Movies set in San Francisco

[randy_byers]

I've long thought that San Francisco was strangely under-rated as a site of great movies, but having taken a closer look I'm no longer so sure about that. These lists are based on various lists found on the internet and a thorough investigation of IMDb, which lets you browse by location. I have a nagging feeling I've still missed some important ones. Is it really possible that none of the classic musicals were set in San Francisco? Anyway, I'm not coming up with anything earthshaking here.



These are movies I've seen that I either think are great movies or at least well worth watching again:

The Penalty (1920) - A Lon Chaney movie about a legless gangster forcing women to make hats! A very twisted romance, as many of Chaney's movies end up being.

Greed (1924) - Erich von Stroheim's legendary truncated masterpiece, based on Frank Norris' bleak, deterministic novel, McTeague. I've only seen it once, many years ago, but it makes the list for sheer fame.

Maltese Falcon (1941) - John Huston's adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and Sidney Greenstreet. Oh yeah, Elisha Cook Jr as Wilmer, as in my user icon.

Out of the Past (1947) - This is kind of a cheat, because this movie is only partly set in San Francisco, but the scenes there are iconic. Speaking of night and fog ...

D.O.A. (1950) - "Small-town accountant Frank Bigelow goes to San Francisco for a week's fun prior to settling down with fiancée Paula. After a night on the town, he wakes up with more than just a hangover; doctors tell him he's been given a "luminous toxin" with no antidote and has, at most, a week to live! Not knowing who did it or why, Bigelow embarks on a frantic odyssey to find his own murderer."

Vertigo (1958) - It took me three viewings to warm up to this cold, perverted classic from Alfred Hitchcock, but it always worked for me as a love-letter to San Francisco -- one of the best uses of the setting. San Francisco as dream city.

Bullitt (1968) - Not sure what I actually think of this movie, but it certainly has been influential in how the city has been used in films made since. (See The Rock below, for instance.)

Dirty Harry (1971) - Another gritty crime film set in one of the world's most romantic cities.

Harold and Maude (1971) - Finally, a burst of countercultural depravity joins the list.

What's Up, Doc? (1972) - Loved this screwball comedy from Peter Bogdanovich when it came out, but haven't seen it since. "It so happens, Mr. Simon, that Howard has had discussions with Leonard Bernstein about the possibility of conducting an avalanche ... in E flat."

Big Trouble in Little China (1986) - "What the hell does that mean? Huh? 'China is here,' I don't even know what the hell that means. All I know is this Lo Pan character comes out of thin air in the middle of a goddamn alley while his buddies are flying around on wires cutting everybody to shreds, and he just stands there waiting for me to drive my truck straight through him, with light coming out of his mouth!"

Hulk (2003) - Ang Lee's dark, repressed superhero movie was another one I had to warm up to, maybe because Danny Elfman stole the music from Vertigo.

Here are a couple of documentaries that I'll list separately, because there's no studio fakery involved, if nothing else:

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) - About one of the great figures in the Gay Rights movement.

The Cockettes (2002) - "On New Year's Eve, 1969, a flamboyant ragtag troupe of genderbending hippies took the stage of San Francisco's Palace Theater and The Cockettes were born. For the next 2 1/2 years, these outrageous drag performers created 20 shows with titles like 'A Crab on Uranus Means You're Loved' and 'Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma,' and were featured in four underground films. But when the Cockettes flew to New York City to appear Off Broadway -- well, you'll just have to see what happened when New Yorkers took a look at them."

So that really doesn't seem like much of a list, all things considered. Maybe I'm just overcritical. Here are a bunch of movies that I've seen that don't quite make the cut for me:

San Francisco (1936) - Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald fall in love in 1906. Uh-oh.

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) - Saw this as a kid and might like it better as an adult.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1968) - Liberalism at its preachiest.

Foul Play (1978) - Entertaining enough, and with some genuine moments of weirdness, but somehow bland in the end.

48 Hours (1982) - I can't stand Eddie Murphy.

Chan Is Missing (1982) - Another movie that I might like better now, but it seemed pretty lightweight at the time.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) - Some pretty funny scenes, but some painful ones too. Not as painful as the space hippies episode of the original series, it's true, but then again what is?

