Bagged, Dad, by the Bay
By Miguel Pendás

For nearly 200 years, San Francisco has lured starry-eyed throngs seeking happiness and gold in this paradisaical setting. It’s not surprising then, with so many false expectations, that so many are disappointed, that the suicide count on the Golden Gate Bridge is so high it has to be kept secret, that this is a city with a dark side. The perfect city, in other words, for film noir.

San Francisco was a film noir director’s dream. It had atmosphere in spades, with its notorious fog and its dense urban center, teeming with working masses. It had the Embarcadero with its unruly longshoremen in what was once the busiest port on the coast. It had genteel night clubs and race tracks as well as rowdy Barbary Coast dives. And the mysterious Orient was vividly present. Hollywood encouraged shooting on location after WWII, and San Francisco quickly became a favored spot. It was known as the City of Seven Hills: one for each Deadly Sin?

Noir flourished at this time, when much of the nation was undergoing a collective mental breakdown. The enthusiasm that accompanied America’s entry into the war was followed by widescale disillusionment as ordinary Americans experienced firsthand the senselessness and brutality of the war.

San Francisco was where they had shipped out by the hundreds of thousands, flags waving as they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Nearly half of those pulled from battle were not physically wounded, but mental casualties, emotionally shattered by the shock of war, unable to continue. What bettter place to record the disillusionment?

“Nowadays, it’s getting so’s you can’t trust men anymore,” says a North Beach lounge singer (Marie Windsor) in Edward Dmytryk’s THE SNIPER. “You can’t trust women, either,” replies the psychotic on the adjoining barstool (Arthur Franz). That about sums it up.

In film noir, entering the city is often seen as a descent into hell. In BORN TO KILL, another psychotic killer (Lawrence Tierney) and his codependent socialite lover (Claire Trevor) take a ferry from Emeryville under the Bay Bridge and arrive at the Ferry Building. It is as if they had been ferried across the River Styx, arriving at the banks of Hades, because the city is about to become the place of their undoing.
Nowhere is the metaphor more apparent than in THE MALTESE FALCON. When the black bird arrives at the docks from Hong Kong, the ship, La Paloma, becomes engulfed in flames.

In THIEVES’ HIGHWAY, a young vet from the central valley farmland (Richard Conte) is unemployed and desperately in need of money. He crosses the Bay Bridge to San Francisco to sell his truckload of fruit in the claustrophobic Produce District, a rat-infested hellhole centered on Washington Street near the Embarcadero. In the end, he manages to claim his fortune, rescue his Eurydice and escape.

The Union Square area and Market Street with their hotels, office buildings and theater district were central to film noir. In THE MALTESE FALCON, the “S-P” (Southern Pacific) sign, one of downtown’s notable landmarks, shines through the downtown office window of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart). And Sam’s partner, Miles Archer, took a fall (literally!) from the top of Stockton Street at the corner of Bush. Author Dashiell Hammet wrote about the San Francisco that he knew: He lived on Eddy Street, ate at John’s Grill on Ellis.

From watching RACE STREET, starring George Raft, we learn that the Golden Gate Theater at Eddy and Taylor was once the thriving RKO Golden Gate movie theater. In THE LINEUP, we discover that there was once a movie theater in the posh Fairmont Hotel, the Nob Hill Theatre. How far cinema has fallen!

In DARK PASSAGE, a nocturnal cab ride takes a wrongly convicted man escaped from the big house (Bogart) past landmarks like Pastine’s cocktail lounge on Kearny, and Foster’s cafeteria just around the corner on Geary. Those places are gone now, but, for a real down-and-out film noir experience, you can still follow in Bogie’s footsteps and stay at the Kean Hotel at 1018 Mission. Ask for a room on the fourth floor in the back.

The exotic Chinatown of the past appears in several films noirs, most notably THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, as Rita Hayworth, pursued by Orson Welles, goes into a theater on Grant Avenue. In other films, like WOMAN ON THE RUN and THE HOUSE ON TELEGRAPH HILL, generic Chinese night clubs stand in for the world famous Forbidden City, once located at 363 Sutter.

In film noir, the rich live in places like Nob Hill, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill. In SUDDEN FEAR, a wealthy playwright (Joan Crawford) lives at the Tamalpais Apartments at 1201 Greenwich, at the top of Russian Hill. Just two blocks away, at the bottom of Lombard Street, the “crookedest street in the world,” she keeps the handsome crook (Jack Palance) who plans to murder her for her money. Together they hit the playgrounds of the well-to-do: the Chapeau Blanc and Le Cirque in the Fairmont Hotel, the Opera, Tanforan Race Track on the Peninsula and the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

In DARK PASSAGE, Bogart finds a benevolent angel in a wealthy heiress (Lauren Bacall) high in a Telegraph Hill aerie. The etched art deco glass walls of the apartment building glow from within.
A pan of the skyline featuring a shot of the Bay Bridge was obligatory for San Francisco noir, and so was a visit to the end of the earth: Ocean Beach. This location featured the dramatic setting of the Cliff House overlooking the Pacific, the stunning glass dome of the Sutro Baths and the grotesque carnival atmosphere of Playland-at-the-Beach.

The brilliant final scene of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI utilized the surreal Crazy House, the house of mirrors at Playland. Laughing Sal, the life-size coin-operated doll, mocks the denizens of WOMAN ON THE RUN before the final, mad rollercoaster ride. And in the marvelous Sutro Baths in THE LINEUP, a cold-blooded murderer (Eli Wallach) sends a man in a wheelchair plunging over the railing to his death. In THE SNIPER, a serial killer (Arthur Franz) practices his craft with deadly accuracy at a Playland shooting gallery.

Does this world of film noir still exist?

You can still see the Bay Bridge of course, the cable cars and Fisherman’s Wharf. But many locations are gone, gentrified out of existence. The Embarcadero is now a docile tourist area named after a wisecracking newspaper columnist. The Produce District has been transformed into the sleek towers of the Alcoa Building, the Golden Gateway Center and the Embarcadero Center; if there are any rats left, they’re wearing suits. Playland has achieved the ultimate horror as a cluster of prefab condos. But for a quarter you can still hear Laughing Sal’s lunatic laughter at the Musée Mechanique below the Cliff House.

You can still play the ponies at Bay Meadows, but Tanforan Race Track is now home to Sears, Walgreen’s and Target. Today, when you bend an elbow at 15 Kearny Street, it won’t be to throw down a whisky on the rocks at Pastine’s cocktail lounge (seen in DARK PASSAGE); it’ll be to talk on a cell phone from Cingular. You can’t go to Shanghai Low at 532 Grant Street anymore (seen in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI), but you can have lunch at the no doubt tamer Lotus Garden Restaurant at the same address. No more scantily clad showgirls in “naughty” revues at Chinese nightclubs on Sutter Street, but rather upscale clothing stores.

Telegraph Hill is still being watched over by Coit Tower, with the stern, stone eyes we saw in film noir, except they seem softer, friendlier now. The heavenly apartment building in DARK PASSAGE still glows.
Steinhardt Aquarium hasn’t changed much since the revelatory scene in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, but you better see it soon, because it too will be renovated, and another piece of history will be available to us only in the movies.