Nathaniel Rich's San Francisco Noir is an entertaining book with a lot of information about noir and neo-noir movies featuring San Francisco locales, beginning with "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), ending with "Twisted" (2004). It's not quite as much the case that the San Francisco noirs started at the top and slid down, because "Vertigo" is right in the middle (the first neo-noir, filmed in color and released only three weeks after the last American noir, Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil"). Some of the other classic (black-and-white) noirs that Rich considers are "Out of the Past," "The Lady from Shanghai," "D.O.A." and some of the neo-noirs (color) are "Bullit," "The Conversation," "Dirty Harry," and "Point Blank." (Rich is more appreciative of the Joe Eszterhas-scripted ones, "Basic Instinct" and "Jade"(!) than anyone else has been in print.)
For each of the 41 movies that show some San Francisco locales, Rich lists director, cinematographer, three cast members, studio, year of release, and the site from the movie that he will describe (for instance, the Malloch Apartment Building at 1360 Montgomery Street, between Alta and Filbert streets that was where Lauren Bacall hid Humphrey Bogart in "Dark Passage," a favorite not only of mine but of some other audience members at a presentation with film clips by Rich).
There are some well-known locations, such as Union Square, Alcatraz (yes, Alcatraz is within the City and County of San Francisco), the Steinhart Aquarium, though "the locations featured in this book betray film noir's predilection for unusual, forgotten urban spaces. Many are quite unremarkable in themselves: a narrow alleyway, an abandoned theater, a fenced-in house. Others are not places at all, but gaps in the urban grid, holes that these films have filled with their own warped tales" (for instance, the address in Where Danger Lives" for the mansion Claude Rains's character owns).
Rich concludes his introduction hoping that "this curious book can serve as a map for this other San Francisco, where it's always night, where the fog is thick with dread, and where no one ever dies—they only get murdered." The pulpy wit of this expression of that very un-noir sentiment (hope) shows Rich's style. His comments on the 41 movies he has chosen to discuss are often wry, and so are some of what he writes about the location he writes about for each of the movies.
I enjoyed reading about the (18) movies I've seen and he made me want to see some others ("Chinatown at Midnight," for instance; I already wanted to see "Thieves' Highway"). Having lived in San Francisco for 27 years, I can figure out how to get to any of the addresses listed. Remembering well that it took me a decade to put together my cognitive maps of neighborhoods into a cognitive map of the whole city and the inter-relations of those neighborhoods, it seems to me that nonlocals would benefit by the inclusion of a map in the book. The book is only 164 pages and a two-page map would not only help nonlocals but would show patterning (I think only the northern half (or less) of the city would need to be included, even if the route of the car chase from "Bullit" was shown).
The other disappointment, the selection of only a single location for each movie, is somewhat lessened by mention of others (especially for "Vertigo" for which I'd like to know the location of Madge's apartment, though Rich mentions some of the locations other than the one he has chosen for exposition, the cemetery of Mission Dolores). I've never been sure which of the many outdoor stairways Bogart stumbles up in the dark night after his plastic surgery in "Dark Passage," for instance.
What there is in the book is very good, both about the movies and the film sites. I'd have liked some more: not necessarily more movies (perhaps none of the earlier version of The Maltese Falcon, "Satan Met a Lady" was filmed in San Francisco), but a map, and multiple locations for some movies, and a conclusion.
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