Chinatown

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The closing line in the 1974 detective saga is one of the most iconic in Hollywood history. With that final refrain, director Roman Polanski concluded a tale that resurrected the film noir style, epitomized the groundbreaking New Hollywood artistry of the 1970s, and further established Jack Nicholson as a signature leading man. Written by Robert Towne and earning him an Academy Award for best original screenplay, Chinatown is a fictionalized account of how ambitious businessmen and city officials in southern California acquired a water supply for the city of Los Angeles through political corruption, media manipulation, and violence, enriching themselves in the process. Considered to be among the best movies of all time, in 1991 Chinatown was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.

Plot summary

The story takes place in and around Los Angeles during a hot summer in 1937 and centers on J.J. (“Jake”) Gittes (played by Nicholson), a former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer who is now a private investigator. A woman purporting to be Evelyn Mulwray (Diane Ladd) hires Gittes to investigate her husband’s suspected infidelity. Gittes, jaded and accustomed to working on small-time cases, perks up when he recognizes the name of her husband, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), as the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).

Gittes attends a public meeting, during which he watches Mulwray oppose the creation of a dam and reservoir, much to the dismay of attendees who are concerned about the region’s drought conditions. Gittes tails Mulwray around the city as the engineer checks on the city’s water infrastructure, including the bone-dry channel of the Los Angeles River and a large pipe that discharges water into the ocean at night. Gittes eventually photographs Mulwray embracing a blonde woman (Belinda Palmer). Gittes gives his client the picture, which, to his surprise, ends up being published in the newspaper the next day, provoking a personal scandal for Mulwray and a professional one for the LADWP.

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At this point, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) confronts Gittes at his office and threatens to sue him for defaming her husband. Realizing that he has apparently been set up to tarnish Hollis’s reputation, Gittes tries to track down Hollis to get to the bottom of the ruse. Before he can find him, the police discover Hollis’s drowned body in a reservoir. Gittes then learns that another man had, improbably, drowned in the dry riverbed of the Los Angeles River. Upon visiting the site to understand how someone could drown there, he meets a young boy who tells him that the riverbed is being periodically flooded at night, a fact the boy reported to Hollis.

That evening Gittes returns to the reservoir where Hollis’s body was found. He hears two gunshots and takes refuge in a concrete channel, which quickly fills with water, nearly drowning him. He is then confronted by two men, one of whom he recognizes as Claude Mulvihill (Roy Jenson), a former sheriff who now works for the LADWP. The other man (played by director Polanski in a cameo) threatens Gittes for trespassing, slices one of his nostrils, and warns him to stop looking into the situation.

Soon after, Gittes meets with Evelyn and tells her that he thinks Hollis was murdered because he had uncovered a plot to dump part of the city’s water supply, thereby draining the municipal reserves and artificially creating public support for a new reservoir. Continuing his investigation, Gittes returns to the LADWP, where he learns that Hollis and a man named Noah Cross (John Huston) used to own the city’s water supply but that Hollis persuaded Cross to sell it to the city. Moreover, the new head of the department tells Gittes that some of the city’s water is being diverted to irrigate orange groves in the San Fernando Valley and claims that the discharge to the Los Angeles River and the ocean is merely a minor by-product of that effort.

Evelyn returns to Gittes’s office and hires him to find out who killed her husband. After Gittes reveals that he knows that Cross is her father, she becomes unsettled and says that Hollis and her father had a falling-out over the sale of the water system and the collapse of a dam that killed hundreds. Gittes goes to meet with Cross, who, ostensibly looking after his daughter’s interest, hires him to find the blonde woman Hollis was photographed hugging, whom no one has been able to locate since Hollis’s death.

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Pursuing the lead about the orange groves, Gittes learns from city records that farmland in the San Fernando Valley, under stress from the drought, is being bought up in large quantities. When he drives there to investigate, Gittes is attacked by a group of farmers who suspect he is either a real estate buyer or a city official. A farmer tells Gittes that not only are his groves not being irrigated but that people from the water department also have been poisoning his water and destroying his tanks. A vast conspiracy starts to become clear to Gittes: Cross and land speculators, in cahoots with city officials, have sought to pressure the citizens of Los Angeles into financing a new dam and reservoir by manufacturing an artificial drought, which has devastated agriculture in the valley and forced farmers to sell their land cheaply. Cross and his cronies stand to make a huge profit if the reservoir is built, its water is used to irrigate the valley, the land becomes valuable again, and they are able to sell their holdings at much higher prices.

Gittes and Evelyn find out that the valley properties are being purchased in the names of unwitting residents of a local retirement home. Brought into a new intimacy by their shared knowledge of the conspiracy, Gittes and Evelyn end up sleeping together. Gittes tells her that he has met with her father, and she admits that Cross is likely part of the fraud scheme and behind her husband’s murder. She leaves and Gittes surreptitiously follows her to a house where he sees her with the missing blonde woman. When Gittes confronts Evelyn, she claims that the woman is her sister, Katherine, and that she condoned the supposed affair because she wanted Hollis to be happy.

The next morning Gittes runs into one of his former LAPD colleagues, Lieut. Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez), who accuses Gittes of hiding evidence that Evelyn killed her husband. Escobar also reveals that Hollis was found with salt water in his lungs, suggesting that he was not killed at the reservoir but somewhere else. Gittes returns to the Mulwray house, where he learns that the backyard pond is filled with salt water. Moreover, he discovers a pair of broken glasses resembling those that belonged to Hollis in the water.

