film The Naked City

The Role of Location in Film Noir Movies Brian Hollins Independent Scholar

Just as the war years cast a gloom over the country in the 1940s and into the 1950s so, too, did Hollywood, producing pictures with a decidedly darker tone. A new genre or style, soon to be termed Film Noir, came about. These films were not so much entertainment as social studies exploring the gritty seamier side of society. Usually B movies, their budget constraints pushed directors to use more exterior locations in order to reduce costs. But there was a positive to this; location shooting offered creative opportunities to enhance the storytelling not possible within the confines o f a studio or backlot. By simply stepping outside the studio walls the 1940s moviemakers swept aside the claustrophobia inherent in m ost 1930s Hollywood productions, creating a new experiential universe for their audience.

I host a movie location blog, reelsf.com, presenting Then and Now locations from movies set in San Francisco, many o f them classic film noir. The site, with hundreds o f locations, lets readers calibrate the changes in the city over the past century, at the same time vicariously enjoying the sins of fictional citizens from the past. Compiling and comparing Then with Now images led to a realization that the impact o f location footage was often greater, sometimes in ways unexpected, than its original intended contribution, a synergism that personalized and enhanced the viewing experience. This article explores this theme with the help o f captures1 from noir movies o f that period.

The expression “terroir” describes the sense of place that a vineyard can impart to its wines by way of distinctive aromas and flavors. In much the same way locations can represent the terroir o f a movie. Consider, for example, The Third Man.2 If ever a sense o f place permeated a movie, this is it. Director

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Carol Reed's masterpiece, arguably the best film noir o f all, was filmed in Vienna not long after the war ended, the perfect setting for Graham Greene's tale o f mystery and intrigue about Holly Martins' search for his old friend Harry Lime. Reed employed quintessential high-contrast noir lighting throughout, both above ground where the bruised and rubbled city paralleled Martins' realization that Lime was no longer the fine fellow he used to know and below, during a chase in the city sewers, a metaphor for Lime's adopted underworld activities. (Figs. 1 and 2) Reed also made much use o f “dutch angles,” off-kiltering the camera to add a disorienting effect. (Fig. 3) Appropriately influenced by German Expressionism the tilt, harsh light, deep shadows and hosed-down glistening streets synergized into unforgettable atmospheric images.

Fig. 1 Classic noir lighting in The Third Man

Fig. 3 “Dutch angles” disorient the viewer

Locations were often used to heighten suspense or fear. Viewers who would never go to potentially dangerous urban neighborhoods at dead o f night find themselves there while watching a noir movie, as in the stalking scene in The Sniper.3 We quickly learn that social misfit Eddie Miller's unhappy childhood with an abusive mother has left him with a deep-seated hatred o f women. His response to any perceived slight is to target the lady in question. And so pulses quicken and we fear for one of his victims as he stalks her through the menacingly dark streets and alleys of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. (Fig. 4) The foreboding shadows trumpet her coming fate and we want to call out, as if to warn her; such is the location's dramatic impact. There are many more examples throughout noir, as in Bom to Kill,4 when the naive Mrs. Kraft is dropped off by a cab at the westernmost edge of town somewhere in San Francisco's Outer Sunset for a rendezvous with a killer. (Fig. 5) The clammy fog wafting across the desolate sand dunes sets the tone; it seems to migrate from the screen, permeating the audience and inducing clammy palms amongst the impressionable.

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Fig. 4 Stalking a victim in The Sniper

Fig. 5 In a lonely place in Bom to Kill

Locations can also bring about a psychological response that can draw us into the moment. In The Lady from Shanghai5 there's an unsettling scene in which George Grisby, a borderline paranoiac, offers $5,000 to the drifter Michael O'Hara if he will kill somebody. “Who, Mr. Grisby?" brogues O'Hara, "I'm particular who I murder." The startling reply? "It's me!" Director Orson Welles, who played the O'Hara role as well, carefully chose this location, filmed in Acapulco. The characters step out onto a lookout jutting high above the rocky shore. (Fig. 6) As Grisby delivers the fateful words our gaze is directed down and past him to the rocks and the swirl far below. (Fig. 7) Beads o f sweat on Grisby's brow, coruscating reflections on the water and a dizzying vertiginous perspective inflict the same surprise and unease upon us as did his words on O'Hara.

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Fig. 6 The lookout in The Tadyfrom Shanghai

Fig. 7 “It's me!"

