San Francisco has always looked good on film, but in The Sniper (1952) and The Lineup (1958), the city becomes something more than scenery. It becomes a character—a maze of steep streets, fog, waterfronts, alleys and lonely neighborhoods where killers can disappear and cops have to pound the pavement to find them. Rachel Walther, author of Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, joins me to talk about two very different pieces of Fifties’ Frisco noir.
The Sniper follows a troubled veteran who stalks women with an M1 carbine, while police struggle to understand what is driving him. Shot largely on location, the film offers an unusually intimate view of the city without ever actually naming San Francisco. Then comes The Lineup, where two very strange hitmen arrive in town to retrieve heroin hidden in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers. Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, steam rooms, Sutro’s Baths, the Cliff House and a spectacular chase across the city all come together in one beautifully grimy piece of Frisco noir.
Along the way, Rachel and I talk about director Don Siegel, the Hollywood blacklist, the Film Noir Foundation, Eddie Muller, the lost San Francisco of free parking and empty streets—and the way these old crime pictures can sometimes feel like a decoder ring for the darker machinery of American life, and one San Francisco that exists now mostly on celluloid.
TRANSCRIPT
Knox: Welcome to the Frisco the Secret History podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Today I’m talking to Rachel Walther, author and author, expert on all things noir.
Before we get going, want to say thank you to Walter Haas at Graffeo Coffee Roasters at 735 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco.
Graffeo was founded in 1935 and has been selling coffee beans to the public and the best restaurants near and far ever since. I have been drinking Grafeo coffee since I lived around the corner on Mason Street back in the 70s.
If you can’t get to North Beach you can go to graffeo.com that is g r a f f e o dot com and order there they sell whole beans or will grind to your request. I love starting my day with a huge mug of dark roast. And I am really happy to say that Graffeo Coffee is a founding sponsor for the Frisco The Secret History podcast. I am thrilled to be associated with such an historic and iconic San Francisco brand. Graffeo beans are, as it says on the package, simply the finest coffee in the world. It’s true.
Give Graffeo a try. You will thank me.
Knox: How are you today, Rachel?
Rachel: I’m good. Thanks for having me back, Knox.
Knox: Well, thank you so much. What… Do you want to once again tell us a little bit about your background, what you’ve done?
Rachel: Yeah, my debut book came out earlier this year called Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon. And as the title suggests, it’s all about the true life backstory that inspired the 1975 film directed by Sidney Lumet starring Al Pacino and John Cazale. It goes into not only like the production history of how the movie came to be, but how the true crime events that inspired it, the folks in that side of things really ended up getting entangled in the film’s success and that success altered their lives in turn as well. So it was just a fascinating story, and I’m glad I was able to put that out. The response so far has been really, really positive.
{Knox) You’ve been touring the country.
Rachel:Yeah.
Knox: Doing appearances in movie theaters.
Rachel: Yeah, hosting screenings of Dog Day Afternoon and partnering with local bookshops to sell the book. And, you know, the response has just been wonderful. I’ve made appearances in Portland, Seattle, a couple in LA, Long Beach, New York, and I am due to have two more events left at Chicago on … Labor Day, September 5th at the Music Box Theater, and then down in Dallas that next Sunday, the 13th, at the Texas Theater. So I’m sort of rounding out the tour, going back to the Music Box where I used to work when I lived there.
So, yeah, that’s going to be very exciting.
Knox: You’re like flitting across the country every which way.
Rachel: Yes, I definitely underestimated what a toll that type of travel takes. I’m feeling the extra 10 years on me as I’m going around. But I did was luckily I built in some breaks in between jaunts. And so I’m definitely fully rested and to hit the town.
Knox: Good. Well, what movies are we discussing today?
Rachel: Today, two movies that really showcase San Francisco, not only as a location and a backdrop, but I’d argue really like another character in the film, because sometimes either parts of the San Francisco geography or limitations of it influence what characters do or sort of traps they get caught in are sort of set by the way that San Francisco is constructed. And so it’s two movies that really interface with the city in a really direct way, and also two films from the 50s. So there was a lot more on-location photography that you really get to showcase the actual city as opposed to backlots and allusions to San Francisco that …
Films that then ended up being primarily shot on studio backlots instead.
Knox: Well, which one do you want to discuss first?
Rachel: Well, just to set folks up, the two movies we’re talking about today are The Sniper from 1952 and then The Lineup from 1958.
To dive right in, The Sniper, it was a very, it still remains a pretty strange film. And it sets itself up. It sort of sets the audience up for what they’re going to watch right at the beginning with this sort of printed square up on screen that says, you know, our understanding of the sex criminal is inadequate and … you know, laws don’t exist to handle this sort of incoming scourge is not the word they used, but basically like this is a mental health crisis. That is sweeping the country. Law enforcement is helpless to … Deal with it appropriately. And the film goes on to show this sort of, you know, like lone white guy who has a really deep-rooted and mysterious issue with women, He’s a veteran. He lives alone in San Francisco. He works for a dry cleaning business.
And you see his … he becomes increasingly unhinged and untethered to reality and You see that as the result of he starts to grab his M1 carbine rifle and he starts just picking off women throughout the town. He starts with someone that he’s made an acquaintance with who’s actually extremely nice to him. And it’s implied that because he’s attracted to her, he doesn’t know what to do with those feelings. And those feelings get translated into an outward violence and rage that he takes out not only on her, but then a procession of women after that.
