Chinatown (Paramount, Penthouse Video, Long Road Productions, Robert Evans Company, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 22) Turner Classic Movies showed one of their double bills co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and actor Nathan Lane. They picked two films noir, the 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder and co-scripted by him and Raymond Chandler from a source novel by James M. Cain) and the 1974 neo-noir Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski from a script by Robert Towne which Polanski heavily rewrote). I’ve long appreciated Double Indemnity but I hadn’t seen Chinatown since my mother took me to see it in its original theatrical release. I didn’t like it then and I still don’t. The publicity for Chinatown said that it had revived the spirit of classic noir, which it decidedly didn’t. I had a sense of The Emperor’s New Clothes when both Mankiewicz and Lane prattled on both before and after the movie about how great it was – Lane even called it “perhaps the perfect movie” – when I didn’t like it when it first came out and I don’t like it any better now. Chinatown is a vaguely comprehensible tale about how the super-rich villain, Noah Cross (John Huston in a great man-you-love-to-hate performance that’s easily the best thing about the film, even though his presence inevitably had me thinking it would have been a much better film if he’d directed it as well, especially since he probably would have dispatched the story in two-thirds of Polanski’s bloated and ponderous 130-minute running time), has hatched a scheme to take over the San Fernando Valley and make millions of dollars off it on top of the millions he’s already accumulated. His plan involves cutting off the irrigation water that the orange growers in the Valley desperately need to grow their crops, then persuading the citizens of Los Angeles County to approve an $8 million dam project. Ostensibly the dam is to provide the residents of Los Angeles with water, but Cross really wants it to go to the Valley so the housing developments he plans to build there will have water.

The hero, to the extent this film has one, is private investigator J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, top-billed), who like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer specializes in “divorce work” – in documenting extra-relational affairs being carried on by his clients’ spouses and using those photos either as grounds for divorce or ways to cut down on the amount of settlement money his well-to-do clients have to pay. (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe famously eschewed such work as inherently unethical.) Gittes gets involved when he’s hired by a woman who claims to be Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), wife of Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who’s opposed to the dam project because he thinks the porous shale bedrock they want to build it on top of won’t withstand the weight and the dam will eventually collapse and flood the city. (The character was supposedly based on the real-life William Mulholland, who ran the Department of Water and Power and ensured that Los Angeles would have an ample water supply even though its natural climate is desert.) Gittes’s photographer captures clandestine pictures of Hollis Mulwray apparently frolicking with a young girl, and the photos end up on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper. Then Gittes gets an office visit from the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue him for the way he framed her husband. Ultimately Gittes learns that the woman who posed as Mrs. Mulwray was aspiring actress Ida Sessions (an early role for Diane Ladd), though in the meantime the case spirals out of control when Hollis Mulwray is found dead in a reservoir. Later Ida Sessions is also found dead in her apartment after she and Gittes had an appointment in which she was supposed to Tell Him All She Knows. While all this has been going on, Gittes has drifted into an affair with Evelyn Mulwray and been shot at by a number of people, including angry orange growers who think he’s with the Department of Water and Power. Gittes has also discovered that a secret financier, who of course turns out to be Noah Cross, has been buying up the orange ranches and using the names of residents of a local nursing home as fronts.

We also learn that the “other woman” with whom Hollis Mulwray was apparently having an affair with was actually Evelyn’s daughter Katherine (Belinda Palmer), and both Evelyn and Katherine were fathered by, you guessed it, Noah Cross. This piece of information – Evelyn insisting to Gittes, “She’s my daughter and my sister” – so angers Gittes that he slaps her repeatedly, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, for the first few takes Jack Nicholson pulled the blow so as not to hurt Faye Dunaway for real. But director Polanski didn’t think the result looked convincing, so at Dunaway’s suggestion Nicholson slapped her for real, at full force – and that’s the take that ended up in the final cut. The film’s title gets explained in the final scene, in which two hit men hired by Noah Cross murder Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown just as Gittes is getting ready to drive her and Katherine to Mexico to hide out from dad’s vengeance. Noah then swoops up Katherine, strongly suggesting that the cycle of incest is going to continue and he’s going to deflower her, too. This was the ending Polanski insisted on, overruling Robert Towne’s desire to have the escape to Mexico be successful. One of the two official police detectives who’d been harassing Gittes all movie tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” – a closing line that’s become iconic. (It got recycled in the part-live, part-animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Toontown.”)

I first saw Chinatown as I was making my acquaintance with the classic films noir of the 1940’s, and while the critics who reviewed Chinatown when it was new acclaimed it as a successful recreation of that style, I strongly disagreed (and still do). First of all, Jack Nicholson – an actor I usually dislike, though I loved him as The Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman because the shark-like smile and the vulpine laugh, which usually put me off, were exactly right for that character – is all wrong to play a noir lead. He doesn’t have the world-weariness and depth of the great 1940’s noir stars (Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd). There were some battles between Polanski and the film’s producer, former Paramount studio head Robert Evans; Evans wanted the film shot in black-and-white and he also wanted Jane Fonda to play the female lead. I don’t know about the first (a black-and-white Chinatown would have looked like an even more inept attempt to reproduce classic film noir than the one we have) and I’m with Polanski on the second: Jane Fonda would have been too tough, too independent, too powerful. Faye Dunaway was just right even though she was a limited actress with only two truly great films on her résumé (Bonnie and Clyde and Network). The long early establishing shots of Hollis Mulwray soulfully looking out at the city’s various reservoirs struck me then, and still do, as the sensibility of the 1970’s uneasily grafted on to a film nominally set in the 1930’s. It also doesn’t help that Nicholson as Gittes wears a silly-looking bandage covering his nose through the middle third of the film. That bandage was put there after Gittes was accosted by two thugs, one of whom – the one who actually slashed his nose, and told him that unless he laid off the Mulwray case, next time he’d cut off the nose completely – was played by Roman Polanski himself. This time around I couldn’t help but be reminded of the equally silly-looking bandage Donald Trump wore throughout the 2024 Republican National Convention days after his ear was supposedly grazed by an assassin’s bullet (though I’ve long believed both the alleged assassination attempts on Trump were Sensations of 1945-style gimmicks faked for publicity and sympathy). Of course this time around I couldn’t help but think of Trump when I watched John Huston as Noah Cross, dominating the screen as well as his character dominates the lives of everyone else in the film. Though there’s no evidence that Trump ever actually had incestuous sex with his daughter Ivanka, much less fathered a child with her, Trump did say during the 2016 campaign, “If she weren’t my daughter, I’d date her.” Certainly both the fictitious Noah Cross and the all too real Donald Trump are case studies in the ability of the super-rich to buy their way out of any accountability for their myriad crimes!