Characters / Chinatown

Characters found in Chinatown.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS

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J.J. "Jake" Gittes

Played by: Jack Nicholson

• Ambiguously Jewish: There are hints given in both films.
• Anti-Hero: He has no qualms over manipulating people to get what he wants, or beating people up who oppose him. Still, Jake has good intentions and wants to expose Noah for raping his own daughter as well as his plan to take control of the water supply as part of a real estate development scheme to drive farmers off from their land to build new homes.
• Dark and Troubled Past: His own past is less elaborated upon than Evelyn's, but his work in Chinatown prior to the start of the movie is treated as one. This is especially relevant in the scene where he remarks that Chinatown still bothers everyone who was assigned there.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's a master of this.
• Fatal Flaw: Jake doesn’t know when to quit. Despite him telling Fake Ms. Mulwray to “let sleeping dogs lie”, he doesn’t follow his own advice. This leads to Cross getting one up over him.
• Failure Knight:
  • Jake is quite smart, basically competent, and if he were handling a simple case or a simpler situation, then he might have succeeded, but in the end he confronts forces of commerce, economics, and political corruption bigger than he can comprehend or do anything about and just doesn't quite let go.
  • Incidentally, there's also the question of whether Jake's "successes" are a good thing. In the first scene, he provides photographs of a client's wife committing adultery in the park and consoling the husband. Later Jake seeks out his house as a way to get past Cross's goons, and he sees the wife with a visible black eye, implying that his regular joke of taking photographs of cheating couples is not quite as decent as he thinks it is.
• Guile Hero: While "hero" might be something of a stretch, the fact is that Jake is VERY good at making people slip up so he can wring info out of them, and has so many tricks up his sleeve he'd do Batman proud.
• Hardboiled Detective: At least he tries to assume this persona to hide the fact that he's very vulnerable, lonely, and bitter, and to cover up how truly powerless he feels, which he finally confronts at the end. Indeed, Jake's insistence on putting on that macho, wiseacre personality likely makes him harder to be trusted and taken seriously by both Evelyn and the police.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jake is a smartass detective with a Hair-Trigger Temper who is deeply insecure about the work he does. But he’s definitely got his heart in the right place when it counts even though it doesn’t work out for him.
• Would Hit a Girl: Slaps Evelyn repeatedly to get the truth out of her. When he comes to call in a favor from a man who hired him to find out if his wife was cheating on him, the wife opens the door sporting a huge black eye. In keeping with the Deliberate Values Dissonance, neither of these instances spark much outrage in-universe.

Evelyn Mulwray

Played by: Faye Dunaway

• Can't Spit It Out: Evelyn struggles many times throughout the film to communicate some of her discomfort to Gittes but never quite gets herself to admit it fully until it's too late. This is understandable on account of the trauma she experienced, and the social stigma of being not only a rape victim but being raped by her rich and powerful father and fathering a child of incest would make it difficult to confess to anyone, let alone to Gittes, who initially came across as a snarky snooping gumshoe with a sleazy profile.
  • The first time is when she and Gittes are eating in the restaurant and Gittes flat out asks what's going on, noting that he got his nose cut and would like to know why. Gittes calls for the car and is about to leave before Evelyn yells out his name in reflex before catching herself.
  • The second time is after they have sex, where Evelyn tries to communicate some of her unease about her father only to recoil when Gittes reveals he met him without informing her, warning him that Noah Cross is a very dangerous man.
  • The third time is right after Gittes tailed her to the house where she keeps Katherine and Gittes confronts her about kidnapping Mulwray's "girlfriend", only for Evelyn to state that she's her sister and being disappointed when Gittes walks away again.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: She gets so nervous that she lights a cigarette while her previous one is still burning.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Hers turns out to be that she was raped by her father and ran away at 15.
• Death by Irony: She gets shot through her flawed eye.
• Femme Fatale: Everyone thinks Evelyn is one of these. She is the exact opposite.
• Questionable Consent: In-universe. While Evelyn claims that she had an abusive, but consensual, sexual relationship with Noah, the audience and other characters understand that it was rape because she was too young to consent. The legal age back then was 16, and she is 15 years older than Katherine. Being a Manipulative Bastard, Noah probably did what most groomers do and convinced her that it was her fault.

