Product: The Two Jakes [VHS] (1990)
Rating: 5.0
Nicholson and Keitel in classic LA noir follow up to "Chinatown"
"The Two Jakes" is a Jack Nicholson project released in 1990, a reprisal of his role in the 1974 Roman Polanski picture "Chinatown". In both films, Nicholson (who directed this sequel) plays J.J. Gittes, an LA private eye in the classic sense of the phrase. I found this movie to live up to the original, which is widely considered one of the best American films ever made, despite the controversy over Polanski's personal status as a fugitive in the US for the rape of a young teenager in his private jacuzzi. This act made Polanski the subject of much scorn, but he continued to make films in Europe; his 2002 WWII classic "The Pianist" starring Adrien Brody as a Polish Jew suriving the Holocaust (Polanski himself lived through the war in Poland) was a critically acclaimed Oscar winner, yet Polanski's past caught up with him in 2009 as he was nearly extradicted to the US from Switzerland."Chinatown" seems like Polanski's masterpiece when looked at through the lens of his life, given the fact that his wife Sharon Tate was one of the victims in the infamous Manson murders in 1969. Needless to say, Polanski was quite familiar with the seedy underbelly of LA, and though both Gittes films take place before Polanski's day, the ambience created by Polanski, Nicholson, and screenwriter Robert Towne captures the scandalous yet alluring LA of the 30's and 40's.Both films are from the FDR/Truman era, and are specifically related to the New Deal type utility and land development deals that were often the subject of scandal and crime at the highest levels of society. While many of these projects created alot of jobs and improved the quality of life through reliable sources of electricity and water, there was usually inevitable bloating of contracts and corruption through overly ambitious businesses looking to hit paydirt with a lucrative development scheme. In WWII era LA, things were just beginning to open up, as the construction boom and large scale migration to the West Coast were relatively recent events. This is the world of J.J. Gittes, who gets quite dirty digging through the trash of some of LA's biggest movers and shakers.Even though Nicholson directed the second installment from this world, I found this movie to live up to the original, despite a poor box office showing and mixed critical reception. I really feel that these two movies taken together are in the same league as the first two "Godfather" movies in capturing important people from the WWII generation. The people and places from "The Two Jakes" are in the same world as the beginning of "Godfather Part I", when Tom Hagen visits Hollywood on an errand for Don Corleone on behalf of singer/actor Johnny Fontaine. Even though "The Two Jakes" is not what you would call a straight mob movie, there is a great preformance from Ruben Blades as Mickey Nice (perhaps a nod to LA gangster Mickey Cohen), a friend of Gittes troublesome client, who drags Gittes into another web of corporate corruption, with a suprising connection to Gittes original clients in "Chinatown", the Mulwrays.While "Chinatown" is set in 1938, "The Two Jakes" picks up with many of the same characters a decade later in 1948. The war is over, and Gittes and his police contact Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez) have returned from service abroad. The story begins when Gittes is hired by Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel) to conduct surveillance on his cheating wife, and knowingly doctor a J. Edgar Hoover style audio tape of Berman's wife Kitty and his business parnter Mark Bodine having sex. With Gittes help, Berman overdubbs his voice (Gittes is clearly willing to play dirty), but the actions that follow leave Gittes in a precarious position as an acessory to murder. He is caught in a viscious feud between Berman and his dead partner's widow (played by a sultry Madeline Stowe), with a real estate deal and other industrial contracts on the line.