Writer Robert Towne's Los Angeles in the thirties is a parched landscape of corruption just waiting to be washed clean by a flood down the concrete L.A. River. Flashing his poetic license, director Polanski borrows “Chinatown” less for a setting than for a state of mind. Jack Nicholson is the private eye whose sleepy gaze unravels layers of private depravity behind a public waterworks scam involving gentleman-farmer John Huston and his skittish daughter Faye Dunaway. There are echoes of L.A. lore here, but Chinatown is pure fiction. If Nicholson's J. J. Gittes is the Son of Sam (Spade) or even Philip (Marlowe), Dunaway's Mrs. Mulwray and her dad more likely crawled out of James M. Cain's moral gutter. We even sense Nathanael West's angel looking over Polanski's shoulder. Ah, yes, Los Angeles of old, with its underground arteries of greed and lust. Forget it, Jake. It's Blade Runner.