The Maltese Falcon (1941)

WHO: Humphrey Bogart stars in this.

WHAT: If you go to the corner of Bush Street and Burritt Alley, you'll find a plaque that reads: "On approximately this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaunghnessy". It must be the only plaque in San Francisco that memorializes not a historical event, but a key moment in fiction, namely the Dashiell Hammett detective novel template known as The Maltese Falcon. At least, the only one that bears no indication of its fictionhood, or that it constitutes a "spoiler" for anyone who might not have read the book or watched one of the movie versions made from it. Such as the 1941 version written and directed by John Huston.

Other versions (the 1931 one sometimes called Dangerous Female, or the 1936 Satan Met a Lady) have their points of interest, but the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the one that became a cultural sensation and launched (with High Sierra) Humphrey Bogart's career as a leading man, Huston's as a director, and film noir as a powerful cinematic thread through the 1940s, 50s and beyond. San Francisco movie lovers are proud that their city plays such a key role in such a key film in such a key genre of Hollywood filmmaking, even if they know that apart from a few library-footage shots of the Bay Bridge and the city skyline, Huston's film does not feature actual footage of their city. As Nicola Balkind wrote in the recently-published book World Film Locations: San Francisco:

The camera descends and we are introduced to an office announcing 'SPADE AND ARCHER' where Sam Spade is working as the Bay Bridge gleams through a large window. The office interior was shot in LA but the location is estimated to be 111 Sutter Street at the corner of Montgomery in the heart of the Financial District - not far from neo-noir's favorite location: Chinatown. Although The Maltese Falcon was made in Hollywood, we're never allowed to forget it is set in San Francisco.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens daily at the Stanford Theatre at 5:40 and 9:25.

WHY: World Film Locations: San Francisco is starting to get a few reviews, such as this one in the Bay Area Reporter. It's available online and at stores such as City Lights, Moe's and even the DeYoung Museum gift shop. I'm proud to have contributed an essay on film noir in the city for the book, in which I quickly trace film noir history from Hammett and Huston to Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, to the post-war vogue for on-location shooting and into the ways noir was transformed in the mid-to-late fifties and ultimately found expression in the still-vibrant neo-noir genre.

That's just two pages of the book's 1928, however, most of which are devoted to individual films from the silent era to relatively recent history (Steven Soderbergh's 2011 Contagion being the most current entry). Forty-six films are matched with forty-six of their most iconic San Francisco locations and presented fully-illustrated and even mapped. The pages for Greed show us the Cliff House in 1924 and today, while The Conversation is represented by One Maritime Plaza and Raiders of the Lost Ark is an excuse to show us City Hall, for example. 

San Francisco moviegoers can hardly get enough of seeing our own city on cinema screens, and there are many opportunities to do so in the coming months. The Stanford's current "Best of Bogart and Film Noir Classics" series gives us one almost every weekend in late September and October. After The Maltese Falcon this week, the venue brings Out of the Past (with the Caribbean-set To Have and Have Not) September 26-29, and Dark Passage (Oct. 10-13 with The Blue Dahlia), The Lady From Shanghai (Oct. 24-27 with Key Largo) and The Caine Mutiny (Oct. 31-Nov. 3 with Touch of Evil) each have their own entries in World Film Locations: San Francisco as well.

Two of the three features playing at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its fall movie classics series are also featured in the book: Bullitt, which screens this Friday, and All About Eve, which was set in New York and Connecticut but had a key scene shot at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, screens there October 15th. (The third Paramount movie classic this fall is Huston and Bogart's Uganda-shot adventure film The African Queen on November 18th). Both of the films screening at the Pacific Film Archive's free outdoor movie series in the coming weeks also get WFL:SF entries: Harold and Maude and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And Vertigo (of course also in the book) screens November 1st at Davies Symphony Hall, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann's incredible musical score live.

Perhaps the most unexpected upcoming showcase of Frisco Bay films comes courtesy the San Francisco Film Society, which is hosting at New People Cinema October 18-20 an event called Zurich/SF, which is a cinematic celebration of the ten-year anniversary of San Francisco's sister-city partnership with Switzerland's largest city. This mini-festival collaborates with the Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective coming to the PFA, YBCA and Roxie this fall to plug the Autumn's German-language cinematic gap caused by the Berlin & Beyond festival's move back to a January timeslot after a few years having a go in the Fall, by showing films such as Kurt Früh's rarely-seen The Fall and Andrea Štaka's Fraulein (both in 35mm) as well as five other films by Swiss filmmakers. But it also brings four showings of films in which San Francisco is more than mere backdrop to action but a major element of character and theme. Of these, The Conversation and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (the latter of which will screen on 35mm) merit entries in WFL:SF, while Medicine For Melancholy is discussed in one of the other contextualizing essays in the book. As for 1970s buddy-cop oddity Freebie and the Bean, it will have to wait and see if sales on the book merit a sequel.

HOW: The Maltese Falcon screens on a 35mm double bill with Casablanca.

Helsinki, Forever (2008)

 

WHO: Peter Von Bagh made this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, so let me quote from a short piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) recounted with film clips and paintings

Sounds great, and perhaps not so dissimilar from Thom Andersen's amazing 2003 visual essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, which argues a history of that city through clips from fiction films shot there. And it turns out this comparison has been made before by writers who have seen both works.

WHERE/WHEN: San Francisco International Film Festival screening this afternoon at 3:00 at the Kabuki.

