MOVIE REVIEW : Everything’s Jake

“The Two Jakes” (citywide) may be the only movie in memory with a prerequisite: Before seeing it, see “Chinatown”--again or for the first time.

“I don’t want to live in the past,” Jack Nicholson’s detective, J.J. (Jake) Gittes, says fervently. “I just don’t want to lose it.” Well, lose Jake’s “Chinatown” past and you cut yourself off from “The Two Jakes’ ” deepest meaning.

Frankly, it’s almost impossible to judge how “The Two Jakes” would seem to someone who had never seen “Chinatown,” since once you’ve seen that classic it’s with you inextricably. I’ve seen it probably once a year since 1974. The best I can say is that the intricate weave of Robert Towne’s “Jakes” screenplay stands on its own, but with nothing like the richness it will have for “Chinatown” veterans.

That past makes the elegiac “Jakes” funnier, deeper, even more evocative. It reinforces its great theme, the “development” of Los Angeles and the price tag for that “progress,” a theme planned to stretch across three films. The third seems absolutely essential now after the riches of “Jakes.”

In “Chinatown,” Roman Polanski was the perfect conduit for the edgy, dangerous sensuality of ‘30s Los Angeles; director Jack Nicholson’s very American sensibilities may be just right for the brash, brighter postwar section of the trilogy.

The story pulls Gittes back where he doesn’t want to be, to his memories of “Chinatown’s” mesmerizing Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), whose life he couldn’t, finally, protect. (In “Jakes,” David Keith’s hard-nosed cop, Loach, is the son of the policeman whose single shot killed Evelyn in the presence of her 16-year-old daughter, Katherine.) A wire recording Jake makes at the scene of an illicit love affair mentions Katherine Mulwray’s name, and Jake, the good detective, is off to search for this fragile icon of his memories.

It’s a briskly challenging plot, probably easier than “The Big Sleep,” the high-water mark in tangled detective stories, but only slightly. The difference is that there’s the sense of something valuable at the bottom of “The Two Jakes’ ” mystery; the vision of a city being raped a second time in the name of progress.

“Jakes” has its second-stage villain too, oil baron Earl Rowley (Richard Farnsworth.) Quite understandably, he’s not the towering figure that John Huston’s Noah Cross was--we will not see Huston’s kind on screen again. Also, Cross’ sins were sexual as well as financial; we see only the business side of Rowley. Huston made you believe Cross’ pure, genial pan-amorality. There’s something intrinsically decent about Farnsworth that keeps Rowley from being a true monster.

The film opens with the same punch to a husband’s pride as ‘Chinatown” did. It’s 1948, and postwar euphoria is in the air. Jake Gittes’ investigation business has prospered since the bloody ending of that story some 11 movie years earlier. He’s now a 6-handicap member of a country club and an unpersuasively engaged man, while the husband receiving the bad news of his wife’s infidelity is a very rich real-estate developer. He and Jake share identical two-tone shoes and even the same name; the client is Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), and it’s his wife, Kitty (Meg Tilly), who’s soon to be surprised at the Bird of Paradise Motel in Redondo Beach.

As the Jakes commiserate, a small earthquake (not the last temblor in “Jakes,” either) shakes Gittes’ low, Moderne offices. Suddenly you realize the scene’s peculiar power: Except for those that are about earthquakes, none of the slew of movies that have tried so hard to capture the mood of Los Angeles have faced this essential fact of life here--you cannot even trust the ground under your feet.

That feeling of instability may lie so deep it’s almost subliminal, but it’s there, certainly perceptible to a writer who picks up emotions and motivations as seismically as Towne. He’s made these shocks and aftershocks part of the fabric of the film, a weave of facts and memories caught so precisely that we can feel life in the Los Angeles Basin just at the end of the Second World War.

Towne serves up the pleasant and the venal with equal relish; angora sweaters and anti-Semitism; lone oil wells dotting neighborhoods like tireless dunk ‘em birds and “The Whistler” coming out of a Hudson convertible’s radio; country clubs and G.I. tract homes where neither Jews nor Mexicans need apply; old Pasadena influence and up-and-coming gangsters.

The ruminative narration was reportedly written by Nicholson and laid on last. It’s serviceable and even helpful; only in a few places of metaphor overload does it sound as though Nicholson had been watching too much Edgar Ulmer or listening to too much of Joe Frank’s Work in Progress. Clearly, it ain’t Robert Towne, but t’will serve.

It is, in any event, a lovingly assembled cast in a brilliantly detailed production, with special notice to Vilmos Zsigmond’s haunting cinematography, which seems somehow to have captured the light as it was, pre-smog. By now Nicholson owns J.J. Gittes, and he has thought carefully about the experiences that shaped Jake over the last 11 years. They’re all there for the reading--in his face, his comfortably thickened body, in his fleeting look of melancholy.

There are layers and layers, too, to Harvey Keitel’s beautifully detailed work as Jake Berman, and an absolutely perfect performance by Meg Tilly as the serenely beautiful Kitty. Madeleine Stowe is hilariously good as the angora-wearing widow. It’s wonderful to see James Hong’s Khan out of servant’s livery and into his own nursery garden, to see Perry Lopez’s remarkably fair Captain Escobar, there to balance David Keith’s perfect louse, Loach, and to revel in Eli Wallach’s smoothie, Cotton Weinberger, who may just recall Jerry Geisler.

And as for the optimistic thought that there will be a final chapter, it cannot come a moment too soon.