Noah Cross
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Noah Cross is a fictional character and villain in the 1974 film Chinatown. He is portrayed by the legendary actor/director John Huston.
In the film, Noah Cross is the richest man in 1930s-era Los Angeles. He is a successful Irish-American property developer and an influential business and civic leader who, together with his partner and son-in-law, Hollis Mulwray, is also the co-owner of the city's water department.
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[edit] The character's importance to the film's plot
Although Noah Cross is only introduced midway through the film, his personal history and crimes — putatively occurring behind the scenes and leading up to the actual events depicted on screen — serve to form the background to the plot and play a decisive role in influencing its final outcome. In effect, he functions as a kind of malevolent puppet master within the film's complex narrative framework.
Cross and his associates hired a struggling Hollywood actress named Ida Sessions to impersonate his daughter, Evelyn Mulwray. Sessions had in turn hired a private investigator, J.J. Gittes, to spy on Hollis Mulwray in order to publicly disgrace him as a presumed adulterer by having him photographed in the company of a mysterious young woman. The movie's plot develops from Gittes's investigation into this hoax and his effort to learn how and why he was used to discredit Hollis Mulwray.
After finishing his work, Gittes is confronted in his office by the real Evelyn Mulwray, who threatens to sue the detective for libel. Gittes tells Evelyn that someone set him and her husband up because Hollis had found out that corrupt elements within the water department were dumping fresh water from the city reservoirs into the ocean. However, Hollis is found dead at the end of a runoff drain by the ocean before Gittes has a chance to meet and exchange information with him.
Upon learning that Noah Cross is Evelyn's father and had previously been Hollis Mulwray's business partner, Gittes arranges to meet with the old man at the Albacore Club, an exclusive country club for Cross' business partners and employees. One of Gittes' associates, Walsh, had previously taken photographs of Cross engaged in a heated argument with Hollis outside the Pig and Whistle tavern only a few days before Mulwray's mysterious drowning. Cross explains that the argument had been about his daughter, Evelyn, whom he dismisses as jealous about Hollis' affair and disturbed by his death. Cross then offers to pay Gittes a substantial reward if he can locate the young woman that Hollis had been seen and photographed with shortly before he died.
[edit] Gittes continues his investigation
Gittes leaves Cross and carries on with his investigation of the depleted city reservoirs. After a series of violent encounters and mishaps, Gittes is reunited with Evelyn Mulwray. He later uncovers a questionable mass buy-out of farmland in the San Fernando Valley by a shadow group of new owners affiliated with the Albacore Club who are using the names of recently deceased guests at the Mar Vista Rest Home to purchase property. Gittes and Evelyn return to her husband's vacant mansion where she tends to his nostril wound, and seduces him. She cautions him that her father is a very dangerous man and suggests that he may ultimately be the one responsible for all the suspicious goings-on in and around the city.
Gittes sneaks out of the mansion and secretly follows her to an isolated house where he spies Evelyn placating the very same young woman he had seen consorting with Hollis Mulwray just days before his death. Upon a closer view through the window, Gittes notices that the mysterious young woman is in fact a clearly vulnerable and perturbed teenage girl, and he perceives that Evelyn and the butler are holding the girl captive at the house while keeping her incapacitated with drugs.
Eventually, under Gittes' interrogation, Evelyn finally confesses the full truth to him: that the girl is in fact both her sister and her daughter; Cross raped her when she was in her early teens, and sent the girl away to hide his crime. Evelyn also tells Gittes that the bifocals found in the pond in the back of her house where Hollis was forcibly drowned did not belong to her husband. Gittes now deduces that it was actually Noah Cross who had murdered Hollis Mulwray and dropped his own bifocals in the pond during the struggle. Gittes also concludes that Cross subsequently hired him to locate the girl's whereabouts in order to facilitate a kidnapping of his misbegotten daughter/granddaughter. Gittes advises Evelyn to take the girl and leave the house immediately. He arranges to meet them at her butler's house in Chinatown later that evening.
When Escobar and Loach arrive at the mansion, Evelyn Mulwray and the girl are long gone. Gittes makes up a story that Evelyn must have suspected something was up before either of them could get there and had likely fled to her maid's house in San Pedro to avoid arrest. Escobar demands that Gittes accompany them to the maid's house. Gittes directs Escobar and Loach to the address of an old client, Curly, and requests that the police lieutenant allow him a brief moment alone with Evelyn before she is arrested. Escobar reluctantly obliges and Gittes entices Curly into helping him escape the lieutenant's custody by sneaking out in a car through the back alley behind his house.
