Film / Chinatown

You get tough.
You get tender.
Maybe you even get close to the truth.

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

— Lawrence Walsh

A seminal neo-noir film, and regarded by many to be among the best examples of Film Noir in general, Chinatown (1974) was written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polański. The film stars Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston. It is a dark film, even for the '70s.

The setting is 1937 Los Angeles. J.J. "Jake" Gittes (Nicholson), a former cop turned Private Detective, is hired by a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray, the wife of the city's water commissioner, to find out if her husband is having an affair. It seems like a simple enough job. But it isn't.

It turns out that the woman who hired him isn't really Mrs. Mulwray. Then the water commissioner ends up drowned and the real Mrs. Mulwray (Dunaway) hires Gittes to find out what really happened. Gittes may think he knows what he's dealing with. But—as Noah Cross (Huston), Mrs. Mulwray's father and the former business partner of her late husband, warns him—he really doesn't.

Fun fact: the film was co-financed by Bob Guccione, publisher of the famous pornographic magazine Penthouse. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards (winning for Best Original Screenplay), seven Golden Globes (winning for Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Screenplay), and six BAFTAs (winning for Best Actor, Director, and Screenplay, with Nicholson and Towne earning their awards for both this film and The Last Detail).

A lesser-known—and much less well-regarded—sequel, The Two Jakes, was directed by Jack Nicholson and released in 1990.

For the kind of place, see Friendly Local Chinatown. And don't confuse this with Big Trouble in Little China, however tempting it may be.

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These movies contain examples of:

