Chinatown

"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't," warns water baron Noah Cross (John Huston), when smooth cop-turned-private eye J.J. "Jake" Gittes (Jack Nicholson) starts nosing around Cross's water diversion scheme. That proves to be the ominous lesson of Chinatown, ...more

By 1974, a lingering national malaise spawned by the killing of John F. Kennedy and fed by the national debate over the Vietnam War, the continued wave of political assassinations, and the sudden rise and slow collapse of the counterculture movement had finally come to a head with the revelations of the Watergate scandal. Chinatown, a glossy variant on the hard-boiled film noir detective pictures of the 1940s, suggested that none of this was new, and that ugly battles over power and profit ...more