Chinatown

Plot

In 1937 Los Angeles, a woman identifying herself as Evelyn Mulwray hires private investigator J. J. "Jake" Gittes to trail her husband, Hollis, the chief engineer at the Department of Water and Power. Gittes photographs Hollis in the company of a young woman and the pictures make their way into the Post-Record, exposing their apparent affair. Gittes is then confronted by the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue him. He concludes that the impostor was using him to discredit Hollis.

Gittes crosses paths with his former colleague, LAPD Lieutenant Lou Escobar, when Hollis's corpse is found in a reservoir. Investigating further, he discovers that huge quantities of water are being released from the reservoir each night, despite the fact that the city is in the midst of a drought. Water Department Security Chief Claude Mulvihill warns him off, and he has his nose slashed by one of Mulvihill's henchmen.

Gittes receives a call from Ida Sessions, the woman who posed as Evelyn. She refuses to say who hired her, but urges Gittes to check the Post-Record's obituary section. Now working for Evelyn, Gittes investigates Hollis's death. He learns that Hollis was once the business partner of Evelyn's wealthy father, Noah Cross. Cross offers to double Gittes's fee if he finds Hollis's supposed mistress, who has disappeared.

Public records reveal that much of the Northwest Valley has recently changed ownership. Gittes recognizes one of the buyers' names from the obituary section; the obituary indicates that he had been dead for a week when the deal was closed. Gittes and Evelyn bluff their way into the retirement home where the buyer had lived and discover that many of the other residents are "buyers" too, although they have no knowledge of this fact. A suspicious staff member calls Mulvihill, but Gittes and Evelyn escape him and his thugs and hide at her mansion, where they sleep together. Later that night, Gittes follows Evelyn to a house where he sees her comforting the missing girl. When confronted, Evelyn claims the girl is her sister, Katherine.

A call from Escobar summons Gittes to Ida's apartment; she has been murdered. Escobar reveals that Hollis had saltwater in his lungs, indicating that he did not drown in the reservoir. He suspects Evelyn is responsible for her husband's murder and tells Gittes to produce her quickly. At the Mulwray residence, Gittes retrieves a pair of bifocals from the saltwater garden pond.

Production

Background

In 1971, producer Robert Evans offered Towne $175,000 to write a screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), but Towne felt he could not better the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Instead, Towne asked Evans for $25,000 to write his own story, Chinatown, to which Evans agreed. Towne had originally hoped to also direct Chinatown, but realized that by taking Evans' money, he would lose control of the project's future and his role as a director.

Chinatown is set in 1937 and portrays the manipulation of a critical municipal resource—water—by a cadre of shadowy oligarchs. It was the first part of Towne's planned trilogy about the character J. J. Gittes, the foibles of the Los Angeles power structure, and the subjugation of public good by private greed. The second part, The Two Jakes, has Gittes caught up in another grab for a natural resource—oil—in the 1940s. It was directed by Jack Nicholson and released in 1990, but the second film's commercial and critical failure scuttled plans to make Gittes vs. Gittes, about the third finite resource—land—in Los Angeles, circa 1968.

Origins

The character of Hollis Mulwray was inspired by and loosely based on Irish immigrant William Mulholland (1855–1935) according to Mulholland's granddaughter. Mulholland was the superintendent and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who oversaw the construction of the aqueduct that carries water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. Mulholland was considered by many to be the man who made Los Angeles possible by building the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early 1900s. The 233-mile-long (375 km) feat of engineering brought the water necessary for urban expansion from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, whose growth was constrained by the limits of the Los Angeles River. Mulholland credited Fred Eaton, then mayor of Los Angeles, with the idea to secure water for the city from the Owens Valley.

Although the character of Hollis Mulwray was relatively minor in the film and he was killed in the early part of the movie, the events of Mulholland's life were portrayed through both the character of Mulwray and other figures in the movie. This portrayal, along with other changes to actual events that inspired Chinatown, such as the time frame which was some thirty years earlier than that of the movie, were some of the liberties with facts of Mulholland's life that the movie takes.