Chinatown

• Accidental Misnaming: Cross persists in pronouncing Jake's last name as "Gitts" even after he's corrected (which could be Malicious Misnaming). Also, Curly addresses him as "Mr. Geetis" a couple times.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Once again, John Huston plays a man named Noah whose life has to do with water. (He'd previously played the biblical Noah in his own 1966 film The Bible.)
  • Faye Dunaway's best known role is as Bonnie Parker, who is graphically shot down in a car by the police at the end of that film. Evelyn dies in a similar manner.
• After-Action Patch-Up: Evelyn patching up Jake's nose ends up with them in bed.
• All There in the Script: The first draft revealed what went down in Chinatown. Gittes was working for the district attorney's office and against advice got involved in the wars between rival Chinese gangs. He attempted to save Cherry, a sex worker who along with Gittes' boss got caught in the crossfire.
• Ambiguous Situation Detective Loach fires the fatal shot. But is it a stumble in the dark, warning shot ricochet gone awry, or orders from Noah Cross?
• Ambiguous Time Period: While the film ostensibly takes place in 1937 (i.e., on the early side of Chandler American Time), its portrayal of Los Angeles plucks bits and pieces from multiple eras (as noted in this article). The water rights problem was an issue of the 1910s and '20s, while Gittes makes reference to "Okies" (an insulting word for Dust Bowl-era migrant farmers from Oklahoma) and we see a large portrait of FDR. From the aforementioned article:
  Chinatown is a '70s image of a '40s image of the '30s, apparently based, in turn, on Los Angeles water politics from an earlier period again and complete with a kind of indeterminate post-'50s soundtrack.
• And Then What?: Subverted - Jake attempts this with the villain. It doesn't work.
  Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you're worth. More than 10 million?
  Noah Cross: Oh, my, yes!
  Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
  Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts! The future!
• Arc Words: "As little as possible."
• Armor-Piercing Question: Jake interrogating Mrs. Mulwray on her relations with the mystery woman Katherine.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Mrs. Mulwray delivers some to Jake when being slapped by him and being pushed to answer his questions about her relationship with Katherine. And then she delivers a big one to him, also a Wham Line.
• Audience Surrogate: Jake. He appears in every scene and we learn all the various plot twists at the same time he does. Incidentally, Polański doubled down on this. Towne originally wanted to add a POV in the Noir style, but Polański felt it would be more interesting if we stuck entirely to his viewpoint without the audience being detached from his perspective.
• The Bad Guy Wins: One of cinema's most iconic and unforgettable examples. Noah Cross not only gets away with it, but the Hero is left alive, powerless and stunned, and he gets to watch the villain grab his next victim in full view and disappear, fully aware that he's so low on the totem pole that the villain doesn't even have to kill him, like he did Hollis Mulwray and others.
• Berserk Button: The orange grove workers knock Jake unconscious after he calls one of them a "dumb Okie".
• Bitch Slap: The REAL Mrs. Mulwray gives Jake Gittes one. He is shocked to realize he'd been duped by a fake Mrs. Mulwray. Later, Jake gives several of these to the real Mrs. Mulray asking her for the truth about her relations with a young woman named Katherine.
• Binocular Shot: Jake surveys Hollis Mulwray and his "mistress" with this in the early part of the film.
• Brick Joke: The very first scene has Jake showing Curly the evidence of his wife's infidelity. Toward the end of the film, when Jake goes to Curly's house to shake off the cops, the door is answered by his wife... who sports a noticeable shiner.
• Cacophony Cover Up: Jake fakes a cough when ripping a piece of paper from a land register at the Hall of Records.
• Can't Spit It Out: Evelyn struggles many times throughout the film to communicate some of her discomfort to Gittes but can never quite bring herself to admit it fully until it's too late. This is understandable, on account of the trauma she experienced and the social stigma of being not only a rape victim, but being raped by her rich and powerful father and fathering a child of incest, would make it difficult to confess to anyone, leave alone to Gittes, who initially came across as a snarky snooping gumshoe with a sleazy profile.
  • The first time is when she and Gittes are eating in the restaurant and Gittes flat out asks what's going on, noting that he got his nose cut and would like to know why. Gittes calls for the car and is about to leave before Evelyn yells out his name, in reflex before catching herself.
  • The second time is after they have sex, where Evelyn tries to communicate some of her unease about her father only to recoil when Gittes reveals he met him without informing her, warning him that Noah Cross is a very dangerous man.
  • The third time is right after Gittes tailed her to the house where she keeps Katharine and Gittes confronts her about kidnapping Mulwray's "girlfriend" only for Evelyn to state that she's her sister and being disappointed when Gittes walks away again.