WHY: First of all, the subject of the film sounds just up my alley and makes me think I'll be trying to track down a copy of World Film Locations: Helsinki soon after the screening. Which reminds me to mention that the volume in that series of books that I contributed an essay to, World Film Locations: San Francisco, is now available for pre-order.

But the occasion of the screening would make me want to attend even if the film didn't sound as interesting to me as it does. Director Von Bagh will be on hand for the show, as he is receiving the Mel Novikoff Award for work that has "has enhanced the filmgoing public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema"- an award that has gone to critics like Manny Farber and Roger Ebert, archivists like Kevin Brownlow and Serge Bromberg, and programmers like Bruce Goldstein and Anita Monga. Von Bagh is not only a filmmaker but a historian and the director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival held in Sodankylä, Lapland at the time of summer each year when night never falls above the arctic circle, making the inside of a cinema the darkest place around 24 hours a day.

I don't know when I first heard rumor of this festival, but read more about it in Kenneth Turan's book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made, which immediately shot it to the top tier of my list of festivals I dream of attending one day. Looking at a partial list of filmmaker guests over the years make it clear that Von Bagh and his programming team have terrific taste, and my understanding is that Von Bagh is something of a film-on-film purist, insisting on film screenings even in the waning days of its viability as a mass-market medium.

The other day, I happened to be at a screening sitting next to another award recipient at this year's SFIFF: Philip Kaufman, who will be at the Castro Theatre tomorrow evening for an on-stage conversation before a screening of his great 1978 shot-in-San Francisco remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We got to talking, and he told me he'll be at the Midnight Sun festival for the first time this summer, and that he's currently trying to track down good prints of films he hopes to show there. Invasion of the Body Snatchers will be shown tomorrow digitally, however. 

But as film purist Carl Martin notes in his latest SFIFF round-up, last night's screening of Marketa Lazarová began with an announcement that another Castro screening of a 1970s film tomorrow will be screened on 35mm instead of previously-expected DCP. The film is The Mattei Affair, a political thriller by Francesco Rosi, a filmmaker who, like Kaufman, received an award from the SFIFF (in 1981) and later went on to attend the Midnight Sun festival (in 1999). Why is it being shown in 35mm even though the Film Foundation has helped prepare a new DCP they're trying to show off? The answer lies in Frako Loden's latest SFIFF round-up article, in which she reports on last weekend's  Pacific Film Archive screening via its new digital projector, in which subtitles froze on screen and essentially ruined the experience for non-Italian speakers in the audience. Rather than risk a repeat of such a snafu at the Castro, the festival has opted to use a trusty 35mm print for the 1:30 PM matinee. 

HOW: Helsinki, Forever screens in 35mm.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

WHO: Composer John Williams is, as far as I'm concerned, the most crucial creative contributor to this film.

WHAT: Everyone knows this film. But did you know that an important scene in this film was shot (though not set) in San Francisco, with both Harrison Ford and Karen Allen filmed on location in a familiar SF environment? No, I'm not talking about the brief, actorless shot of the Golden Gate Bridge represented by the screen capture above. Hint: it's a location shared by Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk.

I thought I was a pretty eagle-eyed spotter of my city in films, and had even accepted the task of writing a short essay on the subject in the book World Film Locations: San Francisco, which is newly available for purchase at finer Frisco Bay stores including City Lights and Moe's. But it wasn't until I opened my copy of the book that I realized the San Francisco connection to Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

The format of the World Film Locations series (of which there are more than twenty published so far) is that each book features about forty-five individual scenes from about forty-five different movies, each highlighting one of about forty-five different locations in the city. Most of the featured films are better known for their San Francisco-ness than Raiders of the Lost Ark but I was glad to learn about it and other unexpected entries among the selections. Now I want to revisit the film again, as it's been years since I've seen it in its entirety.

WHERE/WHEN: This morning at the Balboa Theatre only at 10:00 AM.

WHY: George Lucas has long been one of the foremost proponents of digital production and presentation, so it's no surprise that his movies are among those no longer available in 35mm distribution prints. As more and more titles fall into this category it leaves a neighborhood theatre like the Balboa with the option of screening a Blu-Ray or nothing at all. I've heard rumors that some companies (Disney and Fox were mentioned) are becoming reluctant to allow their library to be screened via Blu-Ray in cinemas, meaning only theatres with DCP capability can host showings of their titles. 

Thus the Balboa is holding what I believe to be the first "go digital or go dark"  kickstarter campaign to hit San Francisco. These crowd-funding appeals for funds to purchase new DCP-level projection equipment have been spreading across the nation in 2012 and 2013, thanks to major studio threats to make it impossible for a commercial theatre to legally screen any of their properties in formats other than DCP. The closest-to-home theatre to attempt one of these campaigns before the Balboa was the Rio Vista, a Quonset hut cinema up on the Russian River Noeth if Frisco Bay. Their campaign was successful, and it's looking pretty good for the Balboa too, as it's about halfway to its goal for bringing DCP to one of its two theatres, with 40 days left in the campaign. 

Meanwhile the venue is showing, along with 35mm prints of two of the only mainstream releases available that way (the Butler and Elysium), less-than-DCP quality digital screenings of all three 1980s Indiana Jones movies on successive Saturdays in August, and a documentary on VHS tape collectors that was reviewed by Cheryl Eddy in this week's Bay Guardian.