Author Vincent Brook considers real-life Mulholland to be split, in the film, into "noble Water and Power chief Hollis Mulwray" and "mobster muscle Claude Mulvihill", just as Land syndicate and Combination members, who "exploited their insider knowledge" on account of "personal greed", are "condensed into the singular, and singularly monstrous, Noah Cross".

In the film, Mulwray opposes the dam wanted by Noah Cross and the city of Los Angeles, for reasons of engineering and safety, arguing he would not repeat his previous mistake, when his dam broke resulting in hundreds of deaths. This alludes to the St. Francis Dam disaster of March 12, 1928. Unlike the character of Mulwray, who was concerned about the dam in Chinatown, Mulholland's role in the disaster diverged from the events in the film. Mulholland had inspected the St. Francis Dam after the dam keeper Tony Harnischfeger requested it, when Harnischfeger became concerned about the safety of the dam upon discovering cracks and brown water leaking from its base, which indicated to him the erosion of the dam's foundation. Mulholland inspected the dam at around 10:30 in the morning, declaring that all was well with the structure. Just before midnight that same evening, a massive failure of the dam occurred. The dam's failure inundated the Santa Clara River Valley, including the town of Santa Paula, with flood water, causing the deaths of at least 431 people. The event effectively ended Mulholland's career.

Script

According to Robert Towne, both Carey McWilliams's Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article called "Raymond Chandler's L.A." inspired his original screenplay. In a letter to McWilliams, Towne wrote that Southern California Country "really changed my life. It taught me to look at the place where I was born, and convinced me to write about it".

Towne wrote the screenplay with Jack Nicholson in mind. He took the title (and the exchange "What did you do in Chinatown?" / "As little as possible") from a Hungarian vice cop, who had worked in Los Angeles's Chinatown, dealing with its confusion of dialects and gangs. The vice cop thought that "police were better off in Chinatown doing nothing, because you could never tell what went on there" and whether what a cop did helped victims or further exploited them.

Polanski first learned of the script through Nicholson, as they had been searching for a suitable joint project, and the producer Robert Evans was excited at the thought that Polanski's direction would create a darker, more cynical, and European vision of the United States. Polanski was initially reluctant to return to Los Angeles (it was only a few years since the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate), but was persuaded on the strength of the script.

Towne wanted Cross to die and Evelyn Mulwray to survive, but the screenwriter and director argued over it, with Polanski insisting on a tragic end: "I knew that if Chinatown was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die". They parted ways over this dispute and Polanski wrote the final scene a few days before it was shot.

The original script was more than 180 pages and included a narration by Gittes; Polanski cut and reordered the story so the audience and Gittes unraveled the mysteries at the same time.

According to Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, Towne "secretly employed an old college friend named Edward Taylor as his uncredited writing partner for more than 40 years." (Taylor died in 2013).

Characters and casting

J. J. Gittes was named after Nicholson's friend, producer Harry Gittes.

Evelyn Mulwray is, according to Towne, intended to initially seem the classic "black widow" character typical of lead female characters in film noir, but is eventually revealed to be a tragic victim. Jane Fonda was strongly considered for the role, but Polanski insisted on Dunaway.

Noah Cross: Towne said that Huston was, after Nicholson, the second-best-cast actor in the film and that he made the Cross character menacing, through his courtly performance.

Polanski appears in a cameo as the gangster who cuts Gittes' nose. The effect was accomplished with a special knife which could have actually cut Nicholson's nose if Polanski had not held it correctly.

In 1974, after making Chinatown and while filming The Fortune, Nicholson was informed by Time magazine researchers that his "sister" was actually his mother, similarly to the revelation made in the film regarding Evelyn and Katherine.