• Chekhov's Gun: The script is loaded with these. Nothing is superfluous in this movie. For example, 'Bad for glass'. The salt water is bad for the grass. Hollis died with salt water in his lungs, and Jake realizes that Hollis was drowned in the salt water pool on Evelyn's estate, not in the ocean.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Curl appears in the opening scene as one of Jake's clients. Since he's just a humble fisher, he cannot afford to pay Jake for his services, but Jake is okay with this so long as he agrees to complete a favor for Jake later. Towards the end of the film, Jake cashes out that favor by getting Curly to move Evelyn's things during her attempt to escape to Mexico.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Mrs. Mulwray gets so nervous that she lights a cigarette while her previous one is still burning.
• The Con: A real estate scam is the essence of Cross' plan as he renders vast farmlands arid by illegally dumping their irrigation water into the ocean, thus causing their prices to plummet to next to nothing. After forcing the farmers to sell their land to his cabal of corrupt business partners, Cross intends to develop his newly acquired land by irrigating it with the water supply diverted from the city itself, through a new aqueduct and reservoir built from $8 million of taxpayer money.
• Corporate Conspiracy: Noah Cross, already the richest man in Los Angeles, renders vast farmlands arid by illegally dumping their irrigation water into the ocean, thus causing their prices to plummet to next to nothing. After forcing the farmers to sell their land to his cabal of corrupt business partners, Cross intends to develop his newly acquired land by irrigating it with the water supply diverted from the city itself, through a new aqueduct and reservoir built from $8 million of taxpayer money. His only gain from this elaborate swindle is "The future!".
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Noah Cross is a local tycoon worth millions of dollars, but despite being able to afford whatever luxury he wants, he still yearns for more. So what does he do? Pay off the water department to divert water from local farmlands and force farmers from their land, have his similarly corrupt business partners buy the degraded lands on the cheap, and push for a new aqueduct and reservoir project to irrigate the ill-gotten gains, all so he can obtain "The future!" When Hollis discovers this scheme, Noah has him killed off to prevent him from disrupting it further.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Roman Polański himself appears in the film as the short hoodlum with the knife who slices Jake's nose.
  • C.O. Erickson, the film's executive producer, plays the banker in the barbershop who starts an argument with Jake.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Jake's response when Yelburton asks what happened to his nose.
• Cut Short: A third film, Cloverleaf, was planned. Chinatown focused on water, The Two Jakes focused on oil, and Cloverleaf would have focused on transportation. Ironically, Who Framed Roger Rabbit picked up the slack and even named the trolley car company in the film after the never-produced film!
• Dame with a Case: Evelyn Mulwray turns up at Jake's private eye agency believing that her husband, Hollis, is cheating on her. Jack follows Hollis and finds out that he appears to be cheating on Evelyn. Then it gets deconstructed when the real Evelyn arrives and tells him that she had no idea. Then Hollis is murdered, so Evelyn hires Jake for real to find out what is going on.
• Dead Man Honking: The film ends with Evelyn jumping in her car and trying to escape from the Big Bad, her insanely evil father Noah Cross. Shots are fired, there's the sound of a crash, and the sound of a droning car horn. A dead Evelyn has collapsed on the car horn. Cue Downer Ending.
• Death by Irony:
  • When Evelyn is treating Jake's nose wound, he asks about her flawed eye. In the end of the film, Evelyn is shot through that same eye.
  • In-Universe the Coroner finds it amusing that the City Water Commissioner drowns during a drought.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The characters' casual sexism/racism/antisemitism. The manager of the Vista Inn retirement home, who openly tells Gittes they won't provide any service to Jews, is a notable example.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Noah Cross is already the richest and most powerful man in Los Angeles; he gladly admits he has no idea of how much wealth he really has except that it's over $10 million^*Equivalent to $180 million in 2020 dollars, yet goes ahead with his plan to seize control of the water simply because it will make him even more rich and powerful. In his own words:
  Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
  Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts! The future!
• Detective Patsy: Jake, when he works for the first "Mrs. Mulwray". And pretty much every moment after.
• Domestic Abuse: Curly the client who meets Gittes in the opening scene is revealed to have beaten his adulterous spouse. When Gittes redirects Lopez and Escobar to his house, the door is opened by his wife who sports a prominent black eye. When Curly introduces Gittes, his wife sneers in anger that she knows exactly who he is.^note In the longer opening scene in the original screenplay, Curly even expresses a plan to kill her, under the delusion that nobody would convict a man for murdering his cheating wife ("it's the unwritten law"), and Jake has to angrily talk him out of it.
• Doomed Appointment: Late in the movie, Ida Sessions wants to talk to Gittes, probably to confess about her involvement in the plot. But when Gittes arrives at her place he finds her murdered in the kitchen.