In much the same way, albeit more overtly, Alfred Hitchcock worked the audience in his noir-inflected movie Vertigo.6 H e wanted everybody to share the dread overcoming Scottie Ferguson during his pursuit o f the enigmatic Madeleine Elster up a winding set o f severely steep stairs. Although created by subterfuge, the implied locadon o f a California Mission bell tower (a matte painting, Fig. 8) and the tower stairs (a studio set, Fig. 9) were realistically conveyed. When Scottie unwisely looks down his point of view is shown by a

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camera shot that simultaneously pulls back even as the lens zooms forward; the disquieting zoom swoon effect pulls us all into the vortex. (Fig. 10)

Fig. 8 The bell tower in Vertigo

Fig. 9 The chase up the bell tower stairs

Fig. 10 Scottie’s terrifying view

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In the same film, Hitchcock's sly hum or surfaced through the use of location-as-metaphor when he made sure the besotted Scottie's San Francisco apartment enjoyed a window view o f Coit Tower rising proudly in the distance, admitting in a later interview to its intended significance: a phallic symbol. (Fig. 11) N ow on a roll, his gleeful closing shot in North by Northwest7 o f a train entering a tunnel served the dual purpose of leaving us in no doubt as to the intentions o f passengers Cary G rant and Eva Marie Saint while at the same time cocking a snook at the industry's Production Code. (Fig. 12)

Fig. 11 A Freudian allusion in Vertigo

Fig. 12 ... and another in North by Northwest

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Viewers feel a certain satisfaction when they see a familiar location in a movie. They relate. Perhaps they live around the comer or they might have been there on a visit or come across it in books and magazines. In any case the connection somehow in a small way de-fictionalizes the onscreen action. That is how I felt when Humphrey Bogart got tough at the Golden Gate Bridge in Dark Passage,s (Fig. 13) filmed just 11 years after the bridge opened and a decade before Alfred Hitchcock took us back there for Kim Novak's plunge into the bay in Vertigo.

Fig. 13 Everybody’s favorite bridge in Dark Passage

Perhaps the most powerful feeling that film noir locations can induce on an audience was unplanned and unanticipated by the moviemakers: nostalgia. The passage of time allows us to see things as they used to be and L. P. Hardey's quote: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"9 often springs to mind. While this may be true of all old movies, those o f the film noir era seem to particularly resonate, perhaps because their time coincided with the end of a long period of social stagnation right before the post-war years ushered in change as an ongoing way of life. The strings of yearning can be plucked by changes in cultural mores, favorite places, or by disappearing neighborhoods. Evolving fashion is a case in point; downtown shopping in Union Square in the noirish Portrait in Black10 echoes a time when automobiles had fins and people dressed up to go shopping; hats were de rigueur and women wore stylish dresses, shoes and gloves. Today, sadly, our

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autos are more generic, heads are bare and presentable-formal has for better or worse become slob-casual. (Fig. 14)

Fig. 14 Then ... Downtown shopping in Portrait in Black

... N o w , street fashions have changed, for the worse

The neo-noir thriller The Lineup11 did us a great favor by recording for posterity interior and exterior footage o f the venerable Sutro Baths at San Francisco's Ocean Beach at the very edge o f the Pacific Ocean. (Fig. 15) This location was fortuitous indeed as eight years later, the financially ailing 70-year- old structure was destroyed in a suspicious fire. W hat once in its heyday was a hugely popular family destination with seven swimming pools, a skating rink, a museum and a concert hall, all under 100,000 panes o f glazed roofing, was gone forever. Watching scenes like this either stirs childhood memories or leaves the audience wondering what it was like to live back in the time.

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Fig. 15 Then ... The hilltop entrance above a sprawling entertainment complex in The Uneup

... and Now, Sutro’s is no more

A recent look down to what is left of the Sutro Baths

Similarly, who can blame viewers who long for lost neighborhoods? Los Angeles' Bunker Hill was at the turn of the 20th century an enclave o f grand Victorians and other large homes built by the wealthy on hills conveniently next to downtown. Over time, as city transportation improved, they moved away to trendier parts and the homes mostly devolved into rooming houses for seniors and those of low income. Deteriorating structures, steep hills and

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narrow streets and alleys, handily close to Hollywood, made Bunker Hill a magnet for moviemakers; dozens o f films noir were shot there. It may have descended into seediness but the thriving neighborhood served an important social need; no one could say it lacked soul. But heardess city planners saw it differendy; in a sweeping redevelopment commencing in the late 1950s, ethnic and cultural cleansing by any other name, they razed the neighborhood to make way for new civic buildings and m odem office and residential high-rises. Take a look at the capture from Criss Cross12 showing Burt Lancaster exiting an old streetcar, itself capable o f conjuring up nostalgic pangs. (Fig. 16) Behind him is Court Hill, part o f Bunker Hill, atop the twin-bore Hill Street tunnel. By the time the city-sanctioned developers were through not only the buildings were gone but so too were the tunnel and even the hill itself.