Finally, for fans of Lucas and John Williams and Harrison Ford and digital projection, it's just been announced that the Mill Valley Film Festival will screen Return of the Jedi at the Corte Madera Cinema October 7th. Beside Still Waters is the only other announced festival title so far; it plays October 12th.

HOW: Raiders of the Lost Ark screens as a Blu-Ray projection. A free popcorn and drink are included in the $10 ticket price.

Fog Over Frisco (1934)

WHO: Bette Davis stars in this, looking astonishingly young to anyone who has her performance in All About Eve, made sixteen years later (or even in Now Voyager, made eight years later) burned into their brains.

WHAT: Film historian William K. Everson called it the "fastest film ever made" and compared it favorably to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin as a screen textbook for film editing. But for viewers interested the history of San Francisco's depiction in Hollywood films, Fog Over Frisco takes on special significance. It's one of the very few big-studio productions of the 1930s that actually brought some of its cast (although not Davis, as far as I can tell) and crew to the City By The Bay in order to film sequences on location here.

There's a dynamic sequence in which a gaggle of reporters await Margaret Lindsay (who plays Davis's sister) outside her family's mansion in order to ambush her with their cameras. This is shot in Pacific Heights, right at the corner of Octavia and Washington, and you can clearly see Lafayette Park, Spreckels Mansion (pictured above, and currently resided in by novelist Danielle Steel) and other still-standing structures in the scene. The cable-car line on Washington Street, however, is no more.

Another scene in the film calls for a bridge- but since the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges had only just begun construction in 1933, the filmmakers utilized the Third Street Bridge (now known as the Lefty O'Doul Bridge) in China Basin- a neighborhood that has evidently changed its appearance far more than Pacific Heights has since 1934.

These sequences make Fog Over Frisco one of the most extensive on-location Hollywood film to use 1930s-era San Francisco that I've ever come across. Films like Ladies They Talk About (1933), Barbary Coast (1935), San Francisco (1936) and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) for instance,  use stock photography of the city or none at all, evoking San Francisco entirely through the construction of Hollywood sets. It's a very different story from that of the 1920s, when films like Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) and Greed (1924) were just a few of the productions able to shoot extensively in town (without sound crews, of course), or of the 1940s (particularly the post-World War II era) when developments in cameras and film stocks helped usher in a vogue for location photography in this city that has essentially never looked back. But any student of history wants to fill gaps in the record however possible, so a chance to see what 1930s Frisco was like, through the lens of a First National production, is all the more precious.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight and tomorrow at the Stanford Theatre at 6:10 and 9:05, and the West Portal Branch of the San Francisco Public Library at 6:30 PM on July 23rd.

WHY: I'm thinking a lot about San Francisco-shot films this week because I just received an advance copy of World Film Locations: San Francisco, a book tracing the history of San Francisco moviemaking in a fun and informative way. I'm proud to have been able to contribute to this handsome volume packed with maps, images, and short write-ups on forty-six of the most notable films made in my hometown, each represented by a different scene and location. There are also six essays contextualizing certain recurring trends (the Golden Gate Bridge, car chases) and filmmakers (Hitchcock, Eastwood) involved in shooting here, and a seventh that discusses the current reigning local favorite filmmaker (at least according to a plurality of SF Bay Guardian readers), Peaches Christ.

I've mentioned here before (perhaps too frequently) that my contribution was one of these contextualizing essays, in my case on the topic of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. Though I had free reign to approach this topic how I liked, for which I graciously thank editor Scott Jordan Harris. I had no input in the rest of the book, including the selection of the 46 featured and mapped titles. Of course there are some omissions I'd have stumped for if it had I been involved in that part of the process, but that's a natural reaction any movie fan would feel. Perhaps there can be a sequel if this edition is a success- I think it will be. Overall the book does a great job in bringing together the famous films everyone around the world associates with this city, with a healthy dose of unexpected surprises.

So no, Fog Over Frisco is not featured in the book, but that doesn't mean Spreckels Mansion isn't. It gets its own two-page spread as the chosen location from George Sidney's 1957 musical Pal Joey, starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak. I don't want to give away too much about the contents of an unpublished book yet, but I will note that nine of the book's forty-six featured films are planned to screen for free this month at San Francisco Public Library branch locations as part of a twenty-title SF Library Film Festival. (To further narrow a few guesses, I'll hint that two of the three of these titles screening Thursdays at the Main Library are in the book).

HOW: At the West Portal Library, Fog Over Frisco will screen via projected DVD. At the Stanford, it screens on a 35mm double-bill with the Of Human Bondage, the career-defining Davis role that was filmed just before, and released just after, the filming of Fog Over Frisco.

Shhhhh-owtime!

Two sad pieces of news relevant to this blog started off this shortened week. First, the announcement that San Francisco Film Society executive director Graham Leggat is stepping down for health reasons, after five years of wonderful service to the city's extended film community. He strengthened the city's foremost film exhibition organization in immeasurable ways at a moment when leadership like his was sorely needed, but I also appreciated his rare candor as a contributor to the programming team for the annual San Francisco International Film Festival. He wasn't afraid to publicly admit his favorite film in the festival, even if it was a potentially alienating one to the casual observer. (In 2006 he cited Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud, and this year his pick was Lech Majewski's The Mill and the Cross). Leah Garchik has a good article that details his reasons for departure, and shows us that Leggat's courage is in no way limited to his approach to film programming.

