Jake: Looks like you went quite a distance.
Evelyn: I was riding bareback
What's with all the horseplay in Chinatown? I've written before about the film's nods to The Big Sleep, but screening it again recently for class all I could see were horses.
This framed and tinted photograph on Hollis Mulwray's desk at the Department of Water and Power confirms for Jake Gittes that Evelyn is the real Mrs. Mulwray, as claimed.
And when he goes to her house, she emerges, flushed and in riding clothes, through the garden gate, and the suggestive exchange quoted above takes place.
But Jake's had his eye on horses the whole time. Here, following Hollis at the request of the fake Mrs. Mulwray, Gittes kills time waiting for him speak at a municipal hearing.
Espying the young boy who speaks to Hollis in the dry river bed.
His office, too, speaks to Jake's fondness for horseflesh--look behind him and Sofie.
Evelyn and horses aren't connected explicitly again until she comes to Jake's office and signs the
contract to make her employment of Gittes official. But check out that shot!
Her role as Jake's employer is quickly made manifest in the sequence where vengeful Oakies pursue him on horseback through an orange grove in the Valley.
Much later that same day, mixing business with pleasure. Note the horse in the painting above Evelyn's right shoulder--in place of an angel?
Jake's
retreat to his home--the only time we see him in his own domestic space--finds visual rhymes with the bed he just left as well as the
office in which he seems much more at home. He doesn't get much rest before
the final act in Chinatown, where he gambles on a long shot and loses.
