After all the stylish cinematography and the 1930s cars and costumes, the one thing about Chinatown that most people remember is the jaw-dropping final line. As cop Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) watches Noah Cross (John Huston), a powerful figure guilty of murder (among other things) walk away, another detective (Joe Mantell) quips, "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." It's terse, shocking, and sums up a big message of this Roman Polanski film — that people with high status can get away with anything. It's also not how the movie was supposed to end, at least not according to the film's screenwriter, Robert Towne. He wanted a "happy" ending, with Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) killing Cross — her father, and the father of her daughter, Katherine.
Polanski couldn't hear any of that — he needed the villain to win. Producer Robert Evans sided with Polanski, so he got his way: Evelyn dies, Cross lives, and he strolls away with Katherine. As for that final line of summation, Polanski jotted down some notes on the night he needed to film the scene, handed them off to the actors, and told them to "fashion it" to the way their characters talked. They winged it, and it worked. (Towne later said that Polanski "was right about the end.")