• Downer Ending: An incredibly nasty example. Noah gets away with it all. Everything, from raping his daughter, to kidnapping his daughter's daughter. And Jake can do nothing about it. Keeping in mind Noah had raped his daughter, it looks bleak for his granddaughter/daughter Katherine. She gets away from him, as noted in The Two Jakes but it's implied that Noah Cross never faced justice and that Katherine is still haunted and traumatized by her past and Jake himself never got over that failure.
• Down L.A. Drain: The plot revolves around the LA water system. The concrete structures are featured.
• "Eureka!" Moment: The salt water pond is what is 'bad for glass.'
• Everybody Smokes: Appropriate for the period. Lampshaded when Jake asks the coroner, Morty, how he's doing, to which Morty complains of a cough - puffing away all the while, blissfully unaware of things like emphysema or lung cancer.
• Exact Words: When Jake pushes Mrs. Mulwray for the answers to whom Katherine is, she keeps telling him "she's my sister... she's my daughter...my sister...my daughter..."
• Extremely Short Timespan: The bulk of the action takes place over three really long days, starting from Evelyn's visit to Gittes' office where she officially hires him, and proceeding from there.
• Eye Scream: Evelyn ends up getting fatally shot through the eye at the end. It was her "flawed" eye.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Katherine is thought to be Evelyn Mulwray's sister. Then she is thought to be her daughter. Turns out Katherine is both Mrs. Mulwray's sister and daughter.
• Film Noir: The film goes out of its way to subvert almost all the core tropes of the genre. Gittes isn't a tough, emotionally detached private eye, but rather a vulnerable, flawed Anti-Hero. Evelyn isn't a Femme Fatale, but everyone assumes she is (in part because of the misogynistic value system underpinning 1930s California). And the villain is so rich, powerful and influential that Gittes is ultimately powerless to stop him or his conspiracy. And so on.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Jake asks Mrs. Mulwray who Katherine is and she tearfully answers "She's my sister, she's my daughter. My sister. My daughter." Then she's thrown to the floor and she screams out the Wham Line to Jake.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Right after Gittes gets his nose sliced (by a character played by Roman Polański), he talks about suing the people responsible for the shenanigans. His assistants snark that the people he's after would have the judge in their pocket...
  • When Gittes asks Evelyn what the "C" monogram on a certain document stands for, she briefly chokes on the name before she says "Cross" and throughout their interactions struggles to talk about her father, indicating the abuse she experienced and still experiences as a result of her rape.
  • Much is made of the flaw in Evelyn's eye. Guess where she gets shot in the end?
  • Gittes: I forgot my glasses. I'd like to be able to read across.
  • Most famously...Even the seemingly insignificant touch of Evelyn accidentally setting off the car horn by resting her head on the steering wheel comes back with a vengeance at the end, when Jake (and the audience) know her fate even before seeing the carnage by the continuous sound of the car horn.
• Friend on the Force: Escobar and Loach, to a point.
• Genre Deconstruction: It started out as a Genre Throwback to Film Noir but it ended up becoming this instead, taking full advantage of the end of The Hays Code to put on-screen the stuff the classic noir stories merely hinted at:
  • Nicholson's Gittes is very much imagined as the tough-guy detective archetype perfected by Humphrey Bogart but unlike the gunsels and low-rent tough guys Bogart fought against, Gittes fights state and corporate villainy and only barely understands the scheme of which he is so low and unimportant that it literally does not matter to the bad guys that he knows the truth or not, they know that he can do nothing and that he won't do anything to stop them. In the end he gets a powerful reality check and reveals that under that facade of a tough Hardboiled Detective is a vulnerable, lonely and embittered man. Likewise, the misogynistic assumptions about Femme Fatale and bad girls in the classic noir are turned on its head, when its those same assumptions that leads Gittes to unwittingly cause Evelyn's death. Also Jake acts like a snarky wisecracker who always gets the last word in, but the film shows that his mouth keeps getting him into trouble, as he repeatedly irritates and insults his colleagues and associates, and gets punched out once.
  • As per Robert Towne, the film is a more accurate portrayal of the Private Detective archetype than seen in the works of Raymond Chandler. Where the likes of Philip Marlowe are noble "tarnished knights" or Knight in Sour Armor, J. J. Gittes does actual Private Detective work. That is, taking seedy and sleazy pictures of adulterous spouses for suspicious clients, illegal surveillance and voyeurism, and generally living a very well-heeled existence. Gittes defends his line of work by pointing out that the police are equally sleazy and corrupt while he is honest. But the film casts doubt on this. For instance, the client at the start of the film, on finding out that his wife cheated on him is shown to later beat his wife, giving us some sense of why his wife cheated on him to start with, and making us understand that it's unlikely any of Gittes' work is truly innocent or qualifies as "honest living" as he insists at the start.
