[5] Chinatown was released in the United States on June 20, 1974, to acclaim from critics, with praise for the narrative and screenwriting, Nicholson and Dunaway's performances, cinematography, and Polanski's direction.

[8][9][10] A sequel, The Two Jakes, was released in 1990, again starring Nicholson, who also directed, with Robert Towne returning to write the screenplay.

Gittes photographs Hollis in the company of a young woman and the pictures make their way into the Post-Record, exposing their apparent affair.

Gittes crosses paths with his former colleague, LAPD Lieutenant Lou Escobar, when Hollis's corpse is found in a reservoir.

A suspicious staff member calls Mulvihill, but Gittes and Evelyn escape him and his thugs and hide at her mansion, where they sleep together.

Evelyn leaves after an urgent phone call, and Gittes follows her to a house where he sees her comforting the missing girl.

At the Mulwray mansion, Gittes finds the servants packing up the house, and retrieves a pair of eyeglasses from the saltwater garden pond.

[12][13][14] Towne had originally hoped to also direct Chinatown, but realized that by taking Evans' money, he would lose control of the project's future and his role as a director.

It was the first part of Towne's planned trilogy about the character J. J. Gittes, the foibles of the Los Angeles power structure, and the subjugation of public good by private greed.

[22] Mulholland credits Fred Eaton, then mayor of Los Angeles, with the idea to secure water for the city from the Owens Valley.

[24] Author Vincent Brook considers real-life Mulholland to be split, in the film, into "noble Water and Power chief Hollis Mulwray" and "mobster muscle Claude Mulvihill",[20] just as Land syndicate and Combination members, who "exploited their insider knowledge" on account of "personal greed", are "condensed into the singular, and singularly monstrous, Noah Cross".

[25] Unlike the character of Mulwray, who was concerned about the dam in Chinatown, Mulholland's role in the disaster diverged from the events in the film.

In the movie, water is being purposely released in order to drive the land owners out and create support for a dam through an artificial drought.

[30] According to Robert Towne, both Carey McWilliams's Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article called "Raymond Chandler's L.A." inspired his original screenplay.

/ "As little as possible") from a Hungarian vice cop, who had worked in Los Angeles's Chinatown, dealing with its confusion of dialects and gangs.

Polanski was initially reluctant to return to Los Angeles (it was only a few years since the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate), but was persuaded on the strength of the script.

Robert Evans, never consulted about the decision, insisted that the offer be rescinded since he felt pairing Polanski and Fraker again would create a team with too much control over the project and complicate the production.

[41] Polanski was rigorous in his framing and use of Alonzo's vision, making the actors strictly adhere to blocking to accommodate the camera and lighting.

[12] This subjectivity is the same construction used in Francis Coppola's The Conversation in which the main character, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), appears in every scene in the film.

Jerry Goldsmith composed and recorded the film's score in ten days, after producer Robert Evans rejected Phillip Lambro's original effort at the last minute.

The water project it depicts isn't the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, engineered by William Mulholland before the First World War.

These echoes have led many viewers to regard Chinatown, not only as docudrama, but as truth—the real secret history of how Los Angeles got its water.

McGinnis asserted that after "confronting the web of evil perpetrated by Cross [...] Gittes is the Oedipus whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities which pure reason fails to see'".

The website's critical consensus reads, "As bruised and cynical as the decade that produced it, this noir classic benefits from Robert Towne's brilliant screenplay, director Roman Polanski's steady hand, and wonderful performances from Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway".

[49] Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" list, saying that Nicholson's performance was "key in keeping Chinatown from becoming just a genre crime picture", along with Towne's screenplay, concluding that the film "seems to settle easily beside the original noirs".

A prequel television series by David Fincher and Towne for Netflix about Gittes starting his agency was reported to be in the works in November 2019.

[68] Towne's screenplay has become legendary among critics and filmmakers, often cited as one of the best examples of the craft,[16][69][70] though Polanski decided on the fatal final scene.

He explained in a 1997 interview: "The way I had seen it was that Evelyn would kill her father but end up in jail for it, unable to give the real reason why it happened.

Towne retrospectively concluded that "Roman was right",[71] later arguing that Polanski's stark and simple ending, due to the complexity of the events preceding it, was more fitting than his own, which he described as equally bleak but "too complicated and too literary".