Chinatown Review

Towne locks the point of view to Jake Gittes with unusual discipline: the audience learns nothing before he does, so every revelation arrives with his own miscalculation attached. The water-rights conspiracy is built on real municipal history, which gives the film a foundation most noir substitutes with atmosphere, and the structure keeps redefining the crime upward until private sleaze turns out to be civic theft turns out to be something worse.

John A. Alonzo shoots 1930s Los Angeles dry, warm and bright rather than shadowed, a deliberate refusal of noir shorthand that makes the corruption feel sunlit and ordinary. Nicholson plays Gittes as a man whose confidence is his blind spot, walking around with a bandaged nose for half the film as a standing reminder of what curiosity costs. John Huston's Noah Cross is monstrous in a genial register. Jerry Goldsmith's trumpet, written in ten days, carries the ache. What keeps it just short of the top tier is a middle stretch of procedural legwork before the last act detonates.