  • Moreover, noir stories often had the hero get entangled in stories and have the detective try and solve the mystery to unearth a conspiracy. In this film, the detective is himself an Unwitting Pawn to the real conspiracy and had he done "As little as possible", the heroine could perhaps have lived and made it across the border anyway.
  • Evelyn Mulwray is likewise an attack on the concept of the Femme Fatale. A beautiful elegant woman who is cold and aloof in public is obviously some villainous slutty vamp rather than a deeply vulnerable victim of abuse trying to hide her suffering from an uncaring world and society. Evelyn literally has no one to turn to in the patriarchal America of her time, and the great effort that she goes through to help herself and her daughter/sister comes undone precisely because of the misogynistic assumptions that even the hero Jake Gittes' shares and upholds.
  • The film likewise underscores the racism, sexism and classism that a period Film Noir usually leaves out. As bad as the Big Bad is, the world around him is hardly better, with the upper-crust being anti-semites, Gittes' lower-class clients being wife-beaters and basically giving a sense of how genuinely a City Noir setting really is a Crapsack World and subverting the Retraux nostalgic appeal noir fashions usually attract.
• Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: Jake gives Evelyn one of the ultimate examples of this trope, slapping her repeatedly to get her to tell him the truth about Katherine.
• Gratuitous French:
  • Jake tells Evelyn, "I'm in matrimonial work. It's my métier."
  • When Jake is in bed with Evelyn and speaks about his bad memories of Chinatown.
    Evelyn: Cherchez la femme.
    Jake: (looks back in blank incomprehension)
    Evelyn: Was there a woman involved?
    Jake: Of course.
• He Knows Too Much: Noah has Hollis Mullray murdered when comes too close to working out Noah Crosses' scheme.
• Hellish L.A.: Depicts early 20th century Los Angeles as a Crapsack World full of bigotry and Domestic Abuse in which there is a massive conspiracy going on to "control the future" through the city's water supply. And, at the end, they win.
• Heroic BSoD: Jake has one of the more famous ones in cinematic history after Evelyn is killed.
• Ignored Epiphany: Jake Gittes voices the saying in Chinatown to Evelyn "Do as little as possible" and earlier likewise tells his client to not seek the truth and "let sleeping dogs lie". Yet throughout the film he doesn't follow his own advice, pursuing the Hollis Mulwray murder mystery even when there's no legal or professional or personal reason for him to do so that causes problems. He's obsessed with finding out the truth like all private detective archetypes and in the end after he finds out he can't do anything about it.
• Japanese Ranguage: "Bad for glass" or "bad for grass"? Considering salt water is bad for both...
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Even if you've never seen the movie, you likely know that Faye Dunaway is the female lead; a woman who hires JJ "Jake" Gittes, so when a woman who is decidedly not Dunaway turns up in the second scene seeking to hire Jake, it's pretty obvious this is a setup.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Jake loses one of his nice Florsheim shoes when almost getting flushed away by irrigation water.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Father and grandfather in this case. Noah attempts to introduce himself as this to the young Katherine and get closer to her but Mrs. Mulwray refuses to let him.
• Meaningful Name: The coroner's name is Morty (Mort is French for "dead").
• Media Scrum: Jake saves Evelyn from the press crowd in front of the police department which gains him her sympathy.
• Meta Casting: The casting of John Huston, the director of many of the great, early Film Noir classics including The Maltese Falcon and Key Largo in the role of the villain.
• Moe Greene Special: Evelyn's death. Although the shot enters her skull from the back.
• Morton's Fork: Evelyn's final choice. She can either surrender to the police and try to explain the truth, which won't work because her father, who also raped her, has already made her look insane to everyone and likely she probably killed her husband in a jealous rage (and he has the money to pay off the right people), which will result in him probably taking custody of Katherine, or she can make herself look exactly like the violent murderer Noah has made her seem to be by pulling a gun and driving off, in the vague hope she and Katherine might make it out of Chinatown alive. She picks the latter, and as she's surrounded by armed police, her last try fails, she's killed, and Noah takes Katherine.
• Nasal Trauma: Jake Gittes is warned not to continue his investigation by a knife-wielding thug (played by the director in a cameo) who ends up slicing one of his nostrils open. As such, Gittes spends the rest of the film with his nose bandaged.
• Never My Fault: Noah Cross on being confronted by Gittes about whether he takes responsibility for raping Evelyn, mutters that he prefers not to blame himself, feeling that what he did was right to any man of his power and stature. This is patently not true as Evelyn says that Hollis Mulwray, who was the same class and stature as Cross, was a decent man. But for a man like Cross, morality is an option and not an obligation.
• Never Suicide: The villain attempts this more or less unsuccessfully. The method of Hollis' death is something that seems logical on its surface, but then the saltwater in his lungs is the smoking gun for the cops to realize that someone set Hollis up for adultery to make his death look like a suicide. So Gittes doesn't have to prove it was suicide, he only had to prove it was Cross which he ultimately fails to accomplish.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Gittes gives Cross the only piece of evidence capable of proving him guilty of murdering Hollis Mulwray. Whoops. Although to be entirely fair to him on this one, he does have a gun pointed at his head at the time.