The Presidio (1988) - Pretty good thriller, but nothing special.

Sister Act (1992) - Pretty good comedy, but bland.

The Rock (1996) - Okay thriller. Pretty good cast, actually. Eh.

For further research:

Fog over Frisco (1934) - A young Bette Davis, directed by the German emigre William Dieterle.

Sudden Fear (1952) - Joan Crawford vehicle. Is this really set in SF?

Point Blank (1967) - Lee Marvin in gritty revenge drama.

Skidoo (1968) - Legendarily bad attempt by aging director Otto Preminger to explore the counterculture, but I am compelled to see Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing on acid and Groucho Marx playing God.

The Conversation (1974) - I have no idea why I've never seen this Francis Ford Coppola thriller with Gene Hackman.

Time after Time (1979) - H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper through time to modern San Francisco. Sounds good to me!

So what am I missing? What are your favorite films set in San Francisco?

Comments

[kproche.livejournal.com]

Flower Drum Song was set in SF

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Okay, that's one I'd somehow never heard of. Is it any good? Some good people working on it, including Russell Metty as cinematographer and Alfred Newman as conductor.

[kproche.livejournal.com]

It's a Rogers and Hammerstein score, with a couple of famous numbers in it, including "I enjoy being a girl"

I'm rather fond of it.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The Joy Luck Club. And while not a movie, anything Tales of the City-ish.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

48 HRS. They Call Me MISTER Tibbs. Harold and Maude. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Crumb. Basic Instinct. The Game. Play It Again, Sam.

Anything on this list. :) (Note the superset of this list)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Some of these are already on my lists, however. (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 48 Hrs, Harold and Maude.) And yes, I looked though the entire IMDb list of films shot in San Francisco.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Well, couldn't tell you why my eyes went clean over the duplicates, but they did. Sorry.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

And I see that I actually hadn't looked at the first IMDb list you pointed at, which is more interesting than the complete list in some ways.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I was going to recommend The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill as a documentary, as well.

I'm really surprised you haven't seen The Conversation. It's very subtle and slowly paced, but quite gripping (at least, I think so). It's one of my favorite movies. It has the reality breakdown and irresolution of Philip K. Dick or Jim Thompson.

Now you'll be disappointed. ;>

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, The Conversation has been on my list of Movies To See forever, but somehow it just hasn't made the transition to Done Been Seen.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

Watch The Conversation immediately.

I remember seeing 48 Hours after living in SF for a while and being floored by the way they fold up space...they go into a bar in the Mission and come out in Chinatown. Total tesseract.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The usenet group rec.arts.sf.fandom had a humongous thread under the subject "Ridiculous Movie Geography". There's a similar folding of Seattle space in Singles.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

When I was writing the screenplay for Virtual Light, I tried to keep the SF geography accurate. It was easy enough, living there. After my final draft, they handed it off to a screenwriter who lived in LA, and he must have had a few street names from a travel brochure (or maybe he'd only watched 48 Hours) because he had this huge bike race that hilariously started right up the hill from my house, ran straight downhill for a couple miles (the hill was only about a quarter mile long at the most), and ended on Market Street near Fisherman's Wharf. I would love to have seen that.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Really? Carol Carr and I both agree it's one of the key movies of the 1970s.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

What can I say? There are a lot of great films I haven't seen yet.

[n6tqs.livejournal.com]

You missed "Milk"- two Oscars, the Castro Theatre and Frank Robinson. Based on true events, which some of your friends participated in.

I can't easily locate the guidebook on the subject of real movie locations in SF that I have, but you may have covered all of those.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I should have mentioned Milk, which I did enjoy, but I actually think the documentary that I listed, The Times of Harvey Milk, is a better movie. I find Milk himself much more charismatic than Sean Penn.