[edit] Gittes' final confrontation with Cross
Having eluded Escobar and Loach, Gittes returns to the abandoned Mulwray mansion where he stages a dramatic confrontation with Noah Cross by telephoning and inviting him there on the pretext that he will turn the girl over to him. When Cross arrives Gittes accuses the old man of having murdered Hollis and of leaving his bifocals in the pond as evidence. Gittes also makes Cross aware of his newfound knowledge of the girl's true identity and origins. He had already guessed Cross to be the main culprit behind the shady land grab in the San Fernando Valley and connects this to the deliberate systematic wasting of the city's reservoirs in the midst of a drought. Having rendered the farmland arid and worthless by depriving it of irrigation, Cross had forced the farmers to sell their vast acreages to his cabal of crooked business partners for next to nothing.
Cross explains that he intends to develop his newly acquired properties in the valley by irrigating them with a water supply diverted from the city itself. He plans to do this through a new acqueduct and reservoir to be built with $8 million provided by the Los Angeles taxpayers at the behest of the city councilors who are soon to vote to pass a bond proposal in favor of the construction. Cross's plan is to conceal this scandalously fraudulent misuse of public funds by merely extending the legal boundaries of the city of Los Angeles proper to include the San Fernando Valley as well.
Gittes asks what the already wealthy and powerful Cross hopes to gain personally from planning and executing such an elaborate swindle. The old man's cryptic but emphatic answer is "The future, Mr. Gits! The future!"
When pressed to account for raping his own daughter, Cross replies, "I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gits, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of...anything!"
Out of the shadows, Cross' henchman, Mulvihill, appears with a gun trained on Gittes and promptly seizes the incriminating bifocals from him. Cross and Mulvihill compel Gittes to lead them to his planned rendezvous with Evelyn and the girl in Chinatown. When they run into the Escobar, who is just about to confront and arrest Evelyn for Hollis's murder, Gittes tells him that Cross is the real murderer, but the lieutenant refuses to listen. Cross, who has the entire LAPD in his pocket, is far too rich and powerful to go to prison; and the details of his nefarious scheme to steal the city's water supply to gain control of the San Fernando Valley are too complicated and insidious for Escobar to grasp.
Cross, backed up by the police, accosts Evelyn and attempts to take custody of his daughter/granddaughter, but she pulls a gun on him and shoots, grazing him on the arm. Evelyn frantically tries to escape with the girl by speeding away in her open-topped car but the police open fire. Gittes, who is handcuffed to Escobar, restrains the lieutenant's pistol arm; but the deputy Loach keeps firing after the car which, following the third shot, suddenly grinds to a halt as the girl's hysterical screams pierce the night air. The men rush to the stopped car to find Evelyn slumped over the steering wheel, having been killed by a bullet entering the back of her skull and exiting through her left eye socket. Feigning paternal concern, Cross now claims the newly orphaned, traumatized daughter for himself — literally stealing her away in his clutches as she sobs in despair — and Gittes is helpless to stop him.
[edit] Connotations of the character's name
In the wider context of the story, Noah Cross' rape of his daughter, Evelyn Mulwray, functions as a metaphor for his more extensive rape of the San Fernando Valley farmland and the Los Angeles water supply. Indeed, his first name is an ironic reference to the Biblical patriarch Noah who had likewise profited from a crisis involving the world's water supply. But instead of a flood, Noah Cross is a hydraulic despot who presides over a drought whose devastating effects on the community are egregiously worsened by the dumping of water from the city reservoirs. It is also worth noting that John Huston had played the role of Noah as well as voice of God in his own 1966 film, The Bible.
[edit] Assessment of the character in film history
Noah Cross is one of the most diabolical and enigmatic screen villains in the history of Hollywood cinema. On the surface, he appears a wryly charming and cynical old robber baron in the classic Cornelius Vanderbilt mold. But beneath this craggy, avuncular exterior, Noah Cross reveals himself as a cunning, ruthless and perverse sociopath whose money, power and shrewd deceptions are only surpassed by the far-reaching effects of his unremitting depravity. He is presented as an allegorical embodiment of amoral corporate greed and the insidious effects of crony capitalism poisoning the American Dream. Noah Cross ranks #16 on the AFI's list of the top 50 film villains of all time.
