10 classic film thrillers that take you back to a now-vanished San Francisco
With its steep streets, airy vistas, and unique counterculture, San Francisco has attracted filmmakers since the silent era.
In the decades before tech crept up the Peninsula from Silicon Valley to colonize San Francisco, The City was a regional shipping and manufacturing hub, relatively working class but with a veneer of old-world-meets-new glamour, and ripe for intrigue and noir.
That now-vanished San Francisco has long appealed to me — as a Bay Area native, historian, and old film enthusiast. Cooped up by COVID-19, I’ve turned to watching classic movies set in The City as my grandparents — and (wow!) my parents — first experienced it.
Though no one asked for it, here are my choices for “best” classic San Francisco thrillers. For now, it’s limited to the 1940s and 1950s.
10. Thieves’ Highway (1949). Set in The City’s long-gone waterfront produce market, next to the present-day culinary mecca of the Ferry Building, and starring Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte, and Valentina Cortese, it tells the story of a war vet fighting a greedy and corrupt wholesaler. Why it’s special: its sympathetic portrayal of small-time growers and pickers in California’s verdant Central Valley (including many immigrants) as well as the arduous pre-I-580 trek to bring their produce to market.
9. Impact (1949). Brian Donlevy’s Walter Williams is a cuckolded husband who survives a murder attempt by his wife’s lover, who then dies instead, and then hides out and watches his wife face conspiracy charges. The lovely, idealized small town where the husband lays low is “Larkspur, Idaho,” but scenes were actually filmed in Larkspur, Marin County, which has changed considerably since then. Why it’s special: It’s one of legendary Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong’s most substantive late roles — although the film trades in uncomfortable tropes about Asian-Americans and Chinatown.
8. The House on Telegraph Hill (1951). Cortese’s Victoria Kovelska is a Polish concentration camp survivor who assumes the identity of a dead friend in order to reach the United States, only to be pulled into a greedy murder plot. Love that opening shot of San Francisco’s beautiful low-slung post-war skyline. Why it’s special: It’s a real building on Montgomery Street and houses the now-shuttered-but-soon-to-reopen Julius Castle restaurant.
7. The Lineup (1958). Cops are in a race against time to nab the men murdering tourists in order to collect the heroin they tricked the innocents into smuggling from Hong Kong. Eli Wallach’s psychopathic hitman is so well played that he’s uncomfortable to watch. Why it’s special: That car chase (check it here at 1:18.00), beginning at Ocean Beach’s Cliff House and ending at the still-under-construction Embarcadero Freeway, a double-decker steel-and-concrete monstrosity that blighted The City’s waterfront for three decades, is killer.
6. Sudden Fear (1952). Joan Crawford’s Myra Hudson is a wealthy middle-aged playwright whose riches are targeted by her young, handsome, scheming husband, Jack Palance, and his beautiful mistress, Gloria Grahame. It’s all psychological tension, murky motivations, and melodrama (though the climactic chase is not San Francisco, but was instead filmed in LA’s since-vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood). Why it’s special: Crawford’s sensational here, going from self-assured professional to insecure single woman to googly-eyed lover to … anger, fear, confusion, terror … she brings it.
5. The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Orson Welles’ Mike O’Hara is a sailor who develops and nurtures a sexual obsession with Elsa Bannister (played by his then-real-life-wife Rita Hayworth, wow x 2) as they — along with Bannister’s disabled husband — flit from New York to Mexico via the Panama Canal and then to San Francisco. Pity about Welles’ risible Irish accent. Why it’s special: The cinematography at the Playland at the Beach on the Great Highway in the Outer Richmond is, um, awesome. This was the first (maybe?) film to use a mirror maze in this way and my oh my how it was used.
4. D.O.A. (1950). Edmund O’Brien’s Frank Bigelow learns he’s been poisoned while on a wild weekend in San Francisco, so he has to track down the culprit before he succumbs to the poison. Dig that opening tracking shot inside LA’s City Hall, man, as Bigelow walks into a police station to announce his own murder. Dig the use of a slide whistle to signal Bigelow’s sexual arousal. And dig that dash down Market Street, man. It was a “stolen shot” filmed among pedestrians who didn’t know a movie was being made. Why it’s special: It’s one of the earliest cinematic depictions of Beat subculture when our hero visits a “jive” joint called The Fisherman Club along the Embarcadero. The scene’s hilarious.
3. Vertigo (1958). James Stewart’s John “Scottie” Ferguson is a haunted ex-detective who becomes obsessed with a suicidal beauty after her husband has tasked him with watching her. Scottie’s psycho-sexual obsession with Kim Novak’s character is uncomfortable, but the film is visually arresting. The only movie among these to be filmed originally in color, it’s laden with San Francisco spots, including the Legion of Honor, James C. Flood Mansion, Mission Dolores, Fort Point, and many, many shots of Coit Tower. Why it’s special: Those nightmare sequences are potent enough to give you the shakes.
2. The Maltese Falcon (1941). Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade is a jaded, tough-guy private eye who becomes embroiled in a case involving a beautiful dame (Mary Astor), misfit criminals (including Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet), and a priceless bird of prey statue. The dialogue is so tightly written and the plotting so well-paced, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t actually filmed in San Francisco.
Why it’s special: Check out that 7-minute unbroken scene of exposition in which Greenstreet explains the provenance of the falcon while waiting for the drug he secretly slipped in Bogart’s drink to take effect. And it’s just the prototypical film noir, duh.
1. Dark Passage (1947). Convicted of murdering his wife, Bogart’s Vincent Parry escapes San Quentin, is taken in by a sympathetic local artist (Lauren Bacall, hel-lo-o-o), and then sets about trying to prove his innocence. It has one of the most terrifying scenes of plastic surgery, done by a sketchy backroom doc, in movie history. For more than half the film, we don’t even see Bogart: it’s notable for its first-person camera effect, in which the audience only observes events via Parry’s perspective, until the big reveal following his operation. Awesome shots of the Tiburon Peninsula, the entrance into The City from the GGB, the art deco Malloch House on Montgomery Street on Telegraph Hill, the Presidio, and Harry’s Wagon diner on Polk Street. Why it’s special: The chemistry between real-life couple Bogart and Bacall can’t be faked.
