10 / 10
Official trailer
Chinatown is the Roman Polanski-directed neo-noir that became the defining American detective film of the 1970s and among the most-studied screenplays in cinema history.
Polanski directed. Robert Towne wrote the screenplay. Jack Nicholson plays J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a Los Angeles private detective specializing in matrimonial cases. Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the real wife of the man an impostor hired Gittes to follow. John Huston plays Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father and the man behind the conspiracy.
Roman Polanski himself appears as the small-time enforcer who slits Gittes’s nose with a knife. Perry Lopez plays Lieutenant Lou Escobar, the LAPD officer who once worked with Gittes in Chinatown. The plot follows Gittes’s investigation of a routine adultery case that expands into a conspiracy involving Los Angeles water rights, real estate fraud, and the systematic incest of Evelyn by her father.
I think Chinatown is the most perfectly built American movie I know. Every scene hands me a clue I don’t recognize as a clue until the end, and the ending flattens me.
Nicholson is at his best, Dunaway breaks my heart, and Huston plays pure rot with a folksy charm that turns my stomach. If I had to pick one film to prove what a screenplay can do, I’d pick this one.
The film made approximately twenty-nine million dollars in initial 1974 release on a six million dollar budget.
The commercial performance was strong. The film received eleven Academy Award nominations and won one (Best Original Screenplay for Robert Towne). Later decades have established Chinatown as one of the major American films of the 1970s and Robert Towne’s screenplay as the canonical example of three-act structure in modern American cinema. The screenplay is widely taught in film schools as the model for detective-genre screenwriting.
The Structure
Robert Towne’s screenplay is a heavily studied text in American screenwriting.
The structure is built on the noir detective template (the case that turns out to be more than it seemed, the femme fatale who’s more victim than villain, the deepening conspiracy that ends in the protagonist’s defeat). Towne’s specific contribution is the precision with which each clue accumulates and the structural inevitability of the conclusion. The audience reads each new revelation as connected to the previous ones in ways the script has prepared but not telegraphed.
The screenplay also commits to the genre’s tragic tone without softening.
Most American detective fiction lets the detective win something at the end. Chinatown refuses. Jake’s investigation produces no justice. The villain wins. The woman he tried to save is dead. The child Jake was trying to rescue is delivered into the hands of her abuser. The closing line (“forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”) names the film’s argument: in the world Towne is depicting, decent intentions produce catastrophic outcomes when they confront sufficient corruption. The genre can’t rescue Jake because the genre is the trap.
Towne is smart to refuse Jake anything. Most films would have let him save the girl and send Cross to prison, and I’d have walked away satisfied and forgotten it by morning. The refusal is why this ending sticks with me.
For Writers
A script can refuse a genre’s standard ending if it has prepared the audience for the refusal. Chinatown is a detective story whose detective loses. Detective stories where the detective wins have trained the audience. The refusal is the film’s argument. The lesson is that genre expectations are tools to be deployed deliberately. Following the genre is one valid choice. Refusing the genre is another, but only if the script has justified the refusal through accumulated evidence that the world it depicts can’t support the standard outcome.
The Water Conspiracy
The film’s central plot machinery is the Los Angeles water conspiracy. Noah Cross and his confederates are engineering drought conditions in the San Fernando Valley to drive land prices down.
They’ll buy the parched land cheap. Cross controls the water that he’ll eventually use to irrigate the same land at enormous markup. The conspiracy is loosely based on the actual 1908 Owens Valley water dispute that established the city’s water supply through methods the film accurately characterizes as theft.
The water plot is the film’s external mystery. The actual mystery is what Cross has done to his daughter. The water conspiracy is the surface puzzle. The incest is the buried truth the film is about. The audience spends most of the film tracking the water plot. The incest reveal in the third act reframes everything that came before. The water conspiracy was real, but it was also the cover story Cross used to keep Evelyn under control.
Towne’s structural achievement is making the surface puzzle strong enough to carry two hours and then revealing that the entire film has been about something else. The water plot is the one place I’d grumble. It’s complicated enough that keeping the land deals straight takes real work, and a first-time viewer can get lost in the paperwork. That’s a small price, because the paperwork is exactly what Cross wants everyone staring at.
For Writers
A surface mystery that obscures a deeper truth is the cleanest structure in noir fiction. Chinatown’s water plot is what the protagonist investigates. The incest is what the story is about. The lesson is that strong genre fiction often works on two levels. The visible plot satisfies the genre’s expectations. The buried plot delivers the work’s actual meaning. Build the structure on both levels. The reader will follow the visible plot while the buried plot accumulates weight.
The Closing Sequence
The closing Chinatown sequence is a much-studied final scene in American cinema.
Jake has arranged Evelyn’s escape with her daughter Katherine. Noah Cross has tracked them to the Chinatown street. The police are present, ostensibly to help Jake. Evelyn drives away with Katherine. Cross’s people fire on the car. Evelyn is killed. The car rolls to a stop with the horn blaring. Cross retrieves Katherine and walks her away.
Jake stands in the street, restrained by his associates, watching the woman he loved die and the child she was protecting delivered into the hands of her abuser.
The sequence delivers on every structural setup the film has built. The film has mentioned Chinatown as Jake’s professional trauma since the first act. The audience learns Jake had once worked in Chinatown and tried to save a woman there who died because of his intervention. The closing sequence is the trauma replayed exactly. Jake’s repeated effort to help in Chinatown produces the same outcome. The film argues that individual decency can’t interrupt some patterns of harm. The closing line names the resignation. Forget it, Jake.
The world the film has depicted doesn’t allow the kind of victory Jake was seeking.
That horn is the sound I remember from this film more than any line of dialogue. Polanski lets it blare over Jake’s face, and I think it’s the cruelest sound cue in American movies, because nobody in the frame can do a thing to stop it.
For Writers
A closing sequence that replays the protagonist’s defining trauma in a new context produces the strongest tragic structure available to fiction. Jake’s first Chinatown ended in failure. His second Chinatown ends the same way. The pattern is the meaning. The lesson is that thematic repetition through structural rhyme intensifies fiction’s emotional weight. The reader feels the inevitability when the past returns. Pattern recognition is half of how readers process meaning. Use it deliberately.
Craft Note
The “she’s my sister and my daughter” sequence is the film’s most economical character reveal. Jake has slapped Evelyn repeatedly trying to extract the truth about Katherine. Evelyn finally admits the relationship in fragmented confession: “She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. My sister, my daughter. My sister and my daughter.” Faye Dunaway plays the line as a woman whose composure is shattering in real time. The sequence runs about ninety seconds. The information delivered reframes the entire previous two hours of investigation.
Polanski stages the moment in a single sustained shot on Dunaway’s face. The most devastating revelations hit hardest when the camera doesn’t look away. The audience is forced to watch Evelyn’s collapse for the full duration. The technique is unforgiving and exactly right for the material.
Does Chinatown still hold up?
10/10. Chinatown is the neo-noir every later detective film gets measured against, and I can’t find a wasted scene in it. Robert Towne’s screenplay deserves every film-school syllabus it sits on. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston all give career-defining performances, and Dunaway’s confession scene shakes me. The water plot, the buried revelation and that last street in Chinatown are why this gets a 10 from me. Watch it, read the screenplay, then watch it again.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The 47th Academy Awards (1975), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
- Roman Polanski court hearing, CNN
- Chinatown (1974 film), Wikipedia
- Chinatown (1974), IMDb