On the other hand, I hadn't realized that Frank Robinson was one of Milk's speechwriters until I saw Milk. There's an issue of Earl Kemp's eI with a piece by Robinson about the movie.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

That Robinson essay went around right around the time Milk was coming out. It was a great recollection piece. I used to see Frank frequently at parties in San Francisco. Robinson's story THE POWER was made into a paranoid science fiction thriller with George Hamilton that I watched late at night when I was 11 years old...creeped the hell out of me, although I haven't dared to watch it since. Wasn't set in SF though.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

When VERTIGO went into its big rerelease, after years in the vaults, I watched in San Francisco with a San Francisco audience. (I'd already seen a bootleg video copy, taped off a TV broadcast, in a film class at the U of O.) The best part was the way people reacted to the locations: The same damn interesections were dug up and full of construction crews, all these years later, like permanent city landmarks. Later, my wife and I scrambled around in the ruins of the old Children's Hospital, setting for Scotty's convalescence, while they were converting it into condos. I scavenged some old in-boxes and a scotch-tape-holder from the debris. So for a while I had some Vertigo touch-stones among my office equipment. That's a very important film for me, partly because it captures something essential about the city, partly because we saw it on our first date. A few years ago I stayed in the hotel where Judy was living when Scotty rediscovered her... Spoto talks about how Hitchcock used the image of the city with its sheer streets and drops, its verticality, to echo the terrifying distances in relationships...something like that. His essay on Vertigo is very good.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

When I saw Vertigo in its big rerelease -- I believe it was at the Neptune here in Seattle -- the audience laughed at it, and I laughed along with them. As I say, it wasn't until I watched it a third time (not too long ago on the recent DVD) that I finally warmed to it. It took me three viewings to get past Jimmy Stewart as a sweaty pervert.

It hadn't even occurred to me that San Francisco's verticality plays into the theme of vertigo. Duh. A bit slow on the uptake, but nothing new there.

Another movie I left out because it seemed a shadow of another is Mel Brooks' Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

Did you already list Zodiac? I'm reading this in mail right now, not at LJ.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Nope, no Zodiac. Although Dirty Harry is a Zodiac movie too, as I recall.

[mlamprey.livejournal.com]

It's a good San Francisco movie. The attention to detail achieved with CG is astonishing. I confess, I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes making-of movies more than the movie itself.

[johnnyeponymous.livejournal.com]

I love San Francisco films

Just Like Heaven, a fairly dull Fantasy film from about 2007 or 08, was one, and there's always The Princess Diaries and it's sequel, though not as much as the first episode in that vaunted series.

I know there are a few silents that were set in SF, but I can't remember which ones.
Chris

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've got two silents listed, The Penalty (1920) and Greed (1924), but yeah, there's more. Including another Lon Chaney, The Shock (1923), which I need to see. Also Feeding Seagulls (1898), which is right back there at the beginning of movies.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The documentary may be a better movie, but you're listing movies set in San Francisco, not your favorite movies set in San Francisco. Include "Milk".

Parts of "The Graduate" are set in Berkeley, and there may be San Francisco scenes as well, but I can't recall.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Despite my subject-line, it wasn't my intent to list every movie set in San Francisco. IMDb suggests that there are 2650 of them, although that includes TV shows and porn movies. What was my intent? I suppose it was more focused on movies I'd actually seen or want to see, although I also had the vague idea that there would be hidden gems unearthed. Don't ask me why! The Penalty is probably the closest thing on my list to a great movie that most people haven't seen.

But anyway, Milk certainly belongs on the list as a movie I admired. I've seen The Graduate on other lists.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You included some movies you had negative comments on or hadn't even seen, so I didn't realize you were being restrictive.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I think it's fair to say that my intent was confused and confusing.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Basic Instinct, for a start. And aren't the Dirty Harry movies set in SF?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've never seen Basic Instinct and have never had much interest in it. (Likewise Mrs. Doubtfire, which is apparently also set in SF.)

I did list the first Dirty Harry movie.

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

Very neat list. "Point Blank" is a stunning movie, well worth seeing for several reasons, but I didn't realize it had been shot in SF. Lee Marvin has a kind of "unstuck in time" vibe in this movie and I guess it makes a sense of place harder to pin down too.

"Time after Time" is a weaker movie, but I do remember it wonderfully showcasing some great SF scenery. It is an enjoyable movie and features fine performances by Malcolm Macdowell and Mary Steenburgen.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Honestly, The Conversation doesn't make all that much of the fact that it's set in San Francisco either.