Private dick J. J. Gittes finds himself in another sort of Chinatown (LA police jargon for SNAFU) when he is hired by Evelyn Mulwray to follow her water commissioner husband Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwirling) whom she suspects of hanky panky.
He wraps the case in the first reel only to discover that the Mrs. Mulwray who hired him isn't the same one who now wants to sue him out of existence for smearing Hollis's name across the headlines.
This 1974 Panavision homage to film noir is the second successful collaboration between Roman Polanski (who has always run hot and cold) and Robert Evans Rosemary's Baby was the first).
It boasts an embarrassment of riches: a gritty, witty screenplay by Robert Towne, a sly John Huston performance as a corrupt tycoon (Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough), and the star turn that established Jack Nicholson as one of the great actors of the nineteen-seventies.
Part of the joy of watching Chinatown is its glimpse into the pragmatic procedures of private investigation. Want to find out when the guy you're watching leaves a restaurant? Put a cheap watch in back of his car's rear tire. Want to make a car easier to follow at night? Break the red casing over one of its tail lights.
It's also a genuine Mystery (with a capital M)! As Gittes slowly, unsurely puts the pieces together, he faces not a whodunit but a what-was-done?
Question: Why is someone dumping thousands of gallons from the Los Angeles water supply in the midst of a drought?
Answer: Chinatown.