Fig. 16 Then ... Bunker Hill, in Criss Cross

... a n d N ow , from the same spot, what hill?

The same fate befell San Francisco's old Produce Market, close by the Ferry Building's waterfront, preserved for us in Thieves Highway.13 (Fig. 17) For forty years this area o f warehouses and wholesale businesses teemed with activity as trucks rolled in through the night from the surrounding fields and farms while

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others fanned out the following morning distributing the packaged produce across the city. Then in the 1960s the market was relocated to clear the way for a massive redevelopment that razed and transformed it into an extension of the Financial District. Sound familiar? Entire blocks and some streets vanished. There m ust be many an office worker in the aluminum-clad Alcoa Building or one o f the sleek Embarcadero Center towers who have no idea that they displaced Melo-Glo Tomatoes and Cape Cod Cranberries, not to mention Chickie brand Asparagus or the risque-labeled Buxom brand Melons.14

Fig. 17 Then ... The Produce Market in Thieves' Highway

... a n d N ow , high-rise offices have taken over T he N oir Vision in American Culture 159

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San Francisco's waterfront has undergone a drastic transformation as well. Thieves Highway includes a suspense-filled scene during which two thugs chase Rica, a hard-bitten soft-centered lady of the night. (Fig. 18) The images present a fine example of noir lighting as well as a time warp to street blocks lined with flophouse hotels and dive bars. Today the cleaned-up and redeveloped waterfront would be unrecognizable to those sailors, longshoremen and other workers who routinely drowned their sorrows there at the end o f a hard day. What used to be is now a figment of the past, the site o f a Tennis and Swim Club. It is interesting to conjecture whether denizens both then and now, in reacting to the changes from opposite points in time, would converge at the same conclusion: would they all lament the loss?

Fig 18 Then ... A waterfront street block in Thieves' Highway

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... a n d N o w , a sports and exercise club replaced the razed block

The pictorial examples here presented have illustrated how locations liberated the moviemaker from the studio, how they can imbue an overall look and feel, metaphorically enrich the story, induce fear and suspense, psychologically draw us into the mind o f a character, relate to the familiar and, powerfully, remind us how things were that no longer are. Individually each element served the purpose but collectively they undoubtedly shaped the evolution o f the noir style itself. There is much that meets the eye when watching films noir and much more besides a nod to the power o f the genre. Psychological prompts and visits to long-gone haunts touch us to the core and take us beyond simply observing the human condition; they remind us that we are a part o f it. As we revert from the noir world back into our own we may find ourselves suffering from an emotional hangover, sympathizing with the downtrodden or even secretly rooting for the bad guy. We reflect on how much our surroundings have been affected by city planners and developers and how our way o f life is yielding to the inexorable pressure o f cultural change. All this for the price o f a ticket to a film noir movie.

N o t e s

1 Images in this article were either screen captures obtained from fair use public domain sites or photographs taken by the author. 2

The Third Matt. Directed by Carol Reed. London Film Productions Ltd., 1949. Starring Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles and Alida Valli.

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The Sniper. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Columbia Pictures Corp., 1952. Starring Arthur Franz, Adolph Menjou and Marie Windsor.

Born to Kill. Director Robert Wise. RKO Radio Pictures Inc., 1947. Starring Lawrence Tierney, Claire Trevor and Walter Slezak.

The Lady from Shanghai. Director Orson Welles. Columbia Pictures Corp., 1947. Starring Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders.

Vertigo. Director Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures Corp., 1958. Starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes and Tom Helmore.

North by Northwest. Director Alfred Hitchcock. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp., 1959. Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. 8 Dark Passage. Director Delmer Daves. Warner Bros. Pictures Inc., 1947. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Agnes Morehead. ̂ L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Penguin, 1997), 5.

1(* Portrait in Black. Director Michael Gordon. Universal Pictures Co. Inc., 1960. Starring Lana Turner, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart and Sandra Dee. 11 The Lineup. Director Don Siegel. Columbia Pictures Corp., 1958. Starring Eli Wallach and Robert Keith. 12

Criss Cross. Director Robert Siodmak. Universal Pictures Co. Inc., 1949. Starring Burt Lancaster, Yvonne de Carlo and Dan Duryea. 13

Thieves Highway. Director Jules Dassin. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., 1949. Starring Richard Conte, Valentina Cortesa and Lee J. Cobb.

Nostalgists can check out those colorful produce labels and more at http://www.reelsf.com/thieves-highway-crate-labels

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