Another sad, if very much predicted, news item was the Red Vic's official announcement that it will definitely be closing July 25th after thirty-one years of operation on Haight Street. This is the first time I've closed one of the parentheses on my "Frisco Cinemas" sidebar list. I recently went through my records to figure that I've seen at least 75 screenings there in the past decade and a half (or so). It sounds like a lot, but right now I'm also thinking of all the films I never got around to seeing when they (in some cases quite frequently) played there. Who's going to bring around prints of Foxy Brown or The Good Old Naughty Days or The Holy Mountain or Stop Making Sense (which I must miss when it plays July 15-16) once the venue is shut? Reminiscences are popping up all over the web, but perhaps the most pointed and poignant is Peter Hartlaub's. Cheryl Eddy's interview with Claudia Lehan is the best article I've seen on the details behind the closure.

I don't want to dwell on negative news though. The reason I won't be able to catch Stop Making Sense at the Red Vic next week is that I'll be celebrating the cinema of the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s and even early 1930s with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival from Thursday night until Sunday night. The festival's own blog has been gearing up for the event for weeks now with its remarkably informative series Film Preservation Fridays. Today's entry is an interview with two of the archivists instrumental in bringing festival opener Upstream to light after decades when even the most knowledgeable John Ford scholars assumed it lost. A must-read.

The San Francisco Public Library is also preparing for the event by spreading an exhibition about silent film in several locations on the fourth and sixth floors of the Main Library. Thomas Gladysz has curated one section of the exhibit, "Reading The Stars", focusing on books about filmmaking and famous filmmakers, and on movie tie-ins, all published during the silent era! Another section, curated by Rory J. O'Connor, looks at silent-era filmmaking in San Francisco and elsewhere around Frisco Bay. A third, on the sixth floor, is devoted to silent-era movie palaces. The library will be hosting two events around the exhibition, which will remain up until August 28th. This Sunday at 2PM the library will host a projected video screening of Son of the Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. Valentino expert Donna Hill will be on hand to introduce the screening and sign copies of her breathtakingly beautiful book of rare Valentino photographs. Then, on August 7th, Diana Serra Carey, who performed in 1920s films as "Baby Peggy", will talk about her life in Hollywood and screen an as-yet-unnamed short film. Both events are free to the public, as is the exhibition.

I was recruited to get involved in this exhibit in a very small way: by providing a piece of text talking about this year's Silent Film Festival for one of the display cases. Librarian Gretchen Good, who organized the exhibition along with the SFPL exhibitions staff (including Maureen Russell) said it would be fine to publish the text on my blog as well, so here it is, though I couldn't resist jazzing it up with some hyperlinks:

Every summer for the past fifteen years, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has taken over the Castro Theatre for a weekend of great movies, live music, and the conviviality of silent film fans. The 16th annual festival, held July 14-17, 2011, is their biggest event yet. Thirteen feature films made on four different continents will screen, along with two programs of shorts (one devoted to Walt Disney's first films, one to the earliest special effects films), two free programs of film archivists presenting their latest restorations and unearthings from the vaults, and much more.

Marlene Dietrich, Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Janet Gaynor, George O'Brien, Louise Dressler, Pina Menichelli and Douglas Fairbanks are some of the stars featured in this year's festival films. Well-known classics like F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But..., and Victor Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped screen along with recently rediscovered films like Allan Dwan's Mr. Fix-It and John Ford's Upstream. Seven musical ensembles and soloists rotate in performing live musical scores to each film, and gather Saturday, July 16th on a panel discussion to talk about the role of music in the silent film world.

Every year the festival gives an award to an organization or individual for "distinguished contributions to the preservation and restoration of world film heritage." This year's award is presented to the UCLA Film & Television Archive at a screening of The Goose Woman. American Sign Language interpreters are on hand for the festival's special-guest introductions and panels. Film lovers travel from far and wide to attend the festival, but the screenings are just as fun for people who have never seen a silent movie before.

Hope to see you at the festival next week!

Ten Decades of Frisco in Film

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS PAGE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 11/14/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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In preparation for tomorrow's launch of the Balboa Theatre's Second Annual Reel San Francisco series of films from a diverse range of genres and time periods, all made in and/or about Frisco, as well as the Celluloid San Francisco book event at the Public Library next week, I present a list of some of the titles I think of first when I think of Frisco and film.

The post title is a bit of a misnomer, as Frisco Bay has been a motion picture hotbed for more than ten decades. It all began when Edward Muybridge first successfully photographed a horse's gallop for Leland Stanford in 1878. I've seen interesting Frisco films made in every decade since the Lumiere Brothers invented film exhibition in 1895, starting with 1897's Return of Lifeboat and including 1905's a Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, which was shown at the PFA last weekend and I suspect might be among the films shown this Tuesday at 7PM as part of the Balboa's "City Quakes" earthquake centennial commemoration program. But I will start this list formally with the decade where films first grew to running times similar to those we expect today:

the 1910s: The Tong Man (William Worthington, 1919)
Japanese-American screen idol Sessue Hayakawa played a Chinese anti-hero in this studio set-bound and somewhat sensationalistic depiction of the Frisco Chinatown underworld. It's no masterpiece and I wonder if there was even a single ethnically Chinese actor or crewman on set (most or all the Chinese parts were played by Japanese or white actors, which was customary for the time period) who could speak up against the film's stereotyping. Still, it's a fascinating curio and Hayakawa gives a typically strong performance.
On my to-see wish list: the Chaplin Essanay film a Jitney Elopement.