It was common in the early 50s. It was, and it’s really, the interesting thing is that the screenwriters, Edna Anhalt and Edward Anhalt, they really wanted to underscore how much of like an actual human being this character was. They didn’t portray him as a madman or a psycho. He doesn’t take any glee in what he’s doing.
Arthur Franz, the actor, he was just excellent at depicting this sort of inner turmoil that this character has, he sort of feels compelled to do these acts and to kill, but he also keeps trying to sort of stop himself or leave clues for the cops to get caught. He even sends them a little letter saying something to the effect of, you know, stop me before I kill again, please find me. So it’s that tension between …
You know it’s going to escalate. You know things are going to get worse. But then sort of watching it play out and then in turn watching the detectives with different investigation styles sort of mix old world methods of, you know, just flat foot shoe leather pounding the pavement and talking to witnesses, those sorts of methods with newer psychological methods. And what’s interesting is, you know, in the, what, 50, 60, 70 years since this film came out, we are now so attuned to these types of, like, serial killer films where, oh, you know, let’s do a psychological profile of these people, you know, presumably men, typically. These guys, you know, each sexual deviant has sort of a groove that they run in, so we can discount, you know, the window peepers if this guy is a, you know, shoots with a rifle, those sorts of things. And so they talk to a psychologist who gives them the lowdown on what type of man they might be looking for. And there’s all these scenes where there’s this clash between hardheaded police methods., newer psychiatric techniques that are initially dismissed as sort of too soft, too academic, and just sort of seeing that interplay of how that comes together, building clues, building a profile. That’s become such a trope as serial killers have, you know, sadly become their own genre.
But The Sniper, you know, 1952, this was really one of the first times we saw this story play out. And it still remains one of the most oddly sympathetic and nuanced portrayals of a character like this. They still kind of keep him generic enough, because I think the screenwriters were really wanting to say, hey, this character is just that. He is a character that’s a representation of something larger that’s brewing in the society that we’re not equipped to deal with, because also like a lot of the men that had these maladies, since everyone is kind of coming out of the war.
These are all guys that had these issues that now are trained to kill and also know how to evade capture and can defend themselves in a way that, you know, mass the mass audience wasn’t trained to a generation earlier,
And It’s a movie that … It so benefits from being in San Francisco in the sense that they really portray, Burnett Guffey, the cinematographer, really emphasizes with these like flat focal lengths how vertical the city is, how vertical, people are really shown as sort of literally being on top of each other and how … There’s so many scenes where our main character, played by Arthur Franz, he’s … staking someone out, you see the women in that scope site. That’s become such a sort of common visual cue now.
Knox: Yeah.
Rachel: It’s so easy for him to remain undetected in this sort of vertical urban jungle. And also it’s just, it’s so scenic and lush and lovely. And so there’s this weird interplay between, you know, your eyes are just drinking up these gorgeous views of San Francisco.
You know, anyone listening to this podcast, a San Francisco history buff, is going to be trying to watch, okay, does…
(0:11:14) this view from the exterior of an apartment match with the view that we see in the interior, those sorts of things. And so the sniper really does a good job of …
Catching…
I’m trying to think of how to put it.
Catching views of the city from residents, from… It’s very much like a perspective on the city from a local. And they were also…
They took great pains to never name the city. San Francisco is never mentioned in the story. Even when they’re showing newspapers, they don’t say San Francisco.
Part of that was like a cover themselves move because it was such a hot topic. And something that the production was nervous about at the time was while they were writing and shooting this film, a sniper actually was loose in Los Angeles. And they were really afraid that they would be, you know, that this team would be accused of capitalizing on that or sensationalizing that. So they really wanted to make this sort of just a portrait of a man in urban society. Yeah.
But, A, it’s clearly San Francisco and no other city looks quite like that. But what’s nice about that, though, is you don’t really get any of the …
big ticket landmarks. You don’t see the Golden Gate Bridge or the Bay Bridge. You do get some views of Coit Tower, but that’s okay. Maybe there’s other structures in other cities. And so they do also show a cable car, but at that time, there were various streetcar lines in other towns as well. So it’s just this nice kind of like, I’m thinking of the eye doctor, like it kind of just blurs out the city just enough that it’s used in this really expressionistic and stylistic way, rather than with the other film we’re talking about, the lineup. That is let’s do this awesome tour of the city. And okay, we saw the De Young Museum, we saw the Steinhardt Aquarium. It’s almost like you’re checking things off in a travelogue. And it was also, I think, a lot of the … The canniness with picking these locations and stitching together, you know, chase scenes where they do kind of move from one neighborhood to the other in a movie magic kind of way, drew his director Edward Dimitrik. This was the first film that he made back in the United States after he’d been exiled to the UK for a little over a year. He was one of the Hollywood 10. He had been blacklisted during the big wave of the House Un-American Activities Communist Red Scare. And he initially refused to name names. He was not able to work in Hollywood. He was in England for a little over a year, and then he recanted.
He came back to the States. He did name names. And it kind of, it left a black mark against his name, sort of on both sides of the ledger. You know, a lot of his friends that were members of the Communist Party or stayed true to their sympathies, you know, folks like Abraham Polanski, they wanted nothing to do with them. But then, of course … folks sort of on the more hawkish side were still skeptical of him. It does seem like Dimitrik was … uh what’s the word um ardently actually was repentant about his communist ties. He really … came to see that that was not … the thing for him. And so he, it was just basically like a big moral, re-evaluation that he had just undergone, and The Sniper was his return.