Filming

Principal photography took place from October 1973 to January 1974. William A. Fraker accepted the cinematographer position from Polanski when Paramount agreed. He had worked with the studio previously on Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Robert Evans, never consulted about the decision, insisted that the offer be rescinded since he felt pairing Polanski and Fraker again would create a team with too much control over the project and complicate the production.

Between Fraker and the eventual choice John A. Alonzo, the two compromised on Stanley Cortez, but Polanski grew frustrated with Cortez's slow process, old fashioned compositional sensibility, and unfamiliarity with the Panavision equipment. Alonzo had worked on documentaries and shot film for National Geographic and for Jacques Cousteau. Alonzo was chosen for his fleetness and skill with natural light a few weeks into production. Alonzo understood that Polanski wanted realism in his lighting; "He wants the soft red tile to look soft red." Ultimately, only a handful of scenes in the finished film, including the orange grove confrontation, were shot by Cortez. Because Polanski's English was poor, Alonzo and Polanski would communicate in Italian, which Alonzo would then translate for the crew. Polanski was rigorous in his framing and use of Alonzo's vision, making the actors strictly adhere to blocking to accommodate the camera and lighting.

Soundtrack

Jerry Goldsmith composed and recorded the film's score in ten days, after producer Robert Evans rejected Phillip Lambro's original effort at the last minute. It received an Academy Award nomination and remains widely praised, ranking ninth on the American Film Institute's list of the top 25 American film scores. Goldsmith's score, with "haunting" trumpet solos by Hollywood studio musician and MGM's first trumpet Uan Rasey, was released through ABC Records and features 12 tracks at a running time just over 30 minutes. It was later reissued on CD by the Varèse Sarabande label. Rasey related that Goldsmith "told [him] to play it sexy — but like it's not good sex!"

"Love Theme from Chinatown (Main Title)"

"Noah Cross"

"Easy Living" (Rainger, Robin)

"Jake and Evelyn"

"I Can't Get Started" (Duke, Gershwin)

"The Last of Ida"

"The Captive"

"The Boy on a Horse"

"The Way You Look Tonight" (Kern, Fields)

"The Wrong Clue"

"J. J. Gittes"

"Love Theme from Chinatown (End Title)"

Historical background

In his 2004 film essay and documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, film scholar Thom Andersen lays out the complex relationship between Chinatown's script and its historical background,

Chinatown isn't a docudrama, it's a fiction. The water project it depicts isn't the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, engineered by William Mulholland before the First World War. Chinatown is set in 1937, not 1905. The Mulholland-like figure—"Hollis Mulwray"—isn't the chief architect of the project, but rather its strongest opponent, who must be discredited and murdered. Mulwray is against the "Alto Vallejo Dam" because it's unsafe, not because it's stealing water from somebody else... But there are echoes of Mulholland's aqueduct project in Chinatown... Mulholland's project enriched its promoters through insider land deals in the San Fernando Valley, just like the dam project in Chinatown. The disgruntled San Fernando Valley farmers of Chinatown, forced to sell off their land at bargain prices because of an artificial drought, seem like stand-ins for the Owens Valley settlers whose homesteads turned to dust when Los Angeles took the water that irrigated them. The "Van Der Lip Dam" disaster, which Hollis Mulwray cites to explain his opposition to the proposed dam, is an obvious reference to the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam in 1928. Mulholland built this dam after completing the aqueduct and its failure was the greatest man-made disaster in the history of California. These echoes have led many viewers to regard Chinatown, not only as docudrama, but as truth—the real secret history of how Los Angeles got its water. And it has become a ruling metaphor of the non-fictional critiques of Los Angeles development.

Themes

Chinatown is widely regarded as a defining example of neo-noir, emphasizing themes of moral ambiguity, corruption, and fatalism. The film portrays Los Angeles as a setting in which powerful institutions operate beyond the reach of justice, particularly through its depiction of water rights manipulation and political influence. Unlike many classic film noir works of the 1940s, the narrative offers no moral resolution, culminating in a bleak ending in which the protagonist is unable to prevent injustice.