  • Calling the cops on Evelyn under the erroneous belief that she's the culprit.
• Non-Indicative Name: Only the very last scene of the movie takes place in that neighborhood of Los Angeles. However, it is used by Gittes as a metaphor for the crime-ridden nature of Los Angeles in the film.
• Noodle Incident: We never do find out exactly what happened in Chinatown when Jake was working there. All we know is that there was a girl, he tried to get involved and ended up making things worse.
• Not What It Looks Like: Gittes repeatedly faces this problem. He judges events that on the basis of what he sees, looks reasonable, but actually turns out to be something entirely different. In his investigations tailing Hollis Mulwray and his "girlfriend", he assumes that it's an older man with his mistress when in fact it's a young girl with her surrogate father. He later sees Evelyn at home putting Katharine to bed with some medicine and assumes that Evelyn is holding her hostage, when in fact she's a mother concerned over her troubled daughter.
• No Woman's Land: Basically none of the women on-screen have it good for them. The Fake Mrs. Mulwray, the actress Ida Sessions, gets whacked to tie up loose ends. Evelyn Mulwray dies ignominiously like a criminal, her daughter/sister Katharine enters Noah Cross' clutches^note Fortunately, she's escaped his grasp in The Two Jakes, very likely being raped in turn. Even Curly's wife, the woman who was caught cheating by Jakes at the start of the film, is revealed to sport a very new and fresh-looking black eye, hinting that Jake's investigation condemned her to a life of Domestic Abuse, and she has nothing but contempt for the "hero".
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The irritating clerk at the Hall of Records seems to be doing everything he can to be as unhelpful as humanly possible. It's generally implied that he's doing so because he knows the truth or at least has some hint about the water rights corruption and wants to discourage Jake.
• Off-into-the-Distance Ending: Part of the shattering Downer Ending, as Jake's partners lead him away down a Chinatown street, after everything is lost.
• Ominously Open Door: When Jake arrives at Ida's apartment, the door is unlocked, a clear indicator that something is afoot.
• Over the Shoulder: To emphasize the point that the audience is seeing everything from Gittes' perspective, director Roman Polański often put the camera behind Jack Nicholson, so the audience sees his back and shoulders.
• Parental Incest: It's revealed that Noah Cross raped Evelyn Mulwray, his daughter, and Katherine is the result of this. Towne said it was a metaphor for Los Angeles' corruption at the time. "Incest and water".
• Police Are Useless: They are powerless to stop Noah Cross's plot, in part because according to Evelyn he owns the police.
• Poor Communication Kills: Much of the film's plot and machinations and the tragedy happen because characters, for a variety of believable reasons, don't trust each other or they make wrong assumptions. It's notable that Evelyn finally gets killed by Escobar and Lopez, Gittes' Friend on the Force and not Cross. The way the finale plays out, with Evelyn firing on Cross and hitting his shoulder, and then absconding with Katharine, makes her look bad which leads the police to shoot at her instead.
• Questionable Consent: In-universe. While Evelyn claims that she had an abusive, but consensual, sexual relationship with Noah, the audience and other characters understand that it was rape because she was too young to consent at 14. The age of consent in 1930s California was 16. She doesn't see it that way because of Noah's manipulative behavior.
• Rape as Drama: How Katherine was conceived. Cross doesn't see it as rape or believe he did anything wrong of course.
• Retraux:
  • The sepia-toned opening titles, complete with 4:3 aspect ratio, vintage Paramount logo, and old-fashioned scrolling credits.
  • The first thing shown after the titles is an extreme closeup on a series of black-and-white photographs (albeit far more sexually explicit than anything shown in the Old Hollywood), and then the camera pulls back to reveal cinematographer John Alonzo's lush amber period glow, which looks a bit like old Technicolor but is much richer.
• The Reveal: As the police are closing in on Evelyn Mulwray, Jake violently demands that she explain the truth about Katherine. Katherine turns out to be Mrs. Mulwray's sister AND her daughter, her Child by Rape from her evil father.
• Right Behind Me: Jake tells an off-color joke while Mrs. Mulwray stands right behind him in his office doorway. He ignores the efforts of his associates to either shut him up or draw his attention to the visitor.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Jake tries to help Evelyn escape California with Katherine but unfortunately he already called the police. Despite his numerous attempts to avoid them, Noah and the police eventually catch up with them anyway, moments before they were due to leave. Recognizing it as hopeless, Evelyn tries to take the last stand of threatening them with a gun so that she can take Katherine. This plays right into Noah's already-executed plan of making Evelyn look like a Hysterical Woman who killed her husband out of insane jealousy, the police shoot and kill Evelyn, and the hysterical Katherine is dragged away from her mother's body towards the triumphant Noah, who, inevitably, is going to rape her and perpetuate the cycle using the huge amount of money he's already earned.
