Chinatown

If I were taking part in the "Blind Spot" series that one of the other movie blogs runs, in which you blog over the course of a year about a dozen movies that are generally considered must-see but you haven't seen before, one of the movies I might have selected would be Chinatown. I recently had the chance to record it from the free preview of the Showtime channels, and see that it's going to be on multiple times in the next week, starting overnight tonight at 3:55 AM on TMC Xtra and tomorrow morning at 10:45 AM on Showtime Showcase.

Jack Nicholson plays J.J. Gittes, a private detective in 1930s Los Angeles. One day, into his office comes Evelyn Mulwray, saying that she's worried that her husband Hollis is stepping out on her. Could J.J. investigate and get the goods on Hollis? It'll take some money, and Gittes seems to have some pretty high rates for the mid-1930s, but he's willing to take the job.

Mulwray works for the Los Angeles Water Department, which is trying to get a dam built to deal with the chronic water shortages stemming from the fact that Los Angeles is a growing city and that it never rains in southern California. Mulwray, opposes the buidling of the dam, and probably has evidence that building the dam wouldn't be necessary, which is why he's so dangerous. Gittes does his usual bang-up job, gets photos of Mulwray that sure make him look unfaithful, and then lives happily ever after.

Well, that last part about living happily ever after is clearly wrong, or otherwise we wouldn't have a movie. Gittes goes to the Mulwray house to speak personally to Hollis, but Evelyn tells him to look for Hollis at one of the reservoirs. There, Hollis is found -- but he's quite dead, having drowned. So the police investigate, which is where Gittes finds out that it wasn't Evelyn who hired him, but a woman named Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) who was made up to look like Evelyn. Obviously somebody had it in for Hollis. But who, and why?

So Gittes finds himself investigating a lot more. Among the possible suspects are Yelburton (John Hillerman), now one of hte bigwigs in the Water Department, who gives Gittes a lie about water being sent to irrigate the orange groves out in the San Fernando Valley. There's also Noah Cross (John Huston), who used to work in the Water Department before it was sold to the city. Noah and Hollis had a falling out over that, but also over the fact that Noah's daughter was born Evelyn Cross, the same Evelyn who married Hollis.

Gittes continues to investigate, working somewhat with Evelyn as he had to lie to the police who thought that she had hired Gittes to figure out if Hollis was being unfaithful. Indeed, if the detective investigating the murder, Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez) knew the truth, Gittes could be in big trouble for withholding evidence. And the case is about to get a whole lot more complicated, as Gittes discovers those orange groves are being sold off to dummy buyers as the land would be more valuable as residential tracts -- if only they had enough water. As you can figure, the point of building the dam is to get that water for the putative new housing developments. Oh, and Hollis did drown -- but the water in his lungs was salt water, which raises further questions about where and how he really died.

Chinatown is one of those movies that gets notoriously high rankings on all-time movie lists like the AFI lists or even IMDb's Top 250, which tends to skew towards more recent movies because of their methodology. It's certainly a well-crafted movie, and one worth watching. But it's also something that I found myself thinking I wouldn't put quite as high as all those other critics do. It's not that there's anything wrong with it; it's more that I tend not to buy into hype.

So by all means see Chinatown. It's a darn good movie. It's just that for me it a bit less good than all the other vintage movies on those "best of all time" lists.