10 Brilliant Movie Endings That Give You The Finger
3. Chinatown
1974's Chinatown boasts one of cinema's ultimate feel-bad endings, which confirms it as one of the bleakest films Hollywood has ever made.
In this brilliant Neo-Noir, private investigator JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson) tries to uncover a conspiracy involving the water supply of Los Angeles. After a complicated investigation, he and his love interest Eve Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) work out that Mulwray's father, Noah Cross (John Huston), is behind everything and he's killed in order to gain control of the city's water.
It gets even worse. It turns out that Mulwray has a daughter, Katherine (Belinda Palmer), and the father of the baby... is Noah. Not only is Noah a murderer, he's also been incestuously abusing his own daughter, confirming him as one of cinema's most purely hateful villains.
A more conventional movie would've allowed Gittes and Mulwray to defeat Noah once and for all, this one concludes with Evelyn being killed by police, Katherine being handed back to her father/grandfather and Noah getting away with absolutely everything. As a devastated Gittes is led away, one of his associates tells him "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."
This is one of cinema's earliest and most devastating endings to feature evil winning. We often go to the movies to see the good guys win but here, we got something more tragically realistic. Even now, fifty years later, powerful people are frequently getting away with terrible crimes - lest we forget, the current US President is a convicted felon.