Gittes rushes to find Evelyn, who is at the other house with Katherine preparing to leave town, and accuses her of killing Hollis in the backyard pond. Evelyn denies this and instead confesses that Katherine is both her sister and her daughter, her father having raped her when she was a teenager. When Evelyn tells him that the eyeglasses did not belong to Hollis, Gittes figures out that they must be Cross’s and that Cross must have drowned Hollis in the pond. Gittes instructs Evelyn and Katherine to hide at her butler’s apartment in Chinatown, from which Gittes will have someone smuggle them to Mexico to get away from Cross.

Gittes arranges to meet Cross at the Mulwray house, where he confronts him with evidence of the murder and land scheme. Cross all but admits to both and adds that he plans to have the valley land incorporated into Los Angeles, explaining, “Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.” Cross then forces Gittes, who is being held at gunpoint by Mulvihill, to lead him to Katherine and Evelyn. In the concluding nighttime street scene in Chinatown, Escobar orders another cop to handcuff Gittes, who tries to explain that Cross is the guilty party and should be arrested. Instead, Cross attempts to take Katherine, whereupon Evelyn pulls out a gun and shoots him in the arm before trying to escape with Katherine in her car. The police shoot at them, Evelyn is killed, and the car crashes. Cross pulls Katherine from the wreck. Gittes, in shock and thoroughly defeated in his attempt to bring the powerful to account, is released from custody and Escobar tells him to go home. Gittes’s associate then gives the concluding line: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Production and historical inspiration

The idea for Chinatown originated with screenwriter Towne, a native of Los Angeles who wanted to tell a story about his hometown in the coolly cynical style of hard-boiled detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. Towne became interested in focusing on issues of municipal government after witnessing the dynamics around a large construction project near his house. He eventually landed on using Chinatown—a neighborhood, like those of the same name in other cities, with a predominantly Asian American population that functioned somewhat independently from the rest of the city—as a symbol of, as he told NPR in 1988, “the futility of good intentions.” Towne got the idea after speaking with an LAPD vice cop about his experience working in that neighborhood. The officer told Towne that he had been instructed to do as little as possible in his work there because the police did not understand Chinatown’s complex cultural landscape and so were never sure whether they were preventing crime or facilitating it. In the movie, Chinatown is both a metaphor for hopelessness and the place where, as a young cop, Gittes lost his innocence and where, at the movie’s conclusion, his idealism is dealt a final blow.

Towne also found inspiration in the real history of Los Angeles, in particular the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The aqueduct, planned during a severe drought (1892–1904) and completed in 1913, diverted water from the Owens River more than 200 miles (320 km) south to the San Fernando Valley, ultimately feeding the needs of the rapidly growing Los Angeles, which had no sufficient local water supply. The project was vehemently opposed by Owens River Valley inhabitants, including farmers, ranchers, and small-town residents, whose livelihoods would be ruined by the loss of much of the river’s flow. Adding insult to injury, the aqueduct plan, overseen by William Mulholland, a civil engineer for what later became the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, had been kept secret from the valley’s population. They found out only after the city had acquired all the necessary property and water rights through unpublicized purchases by a prosperous businessman, former mayor Frederick Eaton. Other prominent power brokers benefited from the project because they owned land in the San Fernando Valley, including railroad magnate Henry Huntington and Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis. Towne drew on these and other incidents and figures in his script for Chinatown, giving traits of Mulholland to both the fictional engineer Hollis Mulwray and the ruthlessly visionary businessman Noah Cross, setting the action decades later, and changing the locations and other details.

Chinatown was released by Paramount Pictures, the same studio that distributed other classics of the era, including Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), and Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975).

Aesthetic qualities

Chinatown has been credited with helping to establish the neo-noir genre, which adapted the visual style and themes of classic film noir—such as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, and intricate plots—to a modern sensibility. With its high-contrast lighting and deep shadows, Chinatown is a visual throwback to Hollywood noir classics of the 1940s and ’50s such as The Maltese Falcon (1941; the director of which, John Huston, appears as the villain Noah Cross). Unlike those dark, largely nocturnal black-and-white films, however, Chinatown was filmed in color and mostly in scorching sunlight, albeit with a muted palette of earth tones that reflects the desert landscape of southern California. It is also noted for its jazzy yet melancholic score, composed by Jerry Goldsmith, which permeates the film with a mood of uncertainty, confusion, and hopelessness with its wailing trumpet solos and stabbing strings.

Legacy

Chinatown garnered fairly widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for 11 Academy Awards. It has since been recognized as an enduring classic for its visual style, masterfully complex plotting, and memorable performances.

A sequel, The Two Jakes, written by Towne and starring and directed by Nicholson, was released in 1990 but failed to match the earlier film’s success in popularity or box office revenue.

Although Chinatown’s critical legacy is secure, it has suffered from the subsequent actions of its director. Three years after the film’s release, Polanski was arrested on six felony charges, including the rape of a 13-year-old girl. In August 1977 he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. However, he fled the country six months later, before sentencing, to avoid prison. He has subsequently lived primarily in France and continued to direct movies, but Chinatown is his last work filmed in the United States.