Private Eye with a Heart of Gold What's the best way to get to know a private eye? By watching him solve a mystery, of course. (If you were going to say, "Go through his underwear drawer," you take...

The Awful Truth Evelyn Mulwray is a woman with a mysterious past… and it turns out it's not only a mysterious past, but an extremely sad, twisted, and horrible one. We wait for much of the movie...

"Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know"Noah Cross is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" (which is 1) a sick burn and 2) something Lady Caroline Lamb said about the poet Lord Byron. Shmoop: Feeding You Lit...

By all accounts, this guy gets a raw deal. (Nothing shouts "raw" like "your lungs full of saltwater and left to rot in a dry river bed.")Hollis has been a good guy all along, even though the local...

Escobar is smart—he's just not smart enough. He's the police lieutenant in charge of investigating Hollis Mulwray's murder, and a former colleague of Jake's (they worked together in Chinatown). H...

Yelburton plays it cool—as cool as you can be when your name contains the word "yell"—but he's covering up a crime against the public. He's the deputy chief of the water department who's in cah...

Mulvihill doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, but he's certainly the meanest. He's familiar with Jake Gittes, as they're both rival P.I.'s. The water company hires Mulvihill to guard t...

Ida Sessions is a "working girl"—i.e., a prostitute. Noah Cross and his collaborators hire her to pretend to be Evelyn Mulwray and to ask Jake Gittes to investigate Evelyn's husband, Hollis, for...

Someone must've hit the mute button on this character. We don't hear Katherine Cross say anything, but she's an extremely important part of the movie: she's the child born of incest by Evelyn and h...

This guy may look short…but he's deadly. Director Roman Polanski makes a surprise cameo as this nameless, knife-wielding thug. When Claude Mulvihill and the knife wielder catch Jake Gittes sneaki...

Kahn is one of the few characters in the movie who actually lived in Chinatown. Essentially, he's Evelyn's servant, attending to her, answering her door, and helping her escape attempt at the endâ€...

This guy doesn't exactly deal with his wife's infidelity with a stiff upper lip. We meet Curly at the very beginning of the movie, when Jake presents him with photographic evidence of Curly's wife'...

Bagby pretends to be on the farmers' side…but that's all a ruse. The farmers think that by promising to build a dam that will divert water to their farms, Bagby—the mayor of Los Angeles—is tr...

When Jake goes to investigate the Northwest Valley, and see if the water department's really irrigating orange groves out there, he finds his worst suspicions confirmed. As he drives down a road in...

Walsh hits minor character pay dirt: he isn't one of the most important characters in the movie, but he gets the biggest (and most famous) line. He's one of Jake's two assistants, the other being a...

Detective Loach (Dick Bakalyan) Loach assists Lieutenant Escobar with the official investigation into Hollis's murder. He encounters Jake when Jake goes to the reservoir (which turns out to be the...