Best Ever
Noir Movie?

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The line has become shorthand for fatalism, for the impossibility of justice, for the way power protects itself. But when you watch the scene — really watch it, not just quote it — what hits you is Jack Nicholson’s face. He’s just seen something unspeakable. He’ll carry it forever. And there’s nothing he can do. Roman Polanski made a detective movie where the detective loses, and somehow that feels more honest than a thousand triumphant finales.

The setup is classic noir. J.J. Gittes is a private eye in 1937 Los Angeles, specializing in matrimonial cases — cheating husbands, suspicious wives. A woman hires him to investigate her husband. The husband turns up dead. The woman turns out to be an imposter. The real wife, Evelyn Mulwray, has secrets of her own. So far, so Chandler. But Robert Towne’s screenplay goes somewhere Chandler never went, into territory so dark the studio tried to change the ending.

Nicholson’s Gittes is one of the great screen performances — cocky, smart, wounded underneath the bravado. Watch him in the early scenes, bantering with clients, needling the cops, wearing that bandage on his nose like a badge of honor. He thinks he’s figured out how the world works. He’s wrong. The film is a systematic demolition of his confidence, and Nicholson plays every stage of the collapse.

Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray is even more complex. She’s hiding something from the first frame — that much is obvious — but what she’s hiding defies expectation. Dunaway plays the revelation scene with a rawness that’s almost unbearable: “She’s my sister… she’s my daughter…” The repetition isn’t just exposition. It’s a woman reliving trauma while trying to explain it, the words catching on the horror every time.

John Huston’s Noah Cross is evil made avuncular. He smiles, he jokes, he offers reasonable explanations for unreasonable things. When Gittes finally confronts him about the water scheme, Cross’s response is chilling in its simplicity: “The future, Mr. Gittes.” He’s not even defensive. He’s beyond guilt, beyond law, operating in a realm where money and power have replaced morality entirely. Huston plays him without a trace of villainy in the conventional sense. That’s what makes him terrifying.

The water plot — based on the real history of how Los Angeles stole water from the Owens Valley — gives the noir framework an epic scope. This isn’t just a murder mystery; it’s a story about how cities are built, whose land gets flooded, who profits and who dies. Polanski and Towne understood that the best noir isn’t about individual crimes. It’s about systems of crime, about corruption so embedded in the infrastructure that exposing it changes nothing.

The cinematography by John A. Alonzo is sun-drenched and menacing. This isn’t the shadowy noir of the ’40s; it’s bright, hot, California light that exposes everything while hiding the essential truth. The orange groves and dusty roads and art deco offices all gleam with a beauty that feels like a lie. The prettiest shots in the film are often the ones where something terrible is about to happen.

The ending is a betrayal of everything detective fiction promises. Gittes figures it out — he solves the case — and it doesn’t matter. The wrong person dies. The villain walks away with everything. The cops, who’ve been antagonists throughout, literally hold Gittes back while justice fails. Polanski famously fought to keep this ending against studio pressure. He was right. A happy ending would have been a lie about how power works.

Forget it, Jake.

Roman Polanski: The Best Ever is sunshine hiding the abyss. Is Chinatown the Best Ever Neo-Noir Movie? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Paramount 4K UHD restoration brings out every sun-baked detail.
• The Paramount Centennial Collection Blu-ray includes extensive making-of features.