They're pulling Hollis Mulwray's dead body out of the reservoir…. Evelyn says Hollis isn't there, and they have iced tea together.

Technically, she's an ally in the case, and she agrees to hire him to investigate her husband's death—but she's also suspicious and seems to know more than she's willing to reveal. When Jake comes to, Evelyn's looking over him at the farmer's house (the farmer's called her). The cops show Jake that they've found the pictures of Hollis that Jake took for Ida when she was pretending to be Mrs. Mulwray. (Source). He says that she's keeping her husband's mistress captive, but Evelyn denies it.

When they arrive on the scene in Chinatown, the cops have already tracked Evelyn down.

Curly agrees, but for payment.

Evelyn tells him her father is deeply crazy and dangerous, and says it's possible he's the one behind all this, including the death of her husband. We don't get to see this part—if it even happens. Things get even more complicated when Hollis is found drowned in a city reservoir—a "suicide" that's really a murder—and the woman who claimed to be Evelyn Mulwray turns out to have been an impostor hired by someone who wanted to frame Hollis. Hollis's real wife, the actual Evelyn, has already threatened to sue Jake for investigating her husband without her request. Jake places a stopwatch under the tire of Mulwray's car. Water is sort of an unusual thing to steal.

The phone rings again and this time the voice gives Jake an address where he can meet Ida.

Instead of a two-car garage and 2.2 children, it's incest babies and murder.

Right? Film noirs also often involve a complicated plot, like in The Big Sleep, but Chinatown amps this up too, using a plot that's extremely intricate but also grounded in historical fact.

Noah's secretly stealing water by misappropriating it and letting it run down channels and aqueducts at night. It's also a state of affairs in which it's impossible to comprehend what's going on.

Chinatown basically offers a first person limited perspective narrative—we know everything that Jake knows, but nothing more.

After several brilliant thrillers made in Europe in the early 1960s (“Knife in the Water,” “Repulsion”), he came to California and had an enormous success (“ Rosemary’s Baby,” 1968).

People lower down on the economic scale, like the prostitute Ida Sessions, end up getting used (and/or killed). Evelyn talks to her and gives her a pill, which she tries not to take, before finally agreeing. Evelyn claims she was having affairs too.

When he discovers that water is being stolen, we discover it at the same time, and when Jake learns that awful incestuous truth about what Noah did to his daughter, we learn it too.

The plot is based in part on real events that formed the California Water Wars, in which William Mulholland acted on behalf of Los Angeles interests to secure water rights in the Owens Valley. The cops are there, which would seem fortunate, but they won't listen to Jake when he tries to tell them that Noah's a criminal.

Tauris: 2007. Then he thinks she’s hiding her husband’s mistress. We don't see anyone achieving their romantic aspirations in this movie—no aspiring Hollywood actors or L.A. new age entrepreneurs. He says he still thinks she's hiding something and drives away.

He's also misusing the nourishing power of water by hiding on his own land instead of letting it go to the people who are meant to have it. The violence in Chinatown elevates it to a PG, and the occasional F-bombs kick it up to a PG-13.

When Jake gets back to his car, he sees someone has put a campaign flier on his car, urging him to prevent L.A. from dying of thirst, voting to approve the engineering project to bring water to the city. Chinatown: Plot Overview | SparkNotes Jake Gittes, a former cop who now specializes in divorce investigations, meets a woman pretending to be the wife of Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer of the … It's a healthy, pretty place—it's La-La Land. His performance is key in keeping “Chinatown” from becoming just a genre crime picture -- that, and a Robert Towne screenplay that evokes an older Los Angeles, a small city in a large desert.