Check the back shelves of your video store for the moldering remains of films that want to be
Chinatown. Robert Towne's Oscar-winning screenplay for that 1974 crime classic, starring Jack Nicholson as private eye Jake Gittes, used a 1930s water scandal to track corruption in the City of Angels and reflect the moral compromises of the Watergate era in which the film was made. Piss-poor imitators, including
Mulholland Falls and
The Two Jakes, a
Chinatown sequel, were clobbered both critically and