In post-war Los Angeles there is an incriminating wire recording of a tryst that isn't supposed to be fatal. It is recorded by LA private detective J.J. "Jake" Gittes for his client: real estate developer of B&B; Homes "Jake" Berman, to 'incriminate' Berman's 'unfaithful' wife Kitty who is having an affair in the Bird of Paradise Motel in Redondo Beach with Berman's own real estate business associate Bodine.Berman shoots Mark Bodine in cold-blood as he flees into the motel's bathroom. In the tape recording, a mysterious reference to Katherine Mulwray between the two adulterers stirs up memories of the past for Gittes. (Katherine Mulwray, the blonde teen aged daughter of the earlier film's tragically-killed heroine Evelyn Mulwray, Jake's former client and lover, was sired by incestuous rape by her tycoon father Noah Cross.) It is revealed that Gittes has been set up in the murder-for-profit scheme. The murder cannot be considered justifiable homicide because Berman deliberately killed his partner-he had a gun conveniently planted under a chair delivered to the room-in order to commit premeditated murder of Bodine, a capital crime.For business reasons, partner Bodine's will excludes his sexpot widowed wife, Lillian Bodine and named "surviving partner" Berman the sole beneficiary of B&B; Homes' enormously profitable real estate business (tract housing in San Fernando Valley). Her attorney Chuck Newty states that she is entitled to her husband's wealth if the murder could be proven to be premeditated. Did Berman plan the murder with his wife Kitty in order to collect money from the deceased partner's share? If true, this would also make Gittes an unwitting accomplice to murder.During convoluted developments in the plot, Gittes discoveres that Berman's tract housing sub development, located in an orange grove (the same irrigated location that Gittes visited in the original film), is also being surreptitiously drilled for its vast underground resources by greedy oil baron Earl Rawley, Bodine's business associate. In a preliminary court public hearing regarding the recording, the tape is played, but the evidence is obviously tampered with by Gittes to hide Berman's cold-blooded guilt and to protect Mrs. Berman. Red-haired Kitty is actually the elusive blonde Katherine Mulwray- which Gittes figures out when he realizes that she dyed her hair red. Through various legal and title documents, Katherine is shown to be the original owner of the orange grove and of the mineral rights to the subdivision land, but is forced to sign over a quit-claim deed to the land only to criminal nightclub owner Michael 'Mickey Nice' Weisskopf, Berman's gangster associate, on July 17, 1946.Bodine was blackmailing Berman about the real identity of his wife, threatening to expose her if she didn't sign over the mineral rights-and Bodine was also, as Berman jealously admitted, engaged in a real affair. That was the real motivation in killing Bodine. Gittes perjures himself in court to protect the daughter of the woman that he was unable to protect. Berman also divulges to Gittes that he is terminally ill (with advanced syphilis viewed on X-rays and under a microscope, unsuccessfully treated with radium implants which are also causing cancer)-but has not told his wife Kitty about his condition. To ensure that she would definitely inherit his real-estate fortune (his intention all along)-he deliberately and suicidally blows himself up and ends his life in one of the development's tract homes by lighting a cigarette in the volatile, natural gas-filled environment after a shaky earthquake.In the final scene, Gittes speaks to Kitty/Katherine about their mutual pasts as she leaves his office, in the final line: "It (the past) never goes away" (Jake's belated answer to her earlier question: "Does it ever go away, the past?").
Where does the movie take place?
Los Angeles