Chinatown: The Noir That Poisoned Its Own Ending

Robert Towne wanted a different ending. His screenplay for Chinatown — often cited as the finest ever written, and it is hard to argue — gave his detective a version of a win. Roman Polanski, directing, refused it. He had come out of the murder of his wife and the general conviction that the world does not reward the good, and he insisted the film close on catastrophe. The two men fought about it, and Polanski won, and the reason Chinatown endures where a hundred handsome period thrillers have faded is that the director poisoned the well on purpose. The film is built like a satisfying mystery and then denies you the satisfaction, and that denial is the whole point.

Released in 1974, produced by Robert Evans at Paramount, it belongs to the great decade of American cinema and to a short-lived revival of film noir that used the distance of history to say things the 1940s originals could only imply. Jack Nicholson plays J.J. Gittes, a Los Angeles private investigator who specialises in the cheap end of the trade — divorce work, matrimonial surveillance, other people’s shabby secrets. He is good at his job, vain about his suits, and completely unprepared for what he is about to walk into.

The story, kept above the line

A woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray hires Gittes to catch her husband, the chief engineer of the city’s water department, in an affair. Gittes does the work, photographs Hollis Mulwray with a young woman, and the pictures end up splashed across the papers. Then the real Evelyn Mulwray — Faye Dunaway, all controlled tremor and dark glasses — arrives in his office to inform him he has been used, and threatens to sue. Gittes, humiliated and curious, starts pulling the thread, and the thread runs into the machinery of the city itself.

The plot Towne constructed sits on top of real history: the California water wars of the early twentieth century, the schemes by which Los Angeles secured the water that let it become a metropolis, and the fortunes made by men who knew where the aqueduct would run before anyone else did. Gittes thinks he is investigating a murder and an affair. He is actually stepping into a conspiracy about land, drought and power, and the deeper he digs the more he learns that his instincts — the assumptions that make him competent at small corruption — are useless against corruption on this scale. Everything above this paragraph is safe to read before watching. The film’s method is revelation, and I will keep the worst of it below the line.

Why it works: a mystery told at eye level

The formal masterstroke of Chinatown is its point of view. We are with Gittes in almost every scene, and we learn only what he learns, when he learns it. There are no cutaways to the villains scheming, no dramatic irony of the kind the Coens weaponise in Blood Simple. The audience is as much in the dark as the detective, which means his errors are our errors and his shocks are ours. When the ground opens under Gittes, it opens under us at the same instant. That restraint is why the film’s revelations still land on a fifth viewing: the structure is built to keep you inside one man’s limited sight.

John A. Alonzo shot it — brought in after the original cinematographer departed — in a warm, sunlit palette that quietly refuses the shadowy conventions of classic noir. This Los Angeles is bright, dusty, drought-cracked, its horrors conducted in full daylight, and the cheerful light becomes its own kind of menace. Jerry Goldsmith composed the score in about ten days after an earlier score was thrown out, and its centrepiece is a solo trumpet — played by Uan Rasey — that aches with a romantic yearning the plot systematically betrays. The music promises a love story the film has no intention of delivering.

Nicholson gives what may be his best contained performance, and the containment matters. Gittes spends a stretch of the film with his nose bandaged after a run-in with a knife-wielding thug — played by Polanski himself in a brief, vicious cameo — and the injury is a running visual joke that is also a thesis: the detective who pokes his nose into other people’s business gets it cut, and spends the rest of the picture literally marked as a man in over his head. Dunaway’s Evelyn, meanwhile, is a masterclass in a performance built on suppression, a woman managing a terror she cannot name, and the film’s cruelty is bound up in how long it lets Gittes, and us, misread her.

The collector’s note

Chinatown is a deliberate conversation with 1940s noir, and Towne saturated it in the tradition — the private eye, the femme fatale, the wealthy patriarch with a rotten secret, the city as a moral swamp. But the film it is most profitably watched beside is Carol Reed’s The Third Man, another postwar noir in which an outsider investigating a friend’s death uncovers a corruption so systemic that his moral certainties are useless against it, and which also ends on a note of desolate, unresolved defeat. Both films understand that the deepest noir subject is the discovery that the machinery producing the crime cannot be stopped by any one honest man.

The other essential pairing is with the neo-noir it helped licence. Without Chinatown there is arguably no Blood Simple, no wave of American filmmakers using the period-crime frame to interrogate power, greed and the founding sins of their cities. Towne intended Chinatown as the first part of a trilogy about Los Angeles and the corruptions that built it; only one sequel, The Two Jakes, ever materialised, and it is a lesser thing. The first film is complete in itself, and its completeness is a function of its refusal to console.

The verdict, above the line

Chinatown is one of the two or three finest American films of the 1970s, and its greatness is inseparable from its willingness to be cruel. It is beautifully mounted, immaculately performed, and constructed with a watchmaker’s patience, and it uses all of that craft to lead you, and Gittes, toward a conclusion that offers no relief and no justice. To explain why that ending is the correct one — and why Towne’s softer version would have made a good film into a forgettable one — I have to describe it. Below the line, then. Stop here if you have somehow never seen it.

Spoilers below

The secret at the centre of Chinatown is one of the darkest in mainstream American cinema, and Polanski films it plainly, without sensationalism, which makes it worse. Evelyn’s evident distress around the young woman Gittes photographed with her father, and around her own father, the water magnate Noah Cross — played by John Huston with a genial, unhurried menace that is somehow more appalling than any snarl — resolves into the revelation that the young woman is both Evelyn’s daughter and her sister. Cross raped his own daughter, and the girl is the product. Huston delivers the film’s philosophy in the Prater-flat calm of a man who has never been refused anything: that given the right time and place, a man is capable of anything, and Cross’s ambition is simply to own the future of the city outright, its water, its land, its bloodline.

Gittes, who has spent the film thinking he understands the shape of the corruption, has misread it at every level. He thinks Evelyn is the villain; she is a victim protecting a child. He thinks he can expose Cross and see justice done; he has no idea how completely a man like Cross has already bought the outcome. And the setting of the climax is the Chinatown of the title — a place that, in Gittes’s backstory, is where he once worked as a policeman and where, trying to help a woman, he instead got her killed. Chinatown in the film is not really a place. It is a name for the zone where good intentions produce catastrophe, where the honest man’s intervention is precisely the thing that destroys what he was trying to save.

The ending executes that idea without mercy. Gittes’s attempt to help Evelyn escape with her daughter collapses; Evelyn, trying to flee her father, is shot dead by police as she drives away, her daughter left to be taken by Cross — the one outcome more monstrous than anything the plot has yet delivered. Gittes stands in the street, ruined, and his associate says the line that has become the film’s epitaph: forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown. It is not comfort. It is the sound of the world telling a decent man that his decency was never a match for the thing he was up against, and that the machine will grind on exactly as before.

This is why Polanski was right and Towne, on this one point, was wrong. A version in which Gittes saves the girl and exposes Cross would be a well-made thriller and nothing more. The version we have is a tragedy about the limits of individual virtue against structural evil, and it earns its place in the canon by refusing the catharsis every fibre of its craft has trained you to expect. My verdict: this is the neo-noir all the others measure themselves against, and half a century on it has lost none of its power to leave a viewer sitting in the dark, wounded. Watch it, then chase it with The Third Man for its twin sense of postwar rot, and with the Coens’ Blood Simple to see the tradition it handed down. Some doors, once opened, do not close.