So it was, you know, under a million dollar budget. It was a fairly cheap
B-movie as far as funds go, but it really has a lot of cachet to it in the sense that, I mean, you know, Dimitriq’s a top-notch director.
He did great noir films in the late 40s, like Murder, My Sweet, Cornered. And then they got Adolf Manjou to star in the film as the main police detective, which is … Nuts for an insane choice seemingly at the time because Adolf Manjou was Mr. Name-Namer. He was the most like virulent anti-communist.
Totally going against all of that. Very outspoken. Wanting to ferret out anyone with those types of sympathies. And so it’s odd that, what, you know, half, not even a half dozen years later, here he is starring in a movie …
You know, directed by Dimitrik, but he his reckon honestly, his reasoning was I need the money. I don’t really care. Let’s just make this movie. And, you know, he’s usually this dapper continental type in this film. He’s shaved his mustache off. He’s wearing he’s got kind of a rumpled, like semi Columbo vibe. So it was a real change of pace for him.
And getting back to, excuse me, what I was starting this whole long anecdote with was in having Dimitrik as the director, he grew up in San Francisco. He was actually, he was born in Canada, born in Vancouver, but his childhood was spent in the city. And so…
He just had that innate sense of, you know, how things come together, great little locations that I don’t think an out-of-town person maybe would have spotted. And he really does give, like, a locals feel to the film, too.
And, you know, it all just works well. I mean, Arthur Franz, I think is definitely, I won’t say underrated because he got a lot of … he’s gotten a lot of sort of retrospective praise for his performance. Um, but so much of, his action in the film as the sniper is reaction shots. He doesn’t talk a lot. You know, he’s one of those lone, quiet, what we’d now call like an incel type. And, um … So it’s the work of a lot of the other character actors around him that he sort of has to play off of. So it’s kind of a thankless role that … He straddles really well. And then Manju and Gerald Moore, who plays sort of the younger hipster cop, they’re the voices of Law & Order, and it’s this nice mix of … kind of 30s … pre-forensic…
Then they’ve also brought in a psychiatrist or excuse me, psychologist. I’m not quite sure there. And played by Richard Kiley, who’s this sort of like didactic voice of, you know, the new way of doing things. And, you know, how that all folds together, the movie still really remains strange. It was very unsettling to audiences who watched it because it doesn’t really provide a lot of solutions. Basically, its thesis statement at the end is this is a problem. What are we all going to do about it?
But there’s no, you know…
I don’t want to give away the ending, but the ending is very subdued and not what you would expect. It doesn’t give you that satisfying conclusion of, ooh, that’s all taken care of. Now we can move on with our day. It leaves you with that unsettling feeling. So it was pulled from theaters a little early. It didn’t do a lot of business.
(And Even there was an incident, I think, in Toronto where … a teenager, he became obsessed with the movie. He saw it like five times and then he went out and tried to shoot a bunch of people.
I think they, I don’t believe anyone was killed, but a few folks were injured. And his quote was, they shouldn’t have let me see that film. Like it really kind of ignited something dormant in him. And so it was things like that. Like the movie in a way was too real, too prescient. And so…
I think there’s a quote, and I have to give a lot of credit. A lot of the research and information about this film has already been done. The founder of the Film Noir Foundation, Eddie Muller, has a great commentary on this film. And so my info is based on conversations with him. And he has a lot of insight as an SF native as well. But I think his quote was, the sniper is too obscure to be influential, but…
(0:18:41) Thank you.
(0:18:42) One person I think that was greatly influenced by the movie because he wrote about it was Paul Schrader. Let me just give me just a moment. I know I wrote a quote down.
Knox: This is a …
Rachel: Yeah, because Paul Schrader, as he was getting into films in the … early 70s, he wrote this very influential essay called Notes on Film Noir, and he credits The Sniper as being … sort of a kickoff of the movements, like third and final phase in the mid to late 50s that he calls like the descent into psychopathology. And I think you really do see … the seeds of a film like Taxi Driver in something like The Sniper, where it’s this veteran that he just doesn’t know where to put his emotions.
He’s got these problems in his system. And the movie also alludes to something that is still unfortunately way too common is just the complete overwhelm of the American medical system, the just distracted indifference from a lot of people on like a person-to-person level, when if you can’t sort of self-diagnose and present to someone, hey, I’ve got X issue and this is how to treat it, if you sort of need to have your problems teased out of you, there might not be anyone there to take that time or to have the patience or to have the wherewithal because everything, you know, is just, sort of a five alarm fire with everyone else that needs more acute care.
So this movie alludes to a lot of things that honestly we’re still dealing with. And it’s also just, there’s gorgeous remastered versions available, it is something that folks can catch for free online through YouTube, or if you’re a San Francisco history buff and have a player, this is worth the Blu-ray investment for sure. Just to, you can just leave the sound off, like just watch it for the locations alone, it’s just sumptuous.
Knox: Just real quickly, is Eddie Muller’s commentary available anywhere? Rache: It is on that Blu-ray edition, but I don’t … I don’t believe that you can … Folks, I know, actually, I’ve heard tell there’s these pipelines to sort of access commentary tracks online. I don’t know about that myself.
Knox: Just checking.
Rachel: Oh, yeah. And he’s spoken about it. You know, it’s been on his Noir Alley program on Turner Classic Movies. And so I know he’s done really great intros and outros that are available.
