The Two Jakes

“They say money makes the world go round. But sex was invented before money.”

A voice on a recording drags Los Angeles private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) back to a case he never closed, just as a routine job from a developer named Berman (Harvey Keitel) turns into a shooting. Nicholson directs and plays Gittes again, a war veteran who sells divorce work, now caught between oil beneath the city and a lover's killing. Gittes keeps asking questions, and the old Chinatown case keeps asking them back.