In Search of the Quintessential San Francisco Film
Having grown up in San Francisco, I have long yearned to see films that are quintessentially San Franciscan in character.
Most films shot here show off local landmarks as a shortcut to high production value or simply to provide atmosphere to their story. While there’s a vibrant and tight-knit film community in the Bay Area, San Francisco has oddly not developed its own film aesthetic. Perhaps it’s partly due to its proximity to Hollywood or to the local focus on documentaries rather than narrative films.
SAN FRANCISCO AS BACKDROP
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve enjoyed many films shot and/or set here, like the aptly named San Francisco (1936), Foul Play (1978), Fearless (1993), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) and most recently Steve Jobs (2015), but few of them have fully or accurately captured the character of San Francisco.
Yes, the occasional filmmaker has succeeded in using San Francisco as a backdrop to full effect as with Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic use of landmarks in Vertigo (1958) and Peter Yates’ famous car chase in Bullitt (1968). But, again, they were not local filmmakers. For them, San Francisco served as a mythical character far from the reality of its complex and ever-evolving daily life.
SAN FRANCISCO PORTRAYALS
Some have come close to portraying the City with some authenticity: the noir grit of Dark Passage (1947), the urban isolation in The Conversation (1974), the real Chinatown in Chan Is Missing (1982), the complex and often confusing social lives of single people in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1993 miniseries) and most recently a moving and realistic portrait of San Francisco’s own Harvey Milk in Milk (2008).
UNRECOGNIZABLE SAN FRANCISCO
The latest stand-out disappointment was Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013). Though I enjoyed the film for its usual Allenesque neuroses, I did not recognize a single character as being local. Instead, they were all translated versions of New York types. This made for a jarring viewing experience. While Cate Blanchett’s character was a Blanche DuBoisesque fish-out-of-water, I felt San Francisco was water-with-strange-fish.
Originally published on www.fogcitybloomer.com.
