Jack Nicholson · 1974 · Signature Roles
Jake Gittes is a private detective who specializes in divorce cases and tells dirty jokes to his clients.
Jake Gittes is a private detective who specializes in divorce cases and tells dirty jokes to his clients. Jack Nicholson plays him as a man who thinks he understands Los Angeles — its corruption, its deals, its pretty lies — until he discovers a conspiracy that runs deeper than he imagined, involving water, land, and a father and daughter bound by a terrible secret.
Chinatown is a mystery in which solving the case makes everything worse, and Nicholson’s performance is the film’s moral compass precisely because Gittes is not heroic. He is persistent, he is decent, and he is outmatched. The final scene, in which he tries to save a woman and fails completely, is one of the bleakest endings in American film, and Nicholson plays it with a numbness that is more devastating than tears.
It is often called a perfect film. Nicholson’s Gittes is why it hurts.