Chinatown influenced L.A. Confidential

Chinatown made the history of Los Angeles itself the subject of a detective story, and L.A. Confidential is the clearest inheritor: a crime that turns out to be a symptom of how the city was actually built and who took the profit. What both refuse is the clean public settlement. Chinatown ends with the man behind everything untouched and the detective made complicit by failing. L.A. Confidential does destroy its villain, and that is the difference worth stating: Dudley Smith is exposed and shot. What survives is the official version, in which he is buried as a hero and the department's reputation is protected. In both films the city's account of itself at the end is a lie.