• Shout-Out:
  • The scene in which Gittes repeatedly slaps Evelyn to try and get her to fess up recalls a similar scene in The Maltese Falcon.
  • Polański's cameo as the "Man with a Knife" is often seen as a reference to his first film, Knife in the Water.
• Smoking Hot Sex: Gittes is seen smoking in bed after he and Evelyn made out.
• Stealth Pun: After following Hollis Mulwray to a series of reservoirs, one of Jake's employees comments that he has "water on the brain", meaning literally he's thinking about water but which is also an antiquated name for hydrocephalus, a condition in children that can cause retardation. Jake smiles in response but the pun is never acknowledged in dialog.
• Stopped Clock: Jake places a pocket watch under the tire of Mulwray's car, so that he can know at what time he left from the time the watch was run over.
• Sunshine Noir: The beautiful, golden cinematography of the city and its environs contrasts greatly with what actually goes on inside it. Nonetheless many scenes in the middle, and key moments take place at night. Namely when Jake gets his nose cut, when he and Evelyn are on the trail of the mystery and the ending where Evelyn dies.
• Symbolism: During a scene where Jake and Evelyn are making out, Jake points out a black mark in the green part of Evelyn's eye, apparently a flaw in the iris. The flaw in Evelyn's eye symbolizes the flaw in the system itself — Evelyn's a good character, but has experienced firsthand the corruption bred by greed and by the hunger for power. Her father is stealing the city's water, and he's had a child with her through incest. From a distance, everything probably looks okay — but when you look closely, something's off. That's been Jake's experience throughout the whole movie. He sees that Hollis' death isn't a suicide and that he's been set up…after he learns that the woman who hired him wasn't really Evelyn. These inconsistencies eventually reveal an even more corrupt and evil state of affairs than Jake could've ever realized. The flaw in Evelyn's iris initially suggests that there's something wrong with her—like maybe she's in on her father's scheme. But in reality, the flaw lies in the family she comes from, specifically in her monstrous father.
• Taken During the Ending: After Evelyn is shot by the police, her father drives away with Katherine, who is both her daughter and her sister. It is implied that he is going to rape Katherine as well.
• Talking in Bed: Between Gittes and Evelyn where he alludes to his past as a cop in Chinatown.
• Title Drop: Probably one of the most famous examples: "Forget it, Jake—it's Chinatown...."
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The city of Los Angeles really did steal water from valley farmers. Interestingly, this was neither the first nor the last time the events in question were fictionalized, merely the most well-known. And the catastrophic dam collapse referenced by Hollis Mulwray at the city council meeting was inspired by the real-life failure of the St. Francis Dam in 1928, which killed over 400 people.
• Villainous Gentrification: Chinatown's elaborate layered plot concerns an artificial drought as a result of water being dammed out, to chase farmers from their land, so that the terrain can be bought on the cheap, developed, and suburbanized. It succeeds. The kicker: the film is based on the real-life California water wars, which ended the same way.
• Wham Line: Has two, which are about five minutes apart.
  • Jake is visiting Evelyn's estate while she's making plans to escape, trying to get to figure out what really happened to Hollis. Jake knows the autopsy found salt water in his lungs, which is strange, since he was found in a freshwater reservoir. His leading theory is that someone drowned him in the ocean and moved his body to a freshwater reservoir, but he realizes that Hollis was actually drowned in a saltwater pool on Evelyn's property after a groundskeeper there tells him, "Oh yes, bad for glass. Salt water vely bed for glass."
  • After this revelation, Jake corners Evelyn and violently demands to know just what the deal is with Katherine. Evelyn switches between saying she's her daughter and her sister, but Jake doesn't really believe either of those explanations. Evelyn clarifies that both are true, because Katherine is the result of her father raping her.
    Evelyn: She's my daughter! She's my sister! She's my daughter! My sister! My daughter! She's my sister AND my daughter! My father and I.... Understand? Or is it too tough for you?
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We never learned who killed Ida Sessions, although it was probably Mulvahill and/or The Man With the Knife.
• Wretched Hive: From the way Jake reminisces about his days there and the events by the film's end, you can tell Chinatown was one of these.
• Writer on Board: The reason for Gittes' totally-out-of-left-field question ("Do you accept those of the Jewish persuasion?") and the ensuing Deliberate Values Dissonance at the upper-class retirement home. Although it would also give him an excuse to look at the records of the place, and it does get across how slimy the American upper crust at the time was.
• Your Mom: Gittes uses the wife variation to insult a cop:
  Loach: What happened to your nose, Gittes? Somebody slammed a bedroom window on it?
  Jake: Nope. Your wife got excited. She crossed her legs a little too quick, you understand what I mean, pal?

