The film looked back to the dirty dealings behind Los Angeles’s transformation into a major urban centre, taking inspiration from the original California “water wars” that erupted at the turn of the 20th Century. These occurred when the Los Angeles water department bought up a swathe of land in east California in order to divert water to sate its growing population, to the detriment of the rural community it was taking supply away from. What’s more, Chinatown borrows some aspects of the life of civil engineer William Mulholland, the controversial figure who was the first superintendent of the Los Angeles water system and tasked with creating the aqueduct to ensure the city had sufficient water supply; all this aided the film’s sense of authenticity to the point where its dark fictions have influenced the perception of the city’s real history.
Chinatown begins with a quintessential film noir set-up. In 1930s Los Angeles, private detective JJ Gittes (Nicholson) is hired by a woman who goes by the name of Evelyn Mulwray to prove her husband’s infidelity. Believing it’s a simple case, he investigates the woman’s husband, Hollis (Darrell Zwerling), obtaining photo proof of him meeting a woman. However, things get complicated when these pictures of Hollis and his apparent mistress are splashed in the newspaper, and it turns out that the woman who hired him was only pretending to be Evelyn. The real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) turns up at Gittes’ office and threatens to sue him for the scandal.
Gittes learns that Hollis is a senior engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Evelyn’s father is Noah Cross (Huston) – the former co-owner of the department with Hollis, who is determined for the city’s latest dam scheme to go ahead. From there, he is drawn into a world of corruption, violence and murder. Hollis soon turns up dead in a water reserve, and Evelyn is hiding an even darker secret that may just explain the violence that comes Gittes’s way as he searches for the woman who he first saw Hollis meet (at both Evelyn’s and Noah’s separate and competing requests).
A journalistic story