Chinatown (1974)

Chinatown (1974) is a superb, private eye mystery and modern-day film noir thriller. Its original, award-winning screenplay by Robert Towne is a throwback that pays homage to the best Hollywood film noirs from the pens of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the 30s and 40s. The film declined to provide a tagline, instead choosing imagery over words on its poster, which featured in 40's art deco, the detective - his back facing the viewer, smoking a cigarette, with the smoke emanating from it forming the visage of the heroine, signifying the setting, the mood, and symbolism of the film without uttering a single phrase.
The film is a skillful blend of mystery, romance, suspense, and hard boiled detective/film noir genre elements - especially embodied in The Maltese Falcon (1941) (by director John Huston who acts in this film) and The Big Sleep (1946).

This revisionist noir film was the first production of legendary Paramount Studios head (and ex-actor) Robert Evans, a flamboyant Hollywood figure who later in 1994 published a juicy autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture that was made into a documentary film in 2002.
The film marked director Roman Polanski's return to Hollywood five years after the gruesome 1969 Manson murders that took the life of his actress wife Sharon Tate. Polanski opted to use a bleak ending rather than the more hopeful finale in the original screenplay, presumably because of his life's tragedies. Only a few years later, in 1978, he would be indicted and convicted with the 1977 statuatory rape (and drugging) of a 13 year-old girl (later identified as Samantha Geimer) while at the home of star/actor Jack Nicholson (absent at the time), and had to flee to Europe as a fugitive.
Writer Robert Towne's screenplay was partially based on a true Los Angeles scandal in the early part of the 20th century (the story of the nefarious 1908 Owens Valley 'Rape' and scandalous San Fernando Valley land-grab by speculators). The film's character, Hollis Mulwray, was loosely derived from LA's water engineer William Mulholland, who orchestrated the purchase of water rights and the piping of water from the High Sierras into Los Angeles by an aqueduct that flowed through the now-valuable San Fernando Valley north of LA.
The investigation of a routine story by a detective uncovers secrets under many layers, facades, red herrings, and networks of corruption, conspiracy and deception. The film contains numerous plot reversals and twists (many of which regard the private eye's client and her family), fistfights and some violence, and many changes of scene. As the hero unravels the complicated, elusive facts, he flippantly and self-confidently offers pat explanations for the deeply-flowing corruption he unearths, and then finds he must continually revise his inaccurate pronouncements after uncovering further evidence. His efforts to separate good from evil - to save the good and punish the evil - ultimately fail in the metaphoric (and then real) world of Chinatown by the film's climax. [The film's title, according to Towne, referred to a 'state of mind' rather than an actual geographic place.]
Similar to a case that he never fully perceived or understood years earlier when he was a cop in LA's Chinatown [symbolic of the city of Los Angeles], he is doomed to repeat history ("You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't") - as a powerless, hard-boiled detective, he again brings tragedy to a woman he wants to help. [The story continued in a complex, poorly-received sequel many years later - The Two Jakes (1990) - that required considerable knowledge of the earlier film in order to be comprehensible. It also starred Nicholson as the private detective in 1948 Los Angeles (and he also served as the film's director - in his debut film). The sequel, when viewed with the original film, provides the viewer with a 267-minute film noir epic. A third film to complete a trilogy was shelved when The Two Jakes failed at the box-office.]
The film's claustrophobic, cyclical, bleak mood surrounding the heroic quest of the detective struck a responsive chord after the scandalous Watergate era of the early 1970s. The film's two puzzling mysteries and tragedies - family-related and water-related - are beautifully interwoven together. The water-rights scandal at the heart of the film expresses how ecological rape of the land has occurred in outrageous land-development schemes that redirect the water's flow. It reminds viewers that the days of abundant natural resources (and life-giving water that turns a forbidden wilderness into a plentiful garden) are past - the land has become barren due to the selfish manipulations of rich and powerful businessmen.
There were many accolades for this stunning film, including eleven Academy Award nominations, although only one took the Oscar home, Best Original Screenplay for Robert Towne's superb work (the losses were partly attributed to the intense competition from Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974)). [Chinatown won four of its seven nominations at the 32nd Annual Golden Globes ceremony: it defeated Coppola's film for the Best Picture-Drama award; Polanski won the Best Director award; Jack Nicholson won the Best Actor in a Leading Role-Drama award; and Robert Towne won the Best Screenplay honor.]
The other ten Academy Awards nominations were: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Faye Dunaway), Best Director (Roman Polanski with his first Best Director nomination), Best Cinematography (John A. Alonzo), Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Original Dramatic Score (Jerry Goldsmith), Best Film Editing, and Best Costume Design. Originally, Polanski had considered Anjelica Huston for the role ultimately assumed by Faye Dunaway - that would have made her real-life father, John Huston, her on-screen father (incestuous) also!