And then, yeah, it’s also, too, that Paul Schrader essay really goes into it. Because the sad thing about The Sniper was, at least for me, you know, coming up in the… late 90s to the 2000s, 2010s,
That movie was crazy hard to find. I didn’t see that until I would think I was in my late 20s, just because it had languished. It hadn’t gotten its due. It hadn’t gotten a good home video release. It was really hard to track down a print and Get it in front of people. But now I think thanks in part to the work of folks like Eddie, it’s really now gone back into the canon where it should be. And it’s also a favorite of Martin Scorsese’s too. He’s someone who’s was really promoting its work, restoration and reappraisal.
Knox: You know, we’ve never really talked about the Noir Foundation, I don’t think. I’d like to ask you another question, which is your own…
Rachel: Oh, yeah.
Knox: I wouldn’t call it interest in fascination with noir movies. When did that begin? And has it been a lifelong thing? And also, why don’t you share a little bit about the Noir Foundation and their annual festivals?
Rachel: Oh, sure. And interestingly, those two stories are actually, just for me personally, a bit intertwined. Yeah, I mean, classic Hollywood in general has been a lifelong obsession for me.
My dad and I to connect after my folks got divorced. He’s an obsessive movie fan, and old movies are safe for kids. You can watch mature adult movies that deal with mature themes, and I always appreciated movies where I wasn’t being talked down to. I never really liked kids’ movies when I was a kid, and so I just took to classic movies. And so then we were off to the races watching all the old Warner Brothers films, et cetera.
I think I gravitated towards film noir just because I always also had an interest in photography. That’s what I went to school to study. And so those movies are just so … deeply engaging on a visual level. But also I did grew up with a bit of a pessimistic worldview. You know, I was raised in Phoenix, Arizona, you know, from like a very working class family. And so just life was hard. Things were tough. And it was a really harsh landscape, both environmentally, like weather wise and politically for someone with my sensibilities.
And so I gravitated to that worldview. And it honestly, it’s … Around that time, Eddie Muller’s book, Dark City, The Lost World of Film Noir, was released. And I just ate that up. And then that became my template for films to look for, you know, driving around town looking for them on VHS. And that book was always a bit of a North Star.
And along with the Film Noir Encyclopedia by Elaine Silver and James Yersini. And so between those two, those kind of became my dueling Bibles for what I focused on.
I studied photography in college, and I always had one or two movie jobs, you know, at rental houses or theaters that I was able to continue to hoover up these films. And just through, I mean, that’s a longer story than we have time for, but a bit of serendipity and a bit of persistence. Once I’ve…
Once I moved to the Bay Area, I became connected with Eddie Muller personally and the Film Noir Foundation more broadly. AI now write for their magazine, their quarterly film journal on a pretty regular basis. You can get that in print online through print on demand services. You know, just look them up. You can get the link. Or if you donate to the foundation, you get a free digital copy just sent straight to you. And also…
I started attending the annual film festival every year in San Francisco, it used to be at the Castro. And so just like meeting everyone in that community there and…
There’s just, it’s jerk free. I’ll put it that way. Like, you know, with with any community, any scene, whether it’s music or movies, whatever, there’s, you know, kind of spiky personalities or folks you have to work around or the person that runs the organization is a bit much. This was the antithesis of that. Eddie is super engaging. He’s always wanting new voices, new perspectives. He’s…
He’s very much of the idea that noir is kind of a shifting and fluid and changing definition and, you know, anything that gets young people into the theaters or gets more people watching more movies, let’s have that discussion, let’s have these conversations. And so it was just, it was honestly that open, inviting atmosphere to the organization as a whole that has kept me such a ardent zealot of, I think that’s a…
(0:25:38) God, that’s a… I’m saying the same thing twice.
Knox: Redundant.
Rachel: Redundant, thank you. Yeah, it’s very, very zealous. And also, too, you know, if you don’t live in the Bay Area, now they do the festival out in Oakland at the Grand Lake Theater late January. But they take it all over the country. I want to say it’s maybe in nine different cities now. So most major cities have an outlet that they play a version of the year’s lineup.
Knox: Do they still do it at the Castro as well?
Rachel: it’s changed ownership and it’s much more of like a live music venue and the seating’s all different. Another planet bought it, I think. Yeah. And there was a lot of local consternation with trying to get them to save it. And they basically ignored every, they ignored the community’s wishes to retain its character and then just sort of said, nope, we’re going to do what we want. And so I think that’s a real like hot button topic still, even a few years later with who you talk to in the Bay Area. I
I understand both sides of it, but I think I’m definitely much more in the camp of it would have been nice to keep it the way that it was. But also, to be fair, personally, I love that it’s out in Oakland now at the Grand Lake Theater. Yes, yes. A, because it’s now 10 minutes away from my house rather than an hour and 10 minutes. Right. And it’s just…
It’s just a real, it feels, things feel just a little easier, a little comfier. Part of it’s just like the physical layout of the theater. It’s so beautiful. As much more conducive to a large crowd. Yes. It doesn’t quite have the same grandeur as the Castro, but what it lacks in that, it makes up for in just like community enthusiasm, I think. And it’s also drawing in a different crowd. A lot of people that didn’t have San Francisco events on their radar are now flocking to the Grand Lakes. So yeah, this theater has no trouble selling out.
