SOURCE: "Fault Lines," in Film Comment, Vol. 26, No. 6, November-December, 1990, pp. 52-5, 57-8.

In the following essay, Horowitz analyzes Towne's career through The Two Jakes and reassesses the significance of Chinatown as "the lens through which all of his other films are judged."

Sixteen years have gone by since we first met Chinatown's Jake Gittes, the Los Angeles private eye who specialized in divorce cases, though he preferred the more delicate term "matrimonial work." By whatever name, Gittes' métier was still the sleazy but lucrative snooping on adulterers that his closest professional rival, Philip Marlowe, fastidiously eschewed. It has also been sixteen years since we met the doomed and beautiful Evelyn Mulwray, she of the anxious hunted look and the nervous habit of lighting up a cigarette when she already had one going. Mrs. Mulwray and her family had terrible secrets, and Gittes, regrettably, learned them all...