SAN FRANCISCO NOIR
Location filming advances the action while making history.
There’s something about seeing places you know first-hand turn up in the movies. It’s a connection that only the viewer can appreciate.
While watching Disney’s The Parent Trap (the first one with Hayley Mills), I suddenly recognized the stretch of Commonwealth Avenue in the rear window of the car taking one of the twins to her mother’s home in Downtown Boston. There’s also a scene when she gets out of the car filmed at the corner of Commonwealth & Berkeley, a few doors down from where we lived (the 11-story Haddon Hall, Boston’s first high-rise designed by architect J. Pickering Putnam in 1895, is in the background).
Hayley Mills and Maureen O’Hara at the Boston Public Garden.
There’s also a scene with mother and daughter in the Boston Public Garden, another familiar spot. The movie was released in 1961, the same time our family was living in Boston, so the timing was right.
All this is an introduction to a post about San Francisco Noir by Nathaniel Rich, a book of film noir favorites based in San Francisco. There’s a brief little write-up on a familiar landmark that appears in each film.
It’s a smart little guidebook published in 2005 by Rich, who enlivens your viewing pleasure with the background he provides on some of the locations. It’s important to note that, while having a personal connection to a building or place is great, just having a little history helps.
Here are some examples from San Francisco Noir:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy.
“Cinematographer Mark Chapman shot the the scenes on the streets of San Francisco with a hidden camera so that the crowds on Market Street and the people walking past City Hall are unaware they are being filmed. It’s a measure of the film’s success in creating a mood of paranoia that we mistake these innocent San Franciscans for man-slurping aliens.”
The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth.
The Steinhart Aquarium is one of the San Francisco attractions used in this movie.
“Mike and Elsa declare their love for each other and embrace, kissing for the first (and last) time. Yet even in this, the film’s most tender moment, Welles reminds us in no subtle way of Elsa’s sinister intent. The camera moves from the kissing couple to the tanks behind them, where a parade of piscine grotesqueries float by: a Paleozoic sea turtle, groupers the size of hippos, and a fat, writhing octopus, each beast more monstrous than the last. Mercifully, a group of giggling schoolchildren jolts the couple from their creepy embrace.”
Dark Passage (1947). Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall.
San Francisco’s Malloch Apartment Building, built in 1937, is the scene for some of the action in this one. (The film also features a great shot of Bogey riding a cable car.)
“The building’s most remarkable feature, however, is the elevator that Bogart rides in Dark Passage. It can be accessed through a silver reflective door located in the lobby atrium. The frosted glass elevator shaft is exposed to the street and is backlit, so that you can see the elevator cage rising at night, as if through liquid silver.”
The Lineup (1958) Eli Wallach, Robert Keith.
The Steinhart Aquarium turns up in this one, too, but it’s the Sutro Baths that became the perfect example of a feature film capturing history. Conceived in 1896, the Baths consisted of a giant collection of swimming pools that could once serve more than a thousand swimmers with grandstands that held thousands more for carnivals, festivals, and swimming championships.
“When the Baths’ novelty wore off in the 1950s, they were transformed into a single gargantuan ice-skating rink, and enjoyed a brief prosperity in this new incarnation. It again became a popular destination for schoolchildren, romantic teens, and, as it appears in Don Siegel’s The Lineup, a safe place to pass fat bags of uncut heroin, smuggled from the Orient, to evil crime bosses in wheelchairs.”
After reading about all the area landmarks used in the many epic films made in San Francisco, I only wish more film noir could have been made in the city of Boston. (The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a film made in 1973, did have a scene where Robert Mitchum enjoys the performance of ice hockey great Bobby Orr at a Bruins game at Boston Garden.)