Noah Cross

Played by: John Huston

• Big Bad: He's the corporate mastermind responsible for not only buying up the farmers' newly-drained land to control the water supply for his business partners but also raping his own daughter Evelyn Murray.
• Card-Carrying Villain: A particularly serious, realistic, and horrific example of this trope. He's fully self-aware of his wrongdoing, but he doesn't care.
  "I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING."
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Noah Cross, already the richest man in Los Angeles, renders vast farmlands arid by illegally dumping their irrigation water into the ocean, thus causing their prices to plummet to next to nothing. After forcing the farmers to sell their land to his cabal of corrupt business partners, Cross intends to develop his newly acquired land by irrigating it with the water supply diverted from the city itself through a new aqueduct and reservoir built from $8 million of taxpayer money. His only gain from this elaborate swindle is "The future!".
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Noah Cross is already the richest and most powerful man in Los Angeles; he gladly admits he has no idea of how much wealth he really has except that it's over $10 million^*Equivalent to $180 million in 2020 dollars, yet goes ahead with his plan to seize control of the water simply because it will make him even more rich and powerful. In his own words:
  Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat; what can you buy that you can't already afford?
  Cross: The future, Mr. Gits! The future!
• Dirty Old Man: He's someone in his senior years, and he turns out to be a pervert and a rapist.
• Evil Old Folks: Aside from being a greedy businessman who wants to steal the city water and make profits from the water, regardless of how the people manage themselves, he's also nasty enough to go possessive over his own daughter.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Just listen to John Huston's voice. Screenwriter Robert Towne once expressed that Huston was the second-best-cast actor in the film next to Jack Nicholson. Huston's performance, he claimed, elevated Cross above the portrayal in the script and made him truly memorable.
• Faux Affably Evil: This is the façade that Noah hides behind. He is genial and lighthearted throughout, even to his enemies but it only serves to highlight his utter inhumanity. Beneath, Cross is a living example of what a man is capable of doing if he had no moral scruples and no law to stop him.
• Gruesome Grandparent: Noah Cross ends up taking his granddaughter Katherine in after her mother Evelyn's death, clearly planning to rape her as he did to her mother, resulting in Katherine's birth.
• Hate Sink: Cross lacks any redeeming character traits. He’s unconscionably selfish and greedy, lacks any moral boundaries and is totally unapologetic about it, and is—most memorably and worst of all—an incestuous rapist and pedophile.
• Karma Houdini: Part of the Downer Ending of Chinatown is that Noah Cross gets away scot-free for his crimes and even takes Katherine, his daughter/granddaughter, away at the end. It's implied that he'll go on to molest her the same way he did his daughter.
• Meaningful Name: Noah Cross, who is trying to gain control of all the water in Los Angeles. Noah Cross's original name in the script was Julian, so someone on the team probably decided to change the name sometime during production in realization.
• Minor Major Character: He's the Big Bad of the film, but he gets around 10 minutes of screentime in total.
• Parental Incest: With Evelyn, resulting in the birth of Katherine. The ending all-but-says he's planning an upgrade to grandparental incest.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: He raped his daughter Evelyn, producing Katherine, who the ending implies is his next target.
• The Rich Want to Be Richer: He's already obscenely wealthy and powerful, but he still wants to control Los Angeles's water supply for the sake of being even more rich and influential.
• Rich Bastard: Definitely. Not only does he rape his own daughter, but he wants to swindle millions of dollars from Los Angeles taxpayers to seize control of the water supply.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: In the end, he is not threatened by Gittes's accusations of murder in front of the cops since he knows that he owns the police.
  "Lieutenant, I am rich, I am Noah Cross."
• Smug Snake: Cross is never once caught without a self-satisfied grin or condescending tone.
• The Sociopath: Noah will go down in history as one of the most heartless villains ever put to film. He is greedy, power-hungry, lecherous, utterly without any moral scruples, and believes everyone else is the exact same, just never in a position to realize it.
  • His lack of any guilt or shame in his crimes is palpable. When Gittes questions why he thinks Evelyn and Cross don’t have a relationship, Cross remarks he 'doesn’t blame himself.'
• Villainous Incest: One of several things that really helps to cement him as a thoroughly nasty villain.
• Visionary Villain: He tries to justify his crimes towards everyone's thirst and his attempts to become wealthy (despite already being one of the richest men in town) by claiming it's for "the future".
• Walking Spoiler: The only non-spoiler-related thing that can be discussed about Noah is that he is the wealthiest businessman in Los Angeles. Everything else about him including his relation to Evelyn Mulwray and her daughter Katherine Mulwray as well as his role as the true Big Bad are whited out since it reveals much of the plot.
• We Usedto Be Friends: Knew Hollis Mulwray for a long time but had a falling out. In fact, he killed him.