the 1920s: Greed (Erich Von Stroheim, 1924)
Von Stroheim gained a reputation as one of the first advocates for film realism in large part through his desire to shoot his version of Frank Norris's novel McTeague in the Frisco where Norris had lived and, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, "scouted locations" for his story of a love triangle doomed by the sudden appearance of wealth. A masterpiece in its own right, Greed also feels like a primer on making Frisco locations (in this case the corner of Hayes and Laguna, the Cliff House, and dozens more) work to the advantage of a great film, one that surely influenced future directors trying the same trick like Orson Welles (see below). The studio cut (not Stroheim's original 47-reel version now lost, or Rick Schmidlin's digital "recreation") played the Balboa series last year.
On my to-see wish list: Lon Chaney surviving the Great Quake in the Shock.

the 1930s: San Francisco (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936)
I had never seen the most famous film about the 1906 Earthquake until the Balboa played it last April for the 99th anniversary of the event. Now it's being brought back April 16-18 for the 100th, and if you live in the area and have never seen it before you really ought to. Though this film, directed by Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke (aka "One Take Woody"), has a not wholly undeserved reputation for stodgily moralizing, it really is a grand entertainment nonetheless. I like to think of it as the movie that represents to Frisco what Gone With the Wind is for Atlanta: It's a big-budget, star-laden special effects extravaganza that distorts history through a potentially worrying lens, but it also treats The City as the center of the Universe. If you, like me, think of Frisco as a better candidate for that honor than Ted Turner's town, you'll almost certainly like San Francisco better than the even more famous picture Clark Gable made three years later. And perhaps this film's conservative reputation has been overblown too; the Terry Diggs piece I linked to convincingly argues that the film was covertly packed by screenwriter Anita Loos with pro-labor jabs against the MGM hegemony.
On my to-see wish list: the Howard Hawks Barbary Coast, which plays the Balboa on a bill with Pal Joey April 23-24.

the 1940s: the Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)
You may need to be automatically predisposed to Welles to be able to get over his silly brogue and fully enjoy this film, the only one he made with his then-wife Rita Hayworth, but there's no denying the power of the scenes that make use of some of the eeriest Frisco locations imaginable, now all the eerier because these places are no longer with us. I'm speaking particularly of Playland at the Beach, where this loopy noir ends in an especially bizarre fashion, and the murkily-lit halls of the recently demolished Steinhart Aquarium, where the (by this point in the Welles-Hayworth marriage) fictional-only lovers rendezvous and talk about a doubly-impossible future together. If the story doesn't totally hang together it certainly doesn't matter when Welles is making use of such dream-logic images as moray eels and funhouse mirrors to make an end run around the glib symbology often found in Hollywood classicism. I didn't see this film when it played in last year's Balboa series, but I've seen it several times, most memorably a few years ago at an outdoor screening in New York City's Bryant Park; admittedly this film is just as much a New York movie as a Frisco movie, but Frisco gets the last word.
On my to-see wish list: I Remember Mama, based on the book I remember my mama reading to me as a kid.

the 1950s: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
What to say about this film I often consider the greatest of all time? I've seen it too many times to be surprised by its basic plot structure like I was the first four or five times I saw it, always suckered in by the false first climax. But each time I'm still surprised by another Hitchcockian touch I notice, little things like how Pop Liebel's nostalgia for "the power and the freedom" associated with manhood helps Scottie give himself permission to resist the post-war modernization of gender relations and throw himself into an old-fashioned romantic melodrama. And I'm always struck by another glimpse of the Frisco that existed before I was born but am slowly trying to understand. I've had this site on my sidebar since starting this blog, and if you've never taken the time to lose yourself in it for a while, how about now?
On my to-see wish list: the National Film Registry-selected D.O.A., which plays at the Balboa with another noir, the Bigamist, April 25th.

the 1960s: the White Rose (Bruce Conner, 1967)
I first planned this list to be entirely made of feature films, but once I thought of this experimental documentary short, I had to bump the Birds (at the Balboa April 21-22) or Take the Money and Run (April 26-27) or whatever else I was considering for this decade. It's the first Bruce Conner film I ever saw, back in 1996 at the old DeYoung Museum when it was showcasing art of the Beats. The centerpiece of the exhibit was Jay DeFeo's painting/sculpture the Rose, which she applied 2,300 pounds of oil paint to over the course of eight years before removing it by forklift from her apartment at the Pacific Heights section of Fillmore Street. Conner lived nearby and was on hand to film the extraction, which he edited into this beautiful seven minute piece accompanied by music from Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain.
On my to-see wish list: Experiment in Terror, the classic Blake Edwards thriller I missed when the Balboa showed it last year.

the 1970s: the Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
This is another one of those films that I've seen so many times that it's seemingly seeped into my DNA, but that doesn't mean it's easy to know where to begin to talk about it. I might as well start where the film does, with Union Square, which in a single extended zoom shot morphs from a picturesque cityscape into a paranoia-inducing intrusion. The transformation seems oddly paralleled in the history of the location since Coppola's film was released; gradually the public square has felt more and more encroached upon by the neon-lit signs of the corporations that surround it, culminating in a recent remodel that has shifted the focus of the space toward the Macy's on its South side. I don't know all the locations used in the Conversation but I'm not sure I want to know either; the Cathedral Hill Hotel, which I pass nearly every day on the way to work, has felt just a little creepier since I realized it used to be called the Jack Tar Hotel and was the site of the film's most disturbing scene.
On my to-see wish list: Time After Time starring Malcolm McDowell as HG Wells.