The Two Jakes

• Affably Evil: Earl Rawley is a polite, congenial, and helpful to Jake but at the heart of the conspiracy to defraud Berman and his wife.
• Asshole Victim: Mark Bodine turns out to have been one, sleeping with a woman he planned to expose as a product of incest and steal the oil rights of. Her husband killing him becomes much more justified after that.
• The Bad Guy Wins: For some value of bad guy, Jake Berman kills his business partner for blackmailing as well as sleeping with his wife. He also faces no justice for his crimes because he was Secretly Dying and commits suicide to eliminate all evidence of his crime. Jake even helps him get off the legal hook so his wife can inherit everything.
• Blatant Lies: Earl Rawley tells Jake to his face that he has no interest in the oil underneath the San Fernando Valley. He's already drilling as all the natural gas pockets prove.
• Distant Sequel: The Two Jakes takes place eleven years after the original Chinatown.
• Bedroom Adultery Scene: Jake Berman catches his wife in bed with his business partner before murdering the latter.
• Belated Happy Ending: Katherine Mulwray/Berman managed to outlive her abusive father/grandfather as well as inherit a fortune from her now-deceased husband as their home development is ruined but she has mineral rights to the Valley.
• Blackmail: Mark Bodine was attempting to blackmail his partner for the mineral rights his wife had to the San Fernando Valley. This, combined with the affair, was enough to convince Jake Berman to kill him.
• Corporate Conspiracy: Earl Rawley is drilling underneath the Valley in Katherine Mulwray's land despite her maintaining the mineral rights.
• A Deadly Affair: Jake Berman kills his wife's lover moments after finding them in bed together.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • Jaker Berman killing his wife's lover is considered "temporary insanity" to enough people that no one considers it strange that he might be walking around and carrying out his business after doing it.
  • A gay nightclub's occupants are all arrested and taken downtown.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Jake's fiance ends their engagement after seeing him and Kitty Berman having dinner together. Ironically, this is after him already sleeping with Lillian Bodine. Jake doesn't seem too upset about it.
• Dramatic Irony: Noah Cross went to an elaborate conspiracy to acquire all of the land in the San Fernando Valley but due to the oil drilling underneath his property, the land is worthless for development.
• Driven to Suicide: Jake Berman commits suicide by exploding a gas-filled house with a cigarette.
• Gambit Pileup: Jake Berman murders his business partner to make sure his wife inherits their shared business as he's Secretly Dying. This is while his wife is concealing the fact she's Noah Cross' daughter and owner of most of San Fernando Valley. Earl Rawley is trying to commit fraud to deprive Katherine Mulwray/Berman of her mineral rights to the land. All of this while the police and Jake are conducting their own investigations.
• Good All Along: Jake Berman turns out to have been a Sympathetic Murderer who killed his wife's blackmailer as well as someone who intended to steal the oil rights to the Valley.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Noah Cross died of old age, rich and powerful despite all the horrific evils he committed.
  • Jake flat-out says that any attempt to make Earl Rawley pay is doomed to failure due to how much money he has.
• Macguffin: The voice recording of Jake Berman and the murder of his partner.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Julius "Jake" Berman murders his wife's lover in a bathroom after discovering them in bed together. Except, he already knew they were having an affair and had hired Jake Gittes to record it.
• No OSHA Compliance: Not played for action but drama in the fact the Valley housing development is a minefield of explosive gas pockets due to the drilling going on underneath.
• Secretly Dying: Jake Berman is dying of cancer and his plan is based around securing his wife's finances despite the fact she's the heir of Noah Cross.
• Thanatos Gambit: Jake Berman kills himself to deny himself a horrible lingering death, cover up any evidence of premeditation, and proves there's oil underneath the Valley.
• Two-Timing with the Bestie: Jake Berman kills his business partner and best friend due to the latter sleeping with his wife as well as to provide his wife with their shared wealth.
• Wham Line: Jake hears the name "Katherine Mulwray" while listening to his recording of his client.

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