Films

9.2Skry

Chinatown

1974

Los Angeles, 1937: a city running on water politics and worse. Jake Gittes, a private investigator who makes his living trailing unfaithful spouses, takes what looks like a routine adultery case and finds himself inside a corruption scheme that operates well above his pay grade. Polanski builds the film as a noir that strips the genre of its consolations — the detective asks the right questions, follows the logic, and the logic leads somewhere the form rarely allows. Nicholson plays Gittes as a man whose professional confidence becomes its own liability, and Faye Dunaway and John Huston fill the architecture around him with precisely calibrated concealment. Robert Towne's screenplay keeps its hand on the wheel throughout.