the 1980s: a View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985)
I never said these were "the best" films shot in Frisco, just the ones that for me feel the "Frisco"-est. But honestly the last of the many times I saw this film, probably when I was in ninth grade, I still loved it. I was just the right age for James Bond when it came out in '85, and I can't begin to convey the sense of civic pride I felt when I learned that the international playboy and super-spy was going to be coming to my town, which meant that I obviously lived in a location as exciting and exotic as India or the Bahamas. Opening weekend fell near my twelfth birthday, and my dad took me and a dozen buddies across the Golden Gate to the theatre in Corte Madera he liked to avoid the Frisco crowds at. This was my last birthday party at which I felt no sense of inadequacy for not feeling cool enough to invite girls. I was outwardly resisting my looming teenager-hood as strongly as I could (I didn't even really know who Duran Duran was, but I did like their theme song) and a View to a Kill was the perfect preadolescent fantasy to allow me to do that for another two hours, plus get a glimpse of Grace Jones's naked bum. But probably my favorite scene was the fire engine chase scene culminating in the nail-biter at the "Lefty" O'Doul Drawbridge. The insanity of Christopher Walken's Zorin dueling against Bond on top of the area's most famous bridge was just good gravy. Since my middle-school-age days of intense study of Bondology, I've come to learn that a View to a Kill is considered by most to be one of the worst films in the series. I suspect it's at least in part because it's the film which let Roger Moore beat David Niven in Casino Royale as the oldest actor ever to play James Bond (he turned 57 during filming). One of these days I'd like to revisit it and see what I think, but in the meantime I don't mind reliving the memories.
On my to-see wish list: Chan is Missing, another National Film Registry selection.

the 1990s: Chalk (Rob Nilsson, 1996)
Like the Tong Man and San Francisco, I've only seen this film (actually shot on video) once but it left a powerful impression and turned me into a real Rob Nilsson admirer. Nilsson's Cassavetes-influenced filmmaking style cuts through the extraneous baggage of ego and image that he sees clogging up the independent film scene in this country. Probably his most crucial departure from the norm comes through the way he works with actors to develop their characters and stories. In the case of the Tenderloin-birthed poolhall drama Chalk he brought nonprofessional actors like Earl Watson and Johnny Reese together with local pros like Kelvin Han Yee and longtime Nilsson collaborator Don Bajema. It worked extremely well, and not surprisingly created a story that feels oh-so-Frisco in its composition.
On my to-see wish list: Crumb, another of the titles I missed last year.

the 2000s: In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)
This week Zahedi's hybridized documentary I Am a Sex Addict is playing the Balboa's other screen, but it would fit right into the series, as it was partially set in Frisco and uses local locations to stand in for Paris and elsewhere. But his earlier In the Bathtub of the World is a Frisco film (video again, really) with an even more radical approach. It proposes that a filmmaker does not need to go out and capture or create a particular story, but can make an important, inspiring film capturing some of the very essence of life just by turning a camera back on himself or herself. If a View to a Kill, Vertigo and even Greed use Frisco as the backdrop of the director's vacation film, In the Bathtub of the World turns the home movie of a Frisco resident into something at least as large and profound. Here's a fascinating thing I found that helps to explain why not everybody's heard of it.
On my to-see wish list: the Bridge, Eric Steele's controversial new doc on the topic of Golden Gate Bridge suicides. Another consideration of the subject, the Joy of Life by Jenni Olson, was a highlight of last year's SFIFF (and plays again at the PFA this Tuesday) I expect Steele's film to be of a completely different sort, but my expectations are still high. It's playing at three screenings in this year's edition of the festival, on April 30-May 2.

Vertigo, Vertigo-ing, Vertigone.

Last week, San Francisco Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross reported that the owners of a house at the corner of Lombard and Jones Streets had recently completed a major remodel to the exterior of their home. Normally I wouldn't take notice of changes made to a private residence, but here the building in question has historic significance to cinephiles. It's 900 Lombard, the residence of Jimmy Stewart's character Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo.

Though the indoor scenes in Scottie's apartment were shot at a Hollywood studio, the view from his window, with the phallic Coit Tower looming over the landscape, remains essentially unchanged from when it was synced, through the magic of 1958 Hollywood technology, to these crucial interior shots. But the facade, which features in two just-as-crucial scenes, now is no longer recognizable as a Vertigo location from the street.

One would think the owners of the house, who apparently own a business dependent on the tourist trade, would want to honor the historic nature of their home. Surely they were aware of the movie connection when they moved in 23 years ago, as by this point it was a well-known fact, documented in Michael Oliver-Goodwin and Lynda Myles's 1982 San Francisco magazine article (reprinted in this book). But, according to Matier & Ross, they made the change precisely because they were getting too much attention from Vertigo location hunters.

It seems rather preposterous to me that there would be many cinephiles ringing the doorbell of a private residence, as if expecting a red-robed Kim Novak to answer the door. But what do I know. Maybe there are a lot more unmannered Hitchcock diehards out there than I realized. I do know that I've personally avoided mentioning the addresses of private residences when writing abut film locations (including Vertigo's) on this blog and elsewhere- until now. And when I've visited 900 Lombard I've been careful to respect the privacy of the owners by keeping my voice down and avoiding getting too close to the property, much less trespass.