And they try to get shows on movies on film as much as possible. And the last thing I definitely want to mention, before we switch to the lineup is they are they are film noir foundation is a non-profit so yes everything that they take in from these live shows goes right back into finding films that are at risk of being lost and restoring them. So now there’s like a whole, they do, you know, they try to do about one a year. So now there’s literally over a dozen films that have really been saved by the Film Noir Foundation. And then that have been put out with a collaboration with Flickr Alley on Blu-ray. And then a lot of them are available through like library streaming sites. So if you’ve got Canopy or something like that, you can find them.
Knox: Yeah.
Rachel: Just great stuff. And also foreign, some great foreign films too. He’s expanded …the festival to really encompass all these Noir movements that were cropping up all over the world.
Knox: Does he still have a regular show on Turner?
Rachel: Yeah.
Knox: Okay, good.
Rachel: And forgive me, I don’t want to speculate. I’ve lost track. I know I think the day and the time might have shifted a bit, but he does have a regular show every week where he showcases Noir Alley. So, yeah, just check your local listings. I’ll put it that way. But, yeah, he’s definitely still on TCM. And actually, I don’t know if I can. There’s definitely … he has some new publications coming out that are going to be very exciting in the next couple of years.
Check Eddie’s socials for those. I don’t know if I’m allowed to announce them yet.
Knox: I worked with his father back in the 70s at the San Francisco Examiner. I didn’t know him. He was the boxing writer in the sports section and a real nice guy. And then I did connect with Eddie and we communicated a little bit on Facebook. I don’t know how many years ago maybe 15 years, But I’ll never forget there was a thread about something, about organized crime, and Eddie posted a comment saying, I remember it verbatim. “Politics is organized crime.” And I’ve never forgotten. It was like something clicked when I read that. I went, oh. Duh. I mean, he’s just, you know, he’s a smart guy and, you know, I just, anyway …
Rachel: Oh, it’s, and that is, I think, sort of value add of being a film and Noir obsessive is … it really helps you… understand the mentality of a lot of what’s going on right now that it is just this i won’t say mob mentality because a that’s kind of its own style of movie yeah and if anything they have much more there’s like a lot of honor codes and integrity and weird you know loyalty things going on that also does not really apply to what we’re seeing now yeah so no noir like crime films the syndicate all these things that were coming in in the 50s.
It’s like a decoder ring for what we’re seeing now. But also there’s a lot of, I think even one year, I want to say it was 2022, 23, the theme of this show was they tried to warn us. Like showing films that were really … touching on issues that we’re still dealing with, like Odds Against Tomorrow with racism, Force of Evil with that sort of like moral corruption and organized crime. And just an odd little plug too, I think they’re doing an event in mid-September, I want to say at the Elks Lodge, Elks Club. It’ll be Eddie Muller in conversation with TJ English, who for my money is like the best living writer working today. He’s an organized crime historian. So you’re … but the way that he always structures his books are … You have to study organized crime in the underworld because those guys influenced the overworld sort of spec, like the capitalists and the politicians and the money men. It all goes hand in hand.
Knox: And Hollywood.
Rachel: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Knox: Wow. Definitely.
Rachel: And so I know you caught the lineup recently. What did you think? What were your impressions?
Knox: Well, certainly it was, let’s get to all the, you know, important places in San Francisco. Yes. Have a scene there.
(0:31:53) It was, I mean, just, I love the cinematography and a strange batch of characters. I only recognized one guy and I can’t even remember his name, but the main cop.
And just strange twists and turns.
Rachel: Yeah. And, um…
Knox: And also it had a very, it seemed to me, a very gay undercurrent in parts. Between the two hitmen?
Rachel: Yeah, the two hitmen.
Knox: Yeah. And when one of them is telling the woman that, you know, women…
Rachel: Oh, yes. Yeah. We don’t, you know, you’re not supposed, shouldn’t be involved here. You don’t know how…
What was the phrase? I think it’s that women have no place in society. Something like that. You don’t understand how things work.
Knox: It was weird. I mean, just really the whole, but that steam room shot that just, and then, yeah, the language. Anyway, so, but please, I’ve babbled enough.
Knox: the lineup where it’s a dragnet style. These are cases ripped from the real crime files of San Francisco history. And so it was seen as like kind of a film extension of that television show. And I think for folks that are local, it got syndicated as San Francisco Beat. It was…
Hang on, I know I wrote the… Yeah, I think it was syndicated as like another title, but it’s something that I think people that grew up in the city would know maybe by… San Francisco Beat, I think was the name.
And so Don Siegel was still like an up and coming director at that time. He started in like the montage department.
I want to say Warner Brothers. Forgive me. I might be getting that wrong. And so he had directed the pilot episode of the television show. And he’s just, you know … Don Siegel just, he knows what he’s doing. He’s a super smart guy, extremely competent. He can just, you know, he gets in, he gets out. Everyone likes him. He’s really easy to deal with, too.
Knox: He did some other, some big movies, right?
Rachel: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He did… I’m trying to get up into that point.
It was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was probably his biggest one. And then noir fans, he’d also done Private Hell 36, which actually kind of fell into obscurity until modern times. Riot in Cell Block 11, Crime in the Streets. And then he went on to do Dirty Harry, I think.
And part of the success of Dirty Harry was how many great relationships he fostered in this film with the local SFPD. He got to know the city really well, and he loved it. this film extension of it, but the movie … television show was just sort of a very flat, you know, cop style, just the facts type story.