Scholars have also noted that the film complicates the traditional femme fatale archetype through the character of Evelyn Mulwray, who initially appears deceptive but is ultimately revealed as a victim of abuse and patriarchal power. This subversion reflects broader shifts in 1970s American cinema and reinforces the film’s pessimistic worldview, solidifying its status as a key work in the neo-noir revival.

Analysis and interpretation

In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a "wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex) uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to "a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in "a time of intellectual upheaval [...] after the heroic battle of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting the web of evil perpetrated by Cross [...] Gittes is the Oedipus whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that "There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however, "Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".

Reception

Box office

Chinatown was released in the United States on June 21, 1974, by Paramount Pictures. The film grossed approximately $29.2 million domestically, with an additional $28,149 earned in international markets, resulting in a worldwide total of $29.23 million.

Adjusted for inflation, Chinatown's domestic gross is estimated to be approximately $146 million in 2022 dollars.

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, Chinatown holds an approval rating of 98% based on 147 reviews, with an average rating of 9.40/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "As bruised and cynical as the decade that produced it, this noir classic benefits from Robert Towne's brilliant screenplay, director Roman Polanski's steady hand, and wonderful performances from Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway". Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 92 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" list, saying that Nicholson's performance was "key in keeping Chinatown from becoming just a genre crime picture", along with Towne's screenplay, concluding that the film "seems to settle easily beside the original noirs".

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian calls the dialogue "crackling" and "superb" and says Polanski "brilliantly shows that money and power are not what’s motivating everyone after all". Writing for the Empire, Rob Fraser praises the movie as "the best private eye movie ever made" and is "a timeless classic".

Cineluxe's Michael Gaughn calls some of the casting questionable but says the film is Polanksi's "best work" and praises the cinematography work. Gaughn does critize the black levels that made "many of the scenes in the first half looking almost monochrome or, at best, like hand-tinted postcards".

Vincent Canby from The New York Times praises the performances and plot of the film but noted that Polanksi and Towne "have attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, moore or less thirtyish movie".

Other honors

2010 – Best film of all time, The Guardian

2012 – In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, Chinatown was 78th among critics and 91st among directors.

2015 – The film ranked 12th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world.

American Film Institute recognition

1998 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – Ranked 19th

2001 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills – Ranked 16th

2003 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:

Noah Cross – Ranked 16th Villain

J.J. Gittes – Nominated Hero

2005 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:

"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" – Ranked 74th

2005 – AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores – Ranked 9th

2007 – AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – Ranked 21st

2008 – AFI's 10 Top 10 mystery film – Ranked 2nd

Subsequent works

A sequel film, The Two Jakes, was released in 1990, again starring Nicholson, who also directed, with Robert Towne returning to write the screenplay. It was not met with the same financial or critical success as the first film.

A prequel television series by David Fincher and Towne for Netflix about Gittes starting his agency was reported to be in the works in November 2019.

A film about the making of Chinatown, based on the non-fiction book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, was reported in August 2020 to be in the works, with Ben Affleck as director and writer.

Legacy

Towne's screenplay has become legendary among critics and filmmakers, often cited as one of the best examples of the craft, though Polanski decided on the fatal final scene. While it has been reported that Towne envisioned a happy ending, he has denied these claims and said simply that he initially found Polanski's ending to be excessively melodramatic. He explained in a 1997 interview: "The way I had seen it was that Evelyn would kill her father but end up in jail for it, unable to give the real reason why it happened. And the detective [Jack Nicholson] couldn't talk about it either, so it was bleak in its own way". Towne retrospectively concluded that "Roman was right", later arguing that Polanski's stark and simple ending, due to the complexity of the events preceding it, was more fitting than his own, which he described as equally bleak but "too complicated and too literary".

Chinatown brought more public awareness to the land dealings and disputes over water rights, which arose while drawing Los Angeles' water supply from the Owens Valley in the 1910s.