Reading through the many reader comments on the Matier & Ross article at sfgate.com is depressing to someone like me. The general gist of most of them is: "it's only a movie", "private property rights trump all other concerns" and "film buffs are a pathetic and slovenly lot", although there are a few welcome counter-examples. I don't know. Maybe I'm sensitive because I recently wrote an essay about 1940s & 50s San Francisco location filmmaking for a book expected to be published next year (as part of this series.) Or maybe I've just seen too many Hitchcock movies and have gone overly suspicious, but I feel like there's something else happening here, and the Vertigo connection is more of an excuse than a reason for the remodeling.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I made an excursion to Jones and Lombard to take a look at the changes up close. I went with local filmmaker Sean Gillane, who earlier this month saw his ambitious narrative feature directing debut CXL get its world premiere screening at the SF Film Society's Cinema By The Bay festival. Another world premiere at this festival was Alejandro Adams's fourth feature Amity, which for me is his best picture since his own feature debut Around The Bay. Take that endorsement as you will, as in the past few years I've become friends with Adams, and he and his girlfriend Sara Vizcarrondo (another friend) once invited me to participate in an on-camera discussion of another of my favorite filmmakers (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) on their show "Look Of The Week". Likewise, Gillane (who re-used more than one Vertigo location for his CXL) suggested he film me discussing Vertigo and its role in the psycho-geography of San Francisco at the site, and so he did. I don't know what the fate of this footage will be once it's been edited, but I trust it's in good hands, and will certainly keep Hell On Frisco Bay readers posted.

2012 has been quite a roller-coaster year for lovers of Hitchcock in general and Vertigo in particular. For every previously-lost film he assistant-directed made available for free on-line, there's a dreadful-looking, currently-in-theatres Hitchcock docudrama (which focuses its attention on Psycho and not Vertigo; I haven't seen it yet and am not sure I want to). I've mentioned here before that Vertigo unseated Citizen Kane in the most highly-regarded critical poll of the "Greatest Films Of All-Time" this August. It was an ascent 50 years in the making, as when Kane first took that honor in 1962, the four-year-old film Vertigo was selected by only three voters, all Frenchmen: Eric Rohmer, Jean Douchet & Jacques Siclier. From there Vertigo placed #12 in 1972's Sight & Sound Poll, #7 in 1982's, #4 in 1992's and #2 in 2002's poll before achieving top spot this year, being named among the ten best of all time by 191 critics and curators (including Flicker Alley founder and president Jeff Masino, who I interviewed for Keyframe recently.)

But it was hard for many Vertigo fans to properly celebrate this changing of the guard, knowing that one of the film's leading champions had died just days before. I wrote a bit about Chris Marker's Vertigo connection in my obituary for the cinephile and filmmaker, and linked to a pdf of his 1994 essay on Vertigo, but without comment. Though Marker's 1983 essay film Sans Soleil avoided using the 900 Lombard location, this essay references it, without mentioning the house number:

San Francisco, of course, is nothing but another character in the film. [screenwriter] Samuel Taylor wrote to me agreeing that Hitchcock liked the town but only knew ‘what he saw from hotels or restaurants or out of the limo window’. He was ‘what you might call a seden­tary person’. But he still decided to use the Dolores Mission and, strangely, to make the house on Lombard Street Scottie’s home ‘because of the red door’.

If Marker and the red door no longer exist, Vertigo and Sans Soleil still do. The former film will appear in 35mm at the Pacific Film Archive March 13th as part of the Spring semester's Film 50 afternoon screening and lecture series devoted to "The Cinematic City". The latter film recently played the same venue as part of a compact Chris Marker tribute which concludes tonight.

Shortly after publishing my Marker blog piece last July, I was honored to receive an e-mail from one of Marker's local allies: Tom Luddy. Though I never visited the Pacific Film Archive during Luddy's time as programmer there, in recent years I've seen him at local film events rather frequently, whether in the audience, on stage (as when he received an award on behalf of the Telluride Film Festival, which he co-directs, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last summer), or even on-screen (as a key participant in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which after years of watching on VHS and DVD, I finally saw in a cinema this year thanks to SFMOMA). Luddy cleared up some of the information I'd written about Marker's film Junkopia. The print of this film which I'd seen twice at the PFA was in fact his print, on deposit at that institution. He has graciously allowed me to quote from his e-mail for readers:

Chris came to the Bay Area fairly often in the '70s and '80s, when I was at PFA ('72-'79) and Zoetrope ('80 to the present), sometimes on stopovers to Japan, and sometimes for the two major films that had sequences he shot in Northern California -- Sans Soleil and The Owl's Legacy. I helped him on both. He also did a little second-unit work on Rumble Fish for Zoetrope for a brief moment.

He always stayed in Berkeley, sometimes at my place and sometimes at the Hotel Shattuck. I drove him to SF many times in the '70s.  He was fascinated by the Emeryville Mudflats and one day asked me if anyone had made a film on the ever-changing gallery of objects on display there. I said I did not think there was a film, and he said "let's make one".

So I recruited John and Frank from Zoetrope, and some equipment, and in no time we were shooting there. He was very generous in putting in the credits "Filmed by Chris Marker, John Chapman, and Frank Simeone." But in fact this is a film by Chris Marker in the authorial sense. He gave me a Credit for SPECIAL EFFECTS.... don't ask to explain what for?

He called his producer for many films --Anatole Dauman-- in Paris. Anatole agreed to cover all the costs of the film. Anatole wanted to pay me for my work on the film. I refused to take any money but I said it would be great if I could get a 35mm print as a kind of compensation.  He said fine as he did on Sans Soleil as well. I have a 35mm print of Sans Soleil on deposit at PFA too.

