Jake Gittes is a detective who is hired to work a possible adultery case, his stock in trade. The woman who hired him turns out to have been doing so under false pretences, using another woman’s name, and Jake finds himself embroiled in a tale of corruption in LA’s water department
Doesn’t that just sound thrilling? We all love a good water scandal.
To be fair your average detective story can have any kind of maguffin behind it. And as these things go the one for Chinatown isn’t too bad. It gives plenty of little twists and turns to the plot and the odd “ah ha!” moment. But I really expected a whole lot more.
I don’t get what the big deal is. It’s a passable movie, everyone acts fine in it, but I just found it very meh. Why this ends up on top 100’s of all time and gets lauded as a fantastic film I don’t know. On IMDB it says that the AFI ranks this #2 in the mystery category. I have a Bogart box set that has 4 films in it, and any of those could be above this.
Frankly, and while it’s not technically a sequel, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (it uses themes for the proposed third film in a trilogy, I haven’t seen “The Two Jakes” which is the second) is more enjoyable making it the first time a third movie is better than the first (arguments in the comments on that).
Yeah this is good, passable, but not some kind of amazing classic (hence the fact I haven’t even spoken about it much). Maybe I missed the point…
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