The film's credits play under a sepia-colored art deco background in the old 1:33 screen format, suggesting the bygone era from the past - one of yellowed photographs, the early days of Hollywood's sound pictures, amber-preserved fossils, or images drained of their color. A haunting, melancholy trumpet solo provides the musical backdrop for the title sequence. Set in 1937, the first scene opens in the upscale office of a Los Angeles private detective-hero, an overdressed character named J. J. (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson). He's a former cop who now specializes in investigations involving messy, 'dirty' divorce cases and extra-marital affairs.
One of his distraught clients named Curly (Burt Young) is in his office, groaning while looking at the incriminating evidence - black and white photographs of his wife (probably also groaning) and awkwardly having adulterous sex with another half-clothed man in the woods. [This is the first instance in the film of seeing 'evidence,' 'proof' or facts in a case that can easily be misunderstood or misread. He voyeuristically flips through the pictures - creating a peep-show effect.] Curly is so upset that he throws the pictures into the air and grabs the venetian blinds. The self-assured, unperturbed Jake understands his agonized pain and commiserates with him, but cooly and detachedly cautions him to stop gnawing on the newly-installed fixtures:
All right, Curly, enough's enough. You can't eat the venetian blinds. I just had 'em installed on Wednesday.
Jake, wearing a white-colored suit, offers him a stiff drink instead: "Down the hatch." Jake supports Curly's belief that his wife is unfaithful and no good: "What can I tell you, kid? You're right. When you're right, you're right, and you're right." Curly is ushered into the cream-colored outer room where Jake assures the lower-class fisherman that he won't take his "last dime." The client mumbles about begging off paying the fees until the next week - after his next fishing boat haul to catch more profitable albacore tuna. [This isn't the first mention of albacore.] Jake's door is labeled with bold letters: "J. J. Gittes & Associates, Discreet Investigations."
In another room are Jake's well-dressed partners, "operatives" Walsh (Joe Mantell) and Duffy (Bruce Glover), associates who assist Gittes in gathering evidence, taking photographs, and snooping on the extra-marital indiscretions of rich, wayward spouses. They introduce Jake to a second client, a woman named "Mrs. Mulwray" (Diane Ladd), who also complains about a suspected infidelity. [She isn't who she appears to be, but actually is an imposter named Ida Sessions who has been hired to discredit Mr. Mulwray.]. Not permitted to speak to Gittes privately, she asks him - with his operatives present - to investigate her husband's alleged affair with another woman.
Although Jake attempts to dissuade the lady-like "Mrs. Mulwray" from pursuing the case with an ironic expression: "Let sleeping dogs lie, you're, you're better off not knowing," she insists on his investigation of the extra-marital affair: "A wife can tell... I have to know!" She identifies her husband as Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the well-known chief engineer of L.A. city's "Water and Power" Company. "Mrs. Mulwray" insists that his expensive services are no problem: "Money doesn't matter to me, Mr. Gittes."
Jake begins his investigation of the Mulwray case by listening to public hearings discussing the latest waterways project - a proposed Alto Vallejo Dam and Reservoir. Proponents and opponents of the dam present their cases at the city council meeting. Bored listening to the Mayor Bagby's (Roy Roberts) speech about how "Los Angeles is a desert community" needing irrigation projects that must be paid for by a public bond, Gittes reads the Racing Record with headlines: "Seabiscuit Idol of Racing Fans." When a bow-tied Mulwray is called to speak, the lanky, bespectacled man lambasts the politician's project that would give the desert area north of LA (the San Fernando Valley) irrigation water. He argues with an engineer's grasp of facts against its construction - using previous experience from the Van der Lip dam disaster that killed five hundred people. [Paralleling history, a Mulholland-designed structure, the St. Francis Dam, burst in 1928 and caused a massive loss of life and property]:
And now you propose yet another dirt-banked terminus dam, with slopes of two and one-half to one, 112 feet high and a 12,000 acre water surface. Well, it won't hold. I won't build it, it's that simple. I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.
Mulwray's opinion that effectively denies water to the area is unpopular - it is greeted with boos and protests. As Gittes grins at the sight, an irate farmer (Rance Howard) from the dry valley herds his sheep down the aisle of the public hearing. He demands to know why Mulwray is denying water to his livestock and crops, and then accuses the engineer of being paid off to divert water from the farms in the valley:
You steal water from the valley. Ruin their grazing. Starve the livestock. Who's paying you to do that, Mr. Mulwray? That's what I want to know.
Mulwray looks down and doesn't answer - he is still investigating the truth for himself.
Gittes trails Hollis Mulwray, who spends most of his time checking out the city's water supplies. Gittes spies on him with binoculars as a noisy fly buzzes around his head - but he doesn't understand Mulwray's paradoxical actions. He first walks in a dried-up riverbed and speaks to a Mexican boy on horseback, and then opens a large ledger book on the hood of his car. Next, Gittes tails him in his car, watching him from his rear-view mirror for more clues. He watches Mulwray as he gazes for many hours at the ocean from a coastal beach. At nightfall, water mysteriously runs out of a run-off pipe near the ocean and channels itself into the Pacific.
When Gittes returns to his car at 8:20 pm, he finds a notice on his windshield from the Citizens' Committee to Save Los Angeles, urging a 'YES' vote on the dam bond.