Chinatown is a 1974 neo-noir mystery film directed by Roman Polanski and written by Robert Towne. Set in 1930s Los Angeles, it stars Jack Nicholson as private investigator J. J. “Jake” Gittes, who is hired to follow Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer of the city’s Department of Water and Power, only to uncover a much larger conspiracy involving land, water, political power and family corruption. With Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray and John Huston as Noah Cross, the film combines private-eye storytelling with a deeply cynical portrait of Los Angeles history. Its atmosphere of heat, secrecy and moral rot helped make it one of the defining American films of the 1970s, and it remains one of the great modern examples of film noir.
The film was shot in and around Los Angeles, with additional material on Catalina Island, and its locations are central to the way it turns the city into a place of hidden power and buried violence. Although the title points to Chinatown, only the final sequence is actually set there, around North Spring Street near Ord Street, where the story reaches its bleak conclusion. Much of the film instead moves through older Los Angeles and its surrounding areas: Echo Park Lake, where Gittes photographs Hollis Mulwray; the dry riverbed at Big Tujunga Wash in Sunland; Pasadena and Brentwood for the wealthier residential world of Evelyn and Noah Cross; San Pedro and Hollywood for more everyday urban texture; and Catalina Island for the meeting with Cross. Together, these locations create a Los Angeles that feels sunlit but poisoned, built from civic buildings, dry water channels, old neighbourhoods, private estates and streets where the truth is always partly out of reach.
Millennium Biltmore Hotel
The Millennium Biltmore Hotel has appeared in many films, including The Omega Man, Chinatown, Rocky III, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters and many more.
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