Screen:

...The pace is methodical but not boring, and the cinematic workmanship is beautiful, without ever smacking of self-congratulation...

...Before a detective movie can transcend its genre, it must fulfill it...

...And Nicholson's Jake Gittes...

...But they must be introduced at a pace that leaves us never more than one step behind the detective and certainly never more than half a pace ahead of him...

...At least, that's what I think...

...Jake Gittes, still doing divorce work, takes on a client named Jake Berman...

...How timely...

...The plot pivots on Gittes's recognition of the woman to whom Berman is married...

...Was Faye Dunaway a fascinating femme fatale...

...The victim was Berman's partner and the killer might profit by the death...

...After thirty minutes, I wasn't leaning any further forward...

...Indeed, Harrison Ford, as the hapless Rusty Sabich, gives his best performance to date, but his achievement is like the nature of the man he portrays: slow, patient, meticulous, not wizardly, not grandstanding...

...This time there's a giant...

...They read the book, they already knew who done it, so why the devil was Pakula wasting their time by telling this retread with such care and attention to detail...

...Then it turns out that oil has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...

...In fact, they have accomplished exactly what the maker of The Two Jakes bungled: the step-by-step unfolding of a murder mystery and its solution at a pace and in a manner that keeps the viewer just abreast of the protagonists...

...This script doesn't give him the opportunities to gleam that he made the most of in Chinatown...

...We expect numerous complications in a detective story...

...Or was the killing calculated...

...The Two Jakes does not...

...If it was a case of temporary insanity, Gittes may lose his license for letting a madman loose...

...As much as Jack Nicholson's raffish charm or Faye Dunaway 's edgy sexiness, the cunningly executed plot compelled, teased, filtered, and rewarded the viewer's attention...

...So the book haunts its film adaptation as grimly as Chinatown haunts its sequel...

...One of the reasons it doesn't is that Robert Towne, screenwriter for both films, can't stop masticating his earlier success...

...Considering the chaos of the script, Jack Nicholson has done a surprisingly good job of directing...

...My hunch was implied in the first sentence of this review...

...According to the latest polls, only 142 American adults have not yet read the novel, Presumed Innocent (the Alaskan statistics aren't in yet...

...Some of the early camera placements are fussy, but Nicholson knows how to use dim lighting and cramped places to both sinister and romantic ends...

...Adaptors Frank Pierson (script) and Alan Pakula (script and direction) have done better than yeoman service in bringing the story of a prosecutor prosecuted (for the murder of his mistress) to the screen...

...Or consider the flutter of the judge's (Paul Windfield) fingers as he beckons an incompetent attorney to approach the bench...

...He misdirects the two female leads, Stowe and Meg Tilly, but works well with all the men except Farnsworth...

...There's another robber baron in the sequel, so inadequately played by lanky, gray-haired Richard Farnsworth that director Jack Nicholson has to stick in narration telling us that Farnsworth's character is really evil despite what we see on the screen...

...So Detective Jake must prove that Client Jake is a coldblooded killer...

...Illegal manipulation of public waterworks was at the heart of Chinatown's mystery...

...Gittes sets a trap for Berman's adulterous wife, a ploy meant merely to provide Berman the means for a speedy, cheap divorce...

...And, whether or not Rusty Sabich finally gets convicted (my lips are sealed for the sake of my 141 fellow virgins), Harrison Ford certainly got a bum rap from the jury of movie critics...

...So did the movie he's in...

...New characters are introduced and immediately dropped without affecting the story in any essential way...

...But, in this case, only the critics have been spooked, not the moviemakers...

...Still, this is recognizably Gittes, eleven years older, paunchier, shrewder, less hot-headed but with the fires inside only banked, not quenched...

...Windfield, Dennehy, John Spencer, Gretta Scacchi, the continually improving Raul Julia, and Bonnie Bedelia (whose frozen countenance periodically rippled by scorn and pain fascinated me) make up a superb supporting cast, and the man they're supporting isn't bad either...

...Numbingly behind...

...No one arches his eyebrows like Jack Nicholson and no one conveys, as he does, the semblance of a soused, kindly demon who has decided to guide you through hell rather than torment you there...

...Was there a capitalist buccaneer in Chinatown played by lanky, grey-haired John Houston...

...Yet it's his bottled-up, imploding character that carries the movie...

...The black, brown, and gold palette that has been cinematographer Gordon Willis's obsession for the last quarter of a century perfectly suits this tale of legal dealmakers who serve and betray each other while leaning back in leather chairs or walking down dingy corridors under fluorescent lights...

...Clues aren't just introduced...

...they are scat-ter-shot over the movie's landscape where they remain, never to be picked up...

...The Two Jakes has a good premise...

...Harvey Keitel creates a character who is at first racked with anxiety, then frightening in his willingness to use force, then finally and pathetically at the end of his rope...

...In a descending elevator, chief prosecutor Brian Dennehy rages at his deputy, Harrison Ford, and the monotonous thud-thud that marks the passing of each floor sounds like a metronome dully mocking the man's swelling fury...

...Most of the critics seemed to have watched the film while trying to finish the Times crossword puzzle in their laps...

...As they walk, they move in and out of shadows...

...Thugs beat Gittes to wrest an essential piece of evidence from him, but it turns out that Gittes would have surrendered the evidence gladly if only he had been clearly informed of its true significance, and the man inciting the thugs must have known of Gittes's potential willingness in the first place...

...Madeline Stowe has that function here but performs so blankly that the director has to put sunglasses or facial cream on her in order to lend her the sense of self-concealment that the magnificent Dunaway achieved with sheer acting...

...Nevertheless, those twists and turns worked while one saw the movie...

...Was there a dwarfish thug in the earlier movie...

...It is portentously hinted that an oil conspiracy is at the heart of the mystery...

...The Two Jakes accomplishes the unhappy miracle of putting the viewer both numbingly behind and contemptuously ahead of Jake Gittes...

...But there's also a weary finality in it: the judge, for reasons of his own, has been waiting for this particular prosecutor to make his inevitable mistake, and so this gesture succinctly marks the turning point in the movie's climactic trial...

...It's a hilarious gesture because it so beautifully conveys the judge's itch to strangle the idiot before him...

...How could Robert Towne, renowned in Hollywood for his intelligence and craftsmanship, have perpetrated this mess...

...But, since I went to the movie as a Presumed Innocent virgin, I can report that it is a perfectly self-sustaining organism...

...Keitel shows in his acting a grasp of dramatic development that Towne never shows here in his writing...

...I realized who she was sixty minutes before Nicholson had a glimmer...

...so Towne has tried to put oil piracy at the heart of Jakes's...

...But client Jake seems to go haywire and kills his wife's lover...

...RICHARD ALLEVAs in...

...He can scream for results until doomsday (i.e., the next election), but doomsday approaches at its own pace...

...Because its atmosphere of dread, doomed romance, and unfathomable corruption lingers in the memory long after the twists and turns of its plot have faded, Chinatown is a detective story fondly remembered as something more than a detective story...

...so do their motives and their perceptions of one another...

...Chinatown did...

...And contemptuously ahead...

...Everyone else in this picture gets at least one hotdogging acting opportunity, but for most of the movie Ford must sit and watch and quietly respond to the fits other people throw...

...And I'm not that bright...

...I leaned forward in my seat with anticipation...