and they said to themselves, "Yeah, I could do that". I don't think they necessary "blew up" and dissected the genre in the manner of Leone and co. I hope this post made some sense, it feels very awkward to me.
I was careful not to mention "film noir" which I think is something of a myth; I had in mind the more specific category of the private detective film, of which there aren't all that many. As I said, I think there are definite references to PI films in Chinatown. The first visit to the Mulray house, for example, closely resembles Bogart's arrival at the Sternwood mansion at the beginning of The Big Sleep. There is even a couple shots of a car being washed (referencing the plot point in TBS having to do with the Sternwood's chauffeur), which has absolutely nothing to do with anything in Chinatown.
And is Taxi Driver that popular in the USA?