Film Club No. 002

Los Angeles, 1937. A private detective takes a routine case of suspected adultery and finds himself drawn into a conspiracy involving water, land, money and murder.

1. The Programme

Director: Roman Polanski
Screenplay: Robert Towne
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman
Filmed: 1973, principally in Los Angeles, California, with studio work in Hollywood
Released: 1974
Cinematography: John A. Alonzo
Primary Genre: Neo-Noir
Secondary Genre/s: Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Drama

Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private investigator who specialises in matrimonial disputes. He is well dressed, successful and rather pleased with himself. When a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray hires him to investigate her husband’s infidelity, Gittes expects another straightforward job. Instead, photographs of the supposed affair appear in the newspapers, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) threatens legal action, and the man at the centre of the scandal turns up dead.

What begins as an embarrassment becomes an obsession. Gittes follows a trail through the Los Angeles water department, the city’s reservoirs and the surrounding agricultural land. Along the way he encounters powerful businessmen, uncooperative officials and a family whose secrets prove considerably darker than the original investigation suggested.

Released in 1974, Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski from an original screenplay by Robert Towne. Its principal cast includes Nicholson, Dunaway and John Huston, whose presence carries particular significance for anyone familiar with the history of American cinema.

The film belongs to the tradition of film noir: the private detective, the mysterious woman, the corrupt city and the apparently simple case that grows increasingly complicated. But Chinatown is not merely an imitation of the detective films of the 1940s. It takes their familiar conventions and pushes them towards a far more pessimistic conclusion.

Its reputation rests partly on the precision of Towne’s screenplay, but equally on the way Polanski controls what the audience knows, what it sees and, crucially, what it misunderstands.

2. Keep Your Eyes Open

Stay close to Gittes

One of Chinatown’s most effective techniques is its restriction of perspective. Almost everything we learn comes through Gittes. We follow his investigations, overhear his conversations and discover information at approximately the same time he does.

This creates an unusual relationship between detective and audience. Gittes is intelligent and observant, but he is also arrogant, impulsive and occasionally spectacularly wrong. Because we share his perspective, we tend to share his assumptions.

Notice how often he arrives somewhere without understanding what he is looking at. The camera rarely provides an explanatory view that would put us ahead of him. Instead, we must interpret the same incomplete evidence.

The film’s mystery depends less on withholding information than on encouraging us to draw the wrong conclusions from information already available.

Look at the light

Classic film noir is associated with darkness: rain-soaked streets, cigarette smoke, Venetian blinds and threatening shadows. Chinatown is strikingly different.

Much of the action takes place in brilliant Californian sunshine. The streets are wide, the skies clear and the surrounding countryside seemingly open and prosperous.

Cinematographer John A. Alonzo uses warm, muted colours to recreate the appearance of 1930s Los Angeles. The result is attractive but subtly oppressive. The brightness offers little comfort and even less clarity.

Pay attention to the contrast between the apparently respectable world of offices, mansions and civic institutions and the unpleasant activities taking place within them.

The film suggests that corruption does not necessarily hide in darkness. Sometimes it operates quite comfortably in broad daylight.

Watch how Nicholson plays Gittes

Gittes is not the conventional heroic detective. He is vain, frequently sarcastic and professionally comfortable exploiting other people’s unhappiness.

Nicholson gives him considerable charm, but look for the moments when that charm becomes a liability. Gittes enjoys demonstrating that he is the cleverest person in the room. His confidence sometimes prevents him from recognising when he is being manipulated.

The injury to his nose, sustained relatively early in the film, is particularly important. It turns the detective’s face into a visible record of his misjudgement. For much of the story, Nicholson must perform behind an absurd-looking bandage.

It is an effective way of puncturing the character’s self-image without entirely destroying his authority.

Listen to the music

Jerry Goldsmith’s score is one of the film’s defining elements, particularly its haunting solo trumpet.

Rather than accompanying every development with dramatic emphasis, the music often introduces a sense of melancholy and unease. It evokes the romantic atmosphere of an earlier Hollywood while suggesting that something has gone badly wrong beneath the surface.

Notice how sparingly it is used. Silence, conversation and ordinary environmental sounds are frequently allowed to carry the tension.

Think about the title

For much of the film, Chinatown seems a curious title. The investigation takes place largely elsewhere, and the district itself remains peripheral.

Listen carefully when Gittes discusses his previous employment there. His recollections introduce an important idea: that intervention, even when well intentioned, can make an already dangerous situation worse.

Keep that thought in mind as the investigation approaches its conclusion.

SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON…

3. After The Credits

The detective who cannot solve the problem

The central tragedy of Chinatown is not that Gittes fails to uncover the truth. He eventually understands almost everything.

He identifies the conspiracy surrounding Los Angeles’s water supply, recognises Noah Cross’s involvement and discovers the terrible secret connecting Cross, Evelyn and Katherine.

But knowledge gives him remarkably little power.

This is where Chinatown breaks decisively with the traditional detective story. Ordinarily, solving the mystery restores some degree of order. The criminal is exposed, the innocent are protected and the detective’s persistence is vindicated.

Here, the investigation exposes a system in which the powerful are effectively beyond accountability.

Cross is not simply a villain pursuing money. His ambition extends to controlling the future itself. His manipulation of water and land will determine who prospers and who suffers for generations.

The historical background matters. Towne drew on the real conflicts over water that shaped Los Angeles’s development, although the film’s conspiracy is fictionalised. Water becomes both a commodity and an instrument of political control.

Evelyn and the failure of appearances

Evelyn initially appears to fulfil the familiar noir role of the femme fatale: wealthy, mysterious, evasive and apparently concealing something.

Yet the film gradually dismantles that interpretation.

Her secrecy is not evidence of calculated manipulation but a desperate attempt to protect Katherine from the man who abused her. Gittes repeatedly interprets Evelyn’s behaviour through the conventions of the detective stories he believes himself to inhabit.

His interrogation of her is one of the film’s most uncomfortable sequences. He demands a simple explanation when the truth is too traumatic to fit the categories he has imposed.

Evelyn is not the dangerous woman leading the detective astray. She is the person who most urgently needs protection.

The distinction matters because Gittes’s inability to understand her contributes directly to the catastrophe.

Forget it, Jake

The final sequence is devastating because Gittes believes he has finally taken control.

He has identified the villain, arranged an escape and brought the different strands of the mystery together. In a conventional thriller, this would be the moment when the detective’s ingenuity pays off.

Instead, Evelyn is killed, Cross takes Katherine, and the police accept the powerful man’s version of events.

The closing instruction, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” is more than an expression of resignation. It recalls Gittes’s earlier admission that, in Chinatown, he never really knew whether his actions were helping or harming anyone.

He has returned to precisely the situation he hoped to escape.

Polanski’s decision to end the film so bleakly was famously at odds with Towne’s preference for a less devastating resolution. It is difficult to imagine the film retaining the same force with a more reassuring ending.

The final image leaves us with a detective who has discovered the truth but cannot do anything useful with it.

That is what makes Chinatown more than an exceptionally constructed mystery. It is a film about the limits of individual agency in a society where wealth, authority and corruption reinforce one another.

Gittes can investigate the system, but he cannot defeat it. His intelligence and determination are real, yet neither is sufficient.

The detective solves the case. The villain wins.

And that is why Chinatown continues to disturb long after the credits have rolled.