Don Siegel had little to no interest in doing that. And so you can, the movie’s a little disjointed because you can tell the first 20 or so minutes focuses on the cops trying to figure out what’s going on with it. Honestly, the plot is maybe too silly and convoluted to even like convey.
Knox: But right, you know, the warehouses and the ferry terminals, whatever you call it, you know, those big…
Rachel: Yeah, like Pier 41?
Knox: Yeah, and the guy grabs the suitcase and the cop and hits the cop, kills the cop, but they shoot him and he dies immediately. And yeah, silly indeed, but… Yeah, it’s a little cartoonish with the flying around and the dying, but it’s…
Rachel: But what’s nice is, you know, even with that, I mean, Emile Meyer plays sort of the more flat foot cop and that, you know, sort of the tough character, the tougher cop. Um, and he’s just got a great face, a great character actor. I guess he was actually like a dock worker in New Orleans that Elia Kazan, um, spotted and put him in Panic in the streets. And then Milmaier went on to have this really nice acting career. Like he doesn’t have a crazy range, but you know, he could, he could act a bit and he could do, you know, he could deliver his lines.
And so the first, I would say of folks starting to watch the lineup, hang in there. Like the first 20 minutes are a little dry. You do get some great locations. Like they go through the opera house like that. I was just stunned with that scene. The light in there is gorgeous. And it’s just so nice to see a location that’s in San Francisco that’s sumptuous and is still there. And then we switch to … Okay, there’s two hired killers coming into the San Francisco area to basically extract heroin that’s been hidden in all these unsuspecting passengers who have just docked from overseas. So they sort of have like a list of errands, you know, they have to go make these stops to gather these items that have illicit drugs in them and then do the drop of the drugs and then, okay, their day’s done. But they are hitmen in the sense that if things go wrong, they can take care of it.
Knox: Yeah.
Rachel: And it’s, yeah, it’s a very, they’re a very affected pair. So Eli Wallach is, you might not even recognize him because he’s so young in this. It was like his second film. Eli Wallach is sort of like the younger off kilter, kind of maybe has a screw loose hitman. And then Robert Keith is … plays … like the sort of the older sage criminal. He’s Brian Keith’s father. And Robert Keith, I recognized him immediately always from that one Twilight Zone episode, The Masks. He plays like the patriarch who … Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but he has this very kind of like ghoulish, thin death mask style face to him. So he kind of elicited, he exudes a bit of menace even when he’s not saying anything. And yeah, from there, essentially, you’re following around these two strange guys who take a weird, morbid glee in … random acts of violence.
You find out after Eli Wallach has dispatched with several people who have gotten in the way of him getting his drugs that … his older partner, Robert Keith, like collects people’s last words. So … They’re hurrying to get out of this scrape or the next, and Robert Keith will be like, wait, what did he say? What did he say? And then Eli Wallach will rattle off, oh, yeah, he said this. And then Robert Keith’s like, ah, gorgeous, delicious. This means that. It’s very macabre. It’s very creepy. And I think, I mean, not to read too much into why they made these characters the way they were, but I think it was part of it to show that just … people walking amongst us might actually just be completely nuts. Like, I think they did a really good job and … casting those two guys as these like twisted, antisocial, super strange hired killers.
But then they also could just be grandpa or the businessman in from out of town. Like they look very normal. They’re not too handsome. They’re not too tough. They’re not too rough looking. They’re dressed nicely in suits. They can walk in anywhere and sort of pretend to be normal. But then, you know, things quickly go off the rails.
Knox: Then there was that scene in the steam room where the guy tried to double cross them … How did that come in? –
Rachel: I didn’t … I didn’t … When I first watched that, I didn’t read the gay subtext, which is definitely, it’s like, it’s the Seaman’s club that they’re going to like, okay, yes.
But to me, it also reminds me of there’s this great steam room murder scene in T-Men, which came out, gosh, like, maybe 10 years before. That, I think they turned, he just turns the steam up so high, the guy like scorches to death, the schemer, the character in that film. But to me, it’s To me, that was like a callback to T-Men.
But it’s also just catnip for a cinematographer to get a scene like that. And those are also, again, the lineup like The Sniper was a film that I heard about for years before I actually got to see it. And I would always come across the same few stills from the film. And it was always those steam room shots of Eli Wallach with the silencer. Interesting.
But I guess, did you, and then there’s this big, you know, sort of the reason for locals to watch it is you get to see Sutros out at the Cliff House. So this was shot in 58. And then correct me if I’m wrong, Knox, I think it burned down in the mid 60s, like 65, 66. You know, I actually, I don’t recall. Knox: I was a kid when that happened. I don’t remember exactly.
Rachel: Yeah, it was an odd place.
Knox: I went to Playland and stuff like that. They’re all just another universe, really. So Cliff House and all of that.
Rachel: And you see the, was it the Mark Hopkins Hotel? It’s, which, nice that that’s still there. But no, Sutro’s is, you know, especially someone younger and from out of town, just … Again, drinking that all in and just enjoying the atmosphere. You sort of forget … even the plot of what you’re watching or why Eli Wallach is there. But then there’s just some really horrifying, like in a way you can kind of enjoy the violence in this movie a little more than the sniper since it’s, more fun and less realistic um so it’s just wild what happens and definitely like i think the centerpiece of the film you know and it’s Don Siegel like so he’s just so great with these action action sequences is there is a there’s a freaking high-speed chase from Sutro’s at the pacific all the way out to the other side of the bay by the bay bridge so you they’re running through the presidio you get great views of the golden gate you see the Palace of Fine Arts, Legion of Honor, the Marina.
