One Hollywood legend says that the only script virtually every studio executive has ever read is Robert Towne's Chinatown. Often told as a joke to demonstrate the lack of creativity in the entertainment capital's business elite the legend also points out the power of Towne's work as one of the greatest pieces of screen literature ever produced.

Not only is Towne's script an illustrative example of condensed story-telling relying on intelligent delivery along with unexpected turns in plot and action, it is the basis for Roman Polanski's reworking of film noir in the early 1970s. So total was the creative effort surrounding Chinatown, in fact, it has subsequently been preserved in the National Film Registry while also impacting countless film scholars and movie aficionados alike who flock to the film's occasional screenings and to video store shelves to rent a copy and experience the transformative affects of great film art.

Perhaps the most enduring compliment I can offer the film is my interest in seeing it over-and-over again, each time with added enthusiasm and greater appreciation.

In some ways this repetition is almost necessary when piecing together the film's plot that seems, at first glance, to be rather dauntingly complex and unyielding. Yet the brilliance of Towne's work once again shows through because no single element of how the movie is organized is brought off without a reliance on chance encounters or a focus on blood, sex and violence, although these factors all play a role in the unraveling action.

In a circumstance of ever-broadening screen subjects through relaxed censorship practices and more mobile motion picture technologies since the late 1960s, Chinatown is a breath of fresh air. Within the overarching, trans-generic influence towards spectacles of sight and sound in the last 30 years the film's magic is the result of great writing, scene chewing performance, impressive design elements and steady direction, not the easy thrills of nudity, killing, mayhem and shock.

As a story Chinatown is either about water rights in Los Angeles or the detailed accounting of how innocence is destroyed by the hands of evil no matter the actions of any would-be hero.

Eschewing the first possibility for the second, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is our would-be hero and private investigator, formerly of the Chinatown beat with the LAPD, who primarily investigates adultery. Once approached by the wife of the Los Angeles water and power engineer to investigate her husband, Jake paints himself into a circumstance of intrigue and malevolence that's larger than any affair he ever could have imagined.

Oddly it seems the case involves a connection between the engineer, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), with an assortment of oddly timed run-off floods in a time of deep desert draught and an unknown blonde girl who appears to be his lover. When Jake realizes he was hired by an imposter, he seeks the engineer's real wife, Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), and learns of a conspiracy to horde water, develop arid farm lands and locate the future of Los Angeles County in the hands of Evelyn's father, Noah Cross (John Huston). Unknown to Jake, however, is the incestuous history of Evelyn and her father that has produced her sister-daughter, Katherine (Katherine Cross), and Mulwray's murder by his former business partner and father-in-law.

Through carefully manipulating the LAPD, avoiding Cross's thugs and trying to hold his emotions in check, Jake nearly manages to smuggle Evelyn and Katherine away to Mexico. Before he's able to ensure their safety, however, the imminent corruption of Los Angeles enfolds them leaving Evelyn and Katherine a charge of her father-grandfather who's interest is as incestuous as ever its was when first focused on Evelyn.

Complicated and deftly designed, Chinatown played to large audiences and won wide praise for its depiction of '30s era Los Angeles. Its Chandler-esque tone, formerly quite popular in the noir gangster and detective movies of the 1940s, contributed to a wholesale re-evaluation of older genres then quite popular in Hollywood. It also capitalized on a willingness of moviemakers and moviegoers to expand their palates of entertainment to include sordid stories without clear moral checkpoints and ethical boundaries.

Thus Jake is a flawed hero working along the margins of civilized society, eking out a life with little regard for the other lives upset through his investigations. No innocent heroine herself, Evelyn Mulwray is an updated femme fatale complete with circumstantial dangers of unknown depth and a history of lies and deception that both seduce and repel Jake as he struggles to the center of intrigue swallowing him whole.

These obvious connections between the film and its noir antecedents have been well commented on along with many other connections and differences over the last few decades. But because Polanski's film was shot in color, and because it's deliberation on Los Angeles is very nearly a revelation about the formation of modern civilization with all its seedy subtext and sacrifice, Chinatown is a reworking of the noir film that's affecting on at least three different levels at once.

It reminds us of previous films in the genre that also focused on the interplay of an ambivalent hero and an ever-shifting world. Such an intertext creates a resonance of Jake's journey because it's so much like the journey of other screen heroes. The similarity helps us identify him as being uniquely capable of dealing with confusion since he is witty, street smart and well suited to deal with his unusual circumstances.

The second affect of the film is the way it invokes nostalgia for the 1930s. With luscious costume and production design, a reliance on historically accurate details like winding clocks and its snapshot of Los Angeles as a near-boom time community along the borders of the Pacific Ocean, Chinatown is also the rendering of a city unlike any other.

This meditation on Los Angeles is the third main affect of the film with the cityscape seen moving through primitivism to modernity via irrigation and land development. Not only is this focus on a water-based economy to create Los Angeles, let alone Hollywood, central to the film, the struggle is at the heart of the film's perverse love affair. Without the backdrop of Los Angeles, and without its qualities that suggest birth and death simultaneously, Chinatown would be emptied of its conspiracy and the heft of its impact.

This impact is foisted onto the meaning of Chinatown as both a neighborhood in Los Angeles and as a metaphor for inscrutable evil inflicted on the world by amoral people. Metaphorically it describes the destruction of innocence in the jaws of evil and the inability of anyone to influence this seemingly natural law of experience. It is also a lens for the times in which the film was produced when so much dissatisfaction with official culture, from Vietnam to Watergate, was seen as the corruption of prevailing standards about truth and justice.

Somehow the term and location of Chinatown spoke to Robert Towne as something fascinating in the truest meaning of the word as being both attractive and repulsive. Coincidentally he was able to turn a likely historical interest in the life and times of William Mulholland, the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the early 20th century, into the first part of a trilogy about Los Angeles. The second part of the trilogy, The Two Jakes, was eventually produced with Nicholson reprising his role in 1990 but it failed to live up to the rather illustrious reputation of the original film.

Luckily we are left with the legacy of Chinatown to enjoy again and again even if its epic possibilities have been limited to just one film.