In the opening frames of Roman Polanski's Chinatown we see a series of blowups of black-and-white still photographs of explicit sexual acts between an unidentified man and woman. The photographs were taken, we learn quickly, by private investigator Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) who had been hired by a client named Curly, the justly suspicious and now unquestionably cuckolded husband of the girl in the pictures. Curly struggles to contain his grief and rage by munching on the Venetian blinds in Gittes' office. The photographs establish the moral anarchy of the film, an immoral climate in which, as the monstrously corrupt Noah Cross (played by John Huston) puts it to Gittes near the end of the film, "most people never have to face the fact that given the right time, and the right place, they're capable of anything." The photographs also tell us something about the sort of detective Jake Gittes is. He does divorce work. He is more of a gumshoe than Philip Marlowe, that most famous of movie detectives (though we should keep it in mind that there have been many Philip Marlowes—seven in all—ranging from Bogart's romantic and charming tough guy in The Big Sleep to Elliott Gould's softhearted patsy in Altman's The Long Goodbye and Robert Mitchum's brooding, melancholy loner in Farewell My Lovely); and though Gittes dresses better, his jokes are cruder and his clientele is more than a few steps below the Sternwoods of The Big Sleep. But the incriminating photographs in the opening