Jake Gittes, Right Up There With Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe

Rating: 10/10 (6 December 2006)

In Chinatown, Jack Nicholson gets one of his best roles, definitely in the top five as Jake Gittes, a throwback private eye to the forties of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Had Chinatown been made in the Forties Humphrey Bogart who played definitive versions of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe would definitely have been cast in the role of Jake Gittes. Nicholson however is one worthy successor to Bogey.
Very little action takes place in Chinatown in Los Angeles and only some peripheral characters are oriental. What Chinatown is here is a metaphor for a place you don't want to go and a culture and way of life you cannot penetrate or understand. Back when Gittes was a cop he was stationed in Chinatown and always felt alien there. He couldn't do his job because he didn't understand the people.
Gittes goes back to Chinatown so to speak when he's hired by Diane Ladd to shadow her husband. It's the kind of peep job Nicholson is used to and he does. Later the husband turns up dead and it turns out Ladd was posing as the wife. The real wife Faye Dunaway shows up and threatens to sue him.
Nicholson keeps on digging and he comes up with a juicy political scandal involving a scheme to defraud essentially the whole city of Los Angeles with their water supply. But he comes up with far more than that involving Faye Dunaway's personal life.
The lead villain here is John Huston in probably his greatest role before the camera with only The Cardinal as a rival. Huston is Dunaway's father, a rich gazillionaire who can just about buy everything and everybody and usually does. But as it turns out he's far more malevolent than that, a truly terrifying evil soul.
Faye Dunaway does a great job playing a woman carrying one huge burden on her soul. Look for good performances by Perry Lopez as the dogged police lieutenant trying to keep everyone happy and Diane Ladd as the hapless fake Dunaway.
Chinatown is one timeless film and will be getting raves centuries from now.