A water dispute rebuilt as a detective plot
Chinatown opened in June 1974, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski for producer Robert Evans at Paramount. Towne set the story in 1937 and built it around a fictionalised version of the water disputes that had shaped Los Angeles decades earlier, when the city secured rights to Owens Valley water through an aqueduct project overseen by engineer William Mulholland. Jack Nicholson plays J. J. Gittes, a private investigator hired to look into a case of adultery that turns out to be cover for a scheme involving the city’s water supply, land speculation, and a family secret involving Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray and John Huston’s Noah Cross. It was Polanski’s final film made in the United States, and Towne originally intended it as the first part of a planned trilogy following Gittes across three decades of Los Angeles corruption.
The writer and the director disagreed on the ending
Mulholland’s career supplied more than the setting: the film splits him into two characters, the principled water official Hollis Mulwray, who is murdered early in the story, and Cross, whose greed drives the plot, while also drawing on the actual 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam and a 1904 water-diversion episode for plot mechanics. Towne’s original draft ran past 180 pages and included a first-person narration from Gittes; Polanski cut and reordered it so the audience discovers the scheme’s shape only as Gittes does, with no information delivered ahead of him. Towne and Polanski clashed openly over the ending, Towne wanting Cross punished and Evelyn Mulwray to survive, Polanski insisting on the opposite; Polanski wrote the final scene himself only days before it was shot, after the two had effectively stopped collaborating.
A structure built to match what Gittes knows
Nicholson plays Gittes as competent and self-assured in a way the plot keeps punishing, most visibly in the bandaged nose he wears for much of the film after a warning cut from a hired thug, a running visual joke that also tracks how far behind events he actually is. Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray is built to read first as the genre’s standard suspect and then to invert that reading entirely once her connection to Cross is revealed, and Huston plays Cross without ever raising his voice, which is what makes the character’s eventual reveal land as recognition rather than surprise. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo and composer Jerry Goldsmith, brought in late to replace an earlier score, give the film a controlled, sunlit surface that keeps the story’s corruption largely out of sight until it is named aloud.
What Nicholson, Dunaway and Huston do with it
The plot’s central mechanism, a scheme tying water diversion to land fraud to a family secret involving Cross and Evelyn, requires a fair amount of dialogue to lay out in full, and much of that explanation arrives in conversation rather than through action or image, which slows the film’s back half even as it clarifies the stakes. Some viewers on a single pass may find the connections between the water scheme and the family plot easier to follow after the fact than during the scene where they are delivered. The historical liberties taken with Mulholland’s actual role, compressing engineering decisions and moving the timeline forward roughly three decades, work for the story but mean the film should be read as inspired by the water disputes rather than a record of them.
Where the plotting overreaches
The film’s title names a place Gittes worked before the story begins and barely appears in the plot until its final minutes, and that gap is the point: Gittes describes having learned, in Chinatown, to do as little as possible, because a system that dense could not be reliably read or fixed by one man’s intervention. That lesson is what Cross’s scheme relies on and what the ending confirms, competence and good intention turn out not to be enough against people who own the terms the case is being conducted under. Cross’s justification for what he has done, framed as ambition for the city rather than personal greed, is delivered calmly enough that the film never has to state its case against him; the plot’s mechanics make the argument on their own.
What the title is doing outside the setting
This suits viewers prepared to hold several strands of plot in mind at once and to sit with an ending that refuses to correct the wrong it has just shown, as well as anyone with an interest in Los Angeles’s civic history or in screenwriting structure built around withheld information. It will frustrate anyone expecting detective fiction’s usual restoration of order once the culprit is named, since naming Cross here changes nothing about the outcome. Viewers who prefer to separate a film’s craft from its director’s later history should also know that Polanski’s own account of what makes a story worth telling, expressed directly in his insistence on this ending, is inseparable from what the film finally argues.
Who the film rewards, and who it will frustrate
Chinatown earned eleven Academy Award nominations against a $6 million budget and returned close to $29.2 million at the box office, with Towne’s screenplay the film’s only competitive Oscar win; critics’ aggregate scores decades on remain close to unanimous in its favour. Those numbers describe a film that succeeded on craft rather than spectacle, and the craft holds up on rewatching in a way plot-driven mysteries often do not, since the pleasure here is less in what happens than in how carefully the film controls what you are allowed to know and when. An evening spent on it is better spent a second or third time, once the ending’s inevitability can be tracked back through everything that seemed, on a first watch, merely procedural.