I worked on films with great film-makers (Godard, Agnes Varda, Francis Coppola, etc) and with many more thru my work at PFA, Telluride, San Francisco Film Festival and so on.... Chris is/was the most impressive of them all -- a genius as a writer, photographer, film-maker, collage artist, sound designer, historian, poet...and a great human being.

Tom Luddy's print of Junkopia will screen at the PFA again tonight on a program with a chapter from Marker's 13-part The Owl's Legacy, and with two Marker works made well before his association with Luddy: Les Astronautes (pictured above) and La Jetée. Also screening is Emiko Omori's new documentary To Chris Marker, an Unsent Letter, which Luddy appears in along with other Frisco Bay-connected film personalities like David Thomson, Peter Scarlet, Erika Marcus and David and Janet Peoples. Be there!

Maureen Russell Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Maureen Russell, San Francisco film festival volunteer and cinephile

2011 was an embarrassment of riches for me, film-wise. I finally saw several classic films I'd never seen before (that it seemed everyone else had), waiting for my big screen opportunity. Good thing I got to a lot of films last year, as the 35mm screenings will be harder to find in the future. And my favorite festivals were as strong as ever- I limited myself to one film from each of them.

1. World On A Wire
I hadn’t heard of this film for television before. I ended up seeing it twice: first at SFIFF, the digital screening at the Kabuki. There was so much to take in visually (plus subtitles) and story-wise, that I had to go again when the Roxie screened it a few months later, on 35mm. The 200 minute film sounded like a challenge to do in one screening (with intermission), but I got lost in the intrigue and loved the color, humor, drama, dashing lead, West German early 70’s fashion, sets, mind-bending story, and figuring out the characters.

2. Toby Dammit, Castro Theatre
SFIFF’s last minute acting award and screening was worth the wait. A fun onstage interview with the still charming Terence Stamp was followed by a seldom-screened masterpiece Fellini film. It was 40 minutes of bliss for me: Edgar Allen Poe, late 60’s Italy, surrealism, horror, Italian sports cars, and Terence Stamp as an alcoholic actor.

3. He Who Gets Slapped, Castro Theatre
The entire SF Silent Film Festival was top notch and it was hard to pick a favorite. While I’m usually wary of films about clowns, this one stars Lon Chaney along with John Gilbert and Norma Shearer. The Swedish Matti Bye Ensemble returned to SF to accompany this Swedish director Sjöström’s MGM film, and the music soared.

4. Angel Face, Castro Theatre
Noir City 9 was another great 10 days of noir. Hard for me to pick a favorite here too, but this one definitely delivered. Director: Otto Preminger.

5. Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, Castro Theatre
Los Angeles neo-noir double feature with two period pieces.
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski: I’m one of the people who had never seen Chinatown before (only clips)! I was saving myself for a big screen, and it was worth the wait! Wow.
L.A Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson: Fantastic character and action driven story from James Ellroy’s novel; Great cast includes Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. I’d seen this on TV before, but so much better on the big screen and in this double feature.

6. The Devil’s Cleavage
Good thing I chose to go a screening during the PFA's Cult of the Kuchars series. George Kuchar was there to introduce The Devil’s Cleavage, and the actor playing the plumber was in the audience. A beautiful and outrageous film. And George died just months later...

7. David Holzman's Diary, Victoria Theatre
Another film I'd never heard of before. I found out about it as a Fandor free screening with the director (Jim McBride) in person. The film was beautifully shot and so direct that it stays with you, a mockumentary as well as a personal film. And looking at my list, it ties in with #9.

8. The Hunger/Nadja, the Roxie.
I'm not one to pass up a double feature of arty vampire films before Halloween. I remember loving both of these films when they came out, but hadn't seen either in years. They were great together and I appreciated them as much as ever. I was especially pleased to see Nadja screened on 35mm: a beautiful Pixelvision 90’s flick I wish more people could see. And SFMoMA brought Ann Magnuson (who had a memorable minor role in The Hunger to the Roxie for a revealing onstage interview. I even answered one of her trivia questions and got a prize and a hug from Ms. Magnuson!

9. SFMoMA’s Exposed On Film series
The series accompanied SFMOMA’s fascinating Exposed photography exhibit.
Films I caught at the Castro Theatre included Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler, introduced by Haskell Wexler!
and Kids on the Boundaries day triple feature with the haunting Deep End, Jerzy Skomilowski, Streetwise, Martin Bell, (director's restored version) and Pretty Baby, Louis Malle.
AND my first time seeing Lost Highway, David Lynch! I was waiting for a big screen for that one. It did not disappoint.

10. In Search of Christopher Maclaine: Man, Artist, Legend:
Wilder Bentley II, actor, and Lawrence Jordan, filmmaker in person. Curated by Brecht Andersch, presented by Andersch with Brian Darr, SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater:
The End, The Man Who Invented Gold, Beat & Scotch Hop by Christopher Maclaine. Trumpit by Lawrence Jordan. Moods in Motion by Ettilie Wallace.
I was not familiar with Christopher Maclaine before, so this was a great introduction. Seeing these films, especially The End, was a great bit of SF History. The onstage interview with men who were there and the cool slide show presented by Brecht Andersch and Brian Darr of their quest for SF locations in The End was topped off by drinks at Vesuvio’s, one of the film’s locations.