Lieutenant Lou Escobar

Played by: Perry Lopez

• Dirty Cop: YMMV, but depending on how you interpret Jake's "as little as possible" line and Lou’s reaction to it, Lou may either be just as traumatized by the events in Chinatown as Jake or implied to be complicit in the corruption of the city to ensure his job.
• Hero Antagonist: A detective just trying to do his job. In another noir film, he’d be the lead hero or at least more helpful to Jake. Here, he’s a major obstacle at best and winds up making Jake’s life much harder.
• Friend on the Force: To a point.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Was this at one point with Gittes before their relationship soured following the situation in Chinatown.
• Jerkass Has a Point: His misreading of the entire situation is perfectly understandable once you look at the events from his limited perspective. He even does let Jake off the hook way more than you’d expect if they didn’t have history.
• We Used to Be Friends: Seems to have a begrudging sense of camaraderie with Gittes due to their time working in Chinatown together.

Hollis I. Mulwray

Played by: Darrell Zwerling

• Being Good Sucks: Stands up to his corrupt father-in-law to stop the dam project, which gets him killed.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: The farmer thinks he's trying to steal their water. He was actually trying to stop Noah Cross from stealing it for his own ends. Then his reputation gets ruined posthumously when he's framed as an adulterer.
• Meaningful Name: Hollis Mulwray" is derived from William Mulholland, the name of one of the men involved in the real events which the film fictionalizes (see Very Loosely Based on a True Story) and who also gave his name to a famous road in California.
• Mistaken for Cheating: His meeting with Katherine get mistaken for this by Gittes, and the photos are used to smear him.

Claude Mulvihill

Played by: Roy Jenson

• Dirty Cop: Gittes strongly implies that Mulvihill was one during his time as sheriff of Ventura County. In their first scene together, Gittes mentions that when Mulvihill served (during Prohibition) "the rumrunners landed hundreds of tons of booze on the beach and never lost a drop," hinting that he was on the take.
• The Dragon: The most consistently encountered or Cross's thugs.
• The Heavy: A large, burly enforcer for Cross and the water department conspiracy.
• Terse Talker: Not very emotive or talkative. Not that his job requires it much.

Ida Sessions

Played by: Diane Ladd

The fake Evelyn Mulwray.

• Disposable Sex Worker: She's a prostitute who ends up getting used and killed.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Despite only appearing in the film onscreen and alive once — convinces Gittes to spy on Hollis Mulwray and thereby sets the plot into motion.
• Waiting for a Break: Gittes finds a SAG card in her wallet at her murder scene and her impersonation of Evelyn could be considered an “acting gig.”

Katherine Mulwray (MAJOR SPOILERS)

Played by: Belinda Palmer

• Child by Rape: She is this, due to Noah Cross's Parental Incest on Evelyn Mulwray when she was 14.
• The Voiceless: You could count the number of times she speaks onscreen on one hand.
• Walking Spoiler: Her very existence reveals the whole "rape" aspect of Evelyn's story.

The Man with a Knife

• Creator Cameo: Roman Polański himself plays the role.
• No Name Given: He never gets a specific name to identify himself by.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Doesn't do much physically onscreen, but given his role as an enforcer for Cross, he probably is deceptively tough for his size.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Has a small scene early on and another very brief appearance about halfway through. He’s the one who gives Gittes the iconic nose injury. Also prompting him to further investigate out of spite.

Detective Loach

Played by: Richard Bakalyan

• Friend on the Force: Initially. He tries to get Gittes out of trouble.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Escobar's partner with little characterization beyond that. He shoots and kills Evelyn.
• Smug Snake: Once he begins to suspect Gittes of murder. He begins to twist the knife in Gittes when he can.
• Volleying Insults: Plays this game with Gittes often.

Kahn

Played by: James Hong

• Undying Loyalty: Goes above and beyond the call of duty as a butler to Evelyn.

Curly

Played by: Burt Young

• Chekhov's Gunman: The fact that he cannot afford to pay Jake for his services plays a big role later on.
• Domestic Abuse: Curly, the client who meets Gittes in the opening scene, is revealed to have beaten his adulterous spouse. When Gittes redirects Lopez and Escobar to his house, the door is opened by his wife who sports a prominent black eye. When Curly introduces Gittes, his wife sneers in anger that she knows exactly who he is.