Frankly, as good as it gets. This is a flawless film. My mom was 21 in 1937, and she said it perfectly captured the era--clothes, music and actually everything. The screenplay is a treasure--some people refer to it as the best ever. My favorite Nicholson performance.

definition great movie...  the 3 main performances, the director, and the screenwriter, and even the producer are all famous for their contributions to this masterpiece...

This script is used as a teaching tool for scriptwriting and usually considered one of the best ever written. No matter how times it is viewed, new details or new understandings are revealed.

I met Faye Dunaway back in the 1990s
Fascinating woman. She has the ability to be friendly but distant, graceful but controlled. She has that "old Hollywood glamor" about her.

Your analysis of the way in which Jake is in over his head in this story is very insightful.

This might be the best movie ever made about what wealthy and powerful men are able to get away with, and John Huston’s portrayal of Noah Cross is flawless. The ending takes my breath away, it is stunning. And nausea inducing.

Cute trivia: When Noah Cross asks Gittes if he's sleeping with his daughter, it just happened to be the time when Jack Nicholson actually had just begun sleeping with John Huston's daughter -- Anjelica Huston (and they were on and off for, like, thirty years after that). Nicholson has said that it was a bit nerve-wracking: EVERYONE was intimidated by John Huston in those days.

Great choice and reaction. This is Film Noir in the most brutal and impure form. True Noir doesn’t pull punches and has a devastating ending for the ones you’re rooting for. But this one even destroys a child’s future.  There was a great deal of arguing about the ending with the studio heads but Polanski’s ending prevailed. No Hollywood ending for sure. 😢

Los Angeles swallowing up the valley basically came true.

An absolute masterpiece.

The family name "Mulray" is based upon former LA County water chief William Mulholland, for whom Mulholland Drive is named, and who built the aqueducts that transfer water from Owens Valley in Central California to Los Angeles.

Two things which contributed to the “credits at beginning//credits at end” are:
1. Studios used to have thousands of worker on staff, so the entire lighting department or entire costume department or entire sound department wasn’t listed because they worked on all (or most) of the films put out by that studio and were paid by the studio as regular employees. When the studio system changed, most of those permanent staff were let go, and film producers would hire a new staff for each film and paid the crew out of the money they raised for that particular project.
2. Unions in Hollywood put pressure on having each person in their union get credited, rather than the former system of only crediting the department heads or those who were more well known. Legal rules were put into place, so every person who painted sets, or put makeup on an actor, or set up lights, or was the caterer, or the financial accountant, or the company which contributed the cameras,  - all had to be credited. Since this meant a VERY long list which would take a lot of time, it became impossible to have that at the beginning which would be a detriment for the audience and ruin the atmosphere or mood which the film wanted to create. So sometimes, some credits remained at the beginning, but only for the major names (you can be sure actors and their agents made sure of their billing) with the end of the film being the place where the entire crew got credited.
 Also, doing credits was often an artistic process in itself. Some artisans became famous for their creative credit sequences, which often helped to set the tone for the film and suggest emotional levels using the credit sequences’ visuals, music, fonts, backgrounds, pacing and style to establish character, setting, time period or foreshadow elements to come. During the 1960’s, a great deal of attention was paid to opening credits (such as James Bond films); and some directors (such as Hitchcock) became famous for hiring specialists to create innovative opening credits.

Forget about it, Molly. It's just Chinatown

John Huston is also one of American film's great directors 1940- to 1989.

In the bed scene with Jake and Evelyn, Jake mumbles his disdain for Chinatown. He recounts how when he tries to help someone, inadvertently everything he does to help her leads that person getting hurt. Just this little intel on Chinatown foreshadows  what is going to happen later in the movie. It is a great screenplay with the classic film noir beats.

We had a spate of noir movies back in the 70’s thanks to remakes of Raymond Chandler’s novels like The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely starring Robert Mitchum. Love them all!

such a brilliant screenplay! two examples of foreshadowing- early on Jake mimics the gardeners accent, "yeah sure bad for the glass". the object in the pond are Cross' glasses. And when Jake and Evelyn are in the car in front of the house where Katherine is staying Evelyn slumps forward accidentally honking the horn foreshadowing her death later on
.

This is my all-time favorite movie so I'm always excited whenever someone reacts to it!

FYI Daniel Day Lewis modeled the voice of character Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood after John Huston (Noah Cross). One of the best lines and deliveries in any movie, “Of course, I’m respectable. I’m OLD. Politicians, ugly buildings, and WHORES all become respectable if they last long enough.”😂

I remember my first time watching this one, it renewed an interest in movies I thought I'd lost :) good to see it still has an audience

The farmer with the sheep who interrupted the water council meeting is Rance Howard whose sons would become famous Clint and Ron