And then it’s just so kind of … I don’t know if poignant is the right word, but it’s so great is the sort of thing that is the crooks undoing is they try to escape on the Bay Bridge that’s still under construction and it’s just, it’s gone. Like the bridge just ends. And so they kind of reach this dead end that they have to wrestle with. And you’ve got these great views of the city in the background.
It was also like they were blessed with good weather when they were shooting that film. You have these amazing vistas where it’s these gorgeous clouds. There’s even a shot out at Sutros where there’s like a blimp in the distance. So again, like it’s maybe not the point of the film, but just … something, you know, since this is an SF History podcast, like this movie is such a … It’s just as important to me as a film like Vertigo and how San Francisco is depicted on film. And what’s also interesting is all of the action of the film supposedly takes place during one day. So there’s like an alarm that sounds, I believe, at noon. And then it’s a way for Robert Keith, the older criminal, to reassure Eli Wallach like, hey, there’s an alarm at 430 in the city. So by the time we hear that alarm, we’ll be done with all of our business. Stuff they’ve got to get through and my question for you is, do you remember those alarms too? Because I remember when I first moved to the city, it was down to once a week on Tuesdays. But do you know…
Why was why were those done daily for a couple of decades?
Knox: Well, you know, we weren’t that far out from World War Two. I mean, it was just they were just testing to make sure they work in case there was an actual attack. And it was, of course, in that era was the Red Scare. So who knows? I mean, I don’t you know, I don’t you know, they used.
But speaking of the chase, that driver that showed up. Now, there was an oddball. Richard Jekyll, the actor.
Rachel: Yeah, I mean, his character was great. It seems like there’s a bunch of movies where that’s sort of like a triad, where it’s like this hitman. There’s the older guy, the crazy guy. And then the guy who has like a crutch of some kind or someone who has like a weakness that might potentially be exploited. So he’s sort of the weak link.
Knox: What was his weak link?
Rachel: The booze. Just that he was kind of a dipso. So they were worried about that. And it’s funny because they kind of introduced that and then it doesn’t really go anywhere plot wise. It’s not like it ever ends up tripping them up.
But I like that movie because it also … it throws you a lot of things that might go somewhere and then they don’t. But especially when you first watch it, it kind of keeps you guessing as to like, okay, what’s going to be their undoing and what’s going to be this issue.
And he, I mean, gosh, forgive me, my mind’s completely blanking on other, I know he was in a decent number of Westerns and then he did get a, a best supporting actor nomination for, I think it was Sometimes A Great Notion. He played the brother in that. So, you know, he was just one of those like reliable, good guys. I always think of him and Vic Morrow and kind of the same thing. He was the younger brother and …
Knox: I think it was Never Given an Inch was the actual name of the movie. Rachel: hat’s right. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Oh, my gosh. That movie’s… That book… deeply affected me when I read that.
Knox: Me too.
Rachel: The film, not the same way, but… No, the movie was… I don’t… Knox: They did what they could. We can talk about it outside of the podcast.
Rachel: Yeah. Yeah, and in The Lineup … I mean, I think a lot of people say that that whole chase sequence at the end was like sort of the best chase scene put on film at that point. And if anything, you know, probably Don Siegel’s the only one that outdid himself. I mean, you know, there’s … God, who the heck did…
It’s escaping me, he directed Bullit … right now, I’m so embarrassed.
But anyway, so yeah, what was it? 15, 12, 15 years later, Don Siegel came back to San Francisco to shoot Dirty Harry and … Yeah, they sort of rolled out the red carpet for him.
All the cops remembered him. Sure. They love working with him. And I think … I don’t know. Guilty pleasure is maybe the wrong way to put it, but I really like Dirty Harry, even though politically I’m not really aligned with … a lot of what they’re arguing in that movie, but there honestly are a lot of elements that are similar with The Sniper, to go back to that film, where there’s this crazy guy on the loose, the law enforcement is totally … unable or unwilling to deal with the scourge.
And so, um, in the sniper, the psychiatrist, Richard Kiley is arguing, well, once anyone shows these types of tendencies, we just need to lock them up until either we deem them safe or, um, keep them locked up forever so that they can never go out and inflict harm, which is a little bit problematic. But that’s a similar type of thing with Dirty Harry’s arguing, it’s like, okay, maybe just dispatch them in a different way.
But Sorry, I kind of got off topic on my own point, is there’s such a … buoyancy and fun. There’s such a sense of fun in Dirty Harry. I mean, part of it is, I think, honestly, Clint Eastwood’s sense of humor and his ability to really laugh at himself and make fun of himself, which you kind of forget because I always … He just has such an archetype of like the macho dude. But his movies, he really doesn’t always portray himself in the best light. Not If it’s going to serve the story or make for a funny moment. So I think a lot of that was to his credit.
But then also just on Siegel’s, like get going, get the action going. And I’m, you know, Eastwood drew so much of his own directorial, I think, skill from watching Siegel work. Because they also, you know, they work together a decent number of times. And so I always kind of conflate the two … like, wait, did Eastwood do that one or did Don Siegel do that one? with the Dirty Harrys, but I’ll stop there.
Knox: Real briefly, when did Hollywood start shooting in San Francisco? And was San Francisco always receptive to movies being shot in the city? And, I mean, it sounds like the cops …
Rachel: you know, loved Don Siegel. So, but just overall, San Francisco has been traditionally friendly to Hollywood.
Knox: Are they, and is it still?
Rachel: That’s a question I don’t know the answer to. I don’t know. I don’t, there are not a ton of films shot in SF these days, but I don’t know how much of that’s just financial. I can imagine now it’s just too cost prohibitive. Yes. And too many people, too many cars, too much construction. I mean, That was actually, to quote Eddie Muller again from his commentary, he was saying in The Sniper, locals, you just watch it to ogle the parking spaces to just remember a time when there were … free spaces of street in the city. That alone is a bygone era. Same thing in The Lineup. It’s just like,
Knox: Yeah.
Rachel: It’s just unbelievable how few cars there were. And there’s a great sequence because they have the killers holed up in a sort of like a nice pad down in South San Francisco. So you get a view of the Pacific Ocean and Cow Palace. But you see how much of that area is just hills and undeveloped. It’s stunning, vertical, but I’m sure it’s a real pain in the neck to shoot and to just get the permits and to just source locations and how much you have to pay people to do that. But throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, San Francisco got a lot of screen time. Even, I mean, like the Dirty Harry series, so that’s at least like the first three were shot there. Yeah.
kind of almost back to back to back. And then, um, The Laughing Policeman with … Walter Matthau, they transplanted a European story into San Francisco, like lesser known movies like The Beat Generation. Not the, excuse me. Not the film The Beat Generation. The Subterraneans, excuse me, was shot in the Bay Area. Some of the films we’ve talked about. I mean, it really did come up. after World War II, because so many folks that were enlisted and sent off to the Pacific came through the city, came through San Francisco. So it kind of just had a… an elevated national profile. I think there’s a lot of people … have fond experiences in the city. And so it became more palatable to shoot there too, because it’s far enough from LA where you can get a different look if you need it, but then you could go back into LA to do studio shots and things like that. Like even the sniper, for whatever weird reason, it’s almost wholly shot in the city on location, but there’s this whole initial, like, first five, ten minutes of the film. It’s a studio backlot. Like, I’m not quite sure why they did that or why they needed to. But yeah, so they could mix between backlot. And I think the backlot may be stitched together … with the verticality of San Francisco a little better than L.A.
Knox: How did The Lineup do in the box office? Okay, um…
Rachel: It wasn’t a smash hit. I mean, I think both the TV show and the film … They didn’t, they did enough, but it, for instance, what am I trying to say? The lineup, you know, it didn’t get any Academy Award nominations. It was really seen as like a fun, thrilling programmer experience.
It did okay, but it wasn’t like a standout film of the year or anything like that. I mean, I think one of its main, um, at least reading stuff from the time, it really It kept Eli Wallach on the map. He had just done his debut in Elia Kazan’s Baby Dull the year before, and he got a lot of attention for that. And this … kept his profile up. And that plus how much he was working in television. He went on and I think was the next big thing was Magnificent Seven. Then he was like the ugly and the good, the bad and the ugly. Like he certainly vacillated between starring roles and much more so character parts but yes this was a film that really elevated his profile and cemented don siegel’s sort of like bona fides as like get this guy he does good work. It’s easy, it’s fast, but it was definitely like kind of a B. You know, it came and went, put it that way.
Knox: Thank you. Well, aren’t most noir movies kind of B movies?
Rachel: Yeah. And, you know, the A ones, the A pictures, like I like to say, I think The Sniper is a B film with sort of an A … pedigree where the A’s are maybe a little more ponderous or weighted down or driven by one particular actor. Like, say, a film like we talked about Sudden Fear.
It’s such a Joan Crawford vacuum that the B’s are fast and zippier. And the cheaper, for me, what I love is the cheaper the film typically is the better chance it’s going to be on location. And I just love on location films so much that I’m always like looking behind the actors to see where they shot and things like that. So it’s, um … There’s a lot more of a chance, and also just inventive photography.
I mean, that’s kind of part of what birthed Film Noir as a movement is making do with less and how do we hide the fact that it’s just a bunch of like cardboard boxes and piled velvet in the corner. Okay, we’ll just like make it all in darkness and shadow. Yes. And try to fudge it and make it mysterious and it just … it, it worked so well we’re still making them.
Knox: Well the lineup is available on youtube as well and i will i’ll try to put it on on the website of the Frisco: The Secret History website but are are there any special editions of it or anything like that?
Rachel: There … it’s it’s usually one that gets put on Columbia Box Sets so there’s a few like i have it on blu-ray that um … It has a box set, sadly, with no special features. There is an old DVD that you can dig up that does have a commentary track with Eddie Muller again, which is like, thank you, Eddie, for everything..
I’ve been, all the notes I’ve been cribbing from his insight. It’s Eddie Muller and James Elroy. So I will put a content warning on that one. Very much, you know, I could almost, Eddie Muller, let me try to say, James Ellroy … He’s very humorous. He knows his business. He’s just an encyclopedia of mid-century American people, culture and crime lore, but he can definitely, he’s got some very caustic opinions and it was recorded on probably a good 15 years ago. So it was recorded in, maybe you want to say another day and age, but just proceed … proceed with caution with the James Elroy commentary.
There’s a few things that are now a little inappropriate that is kind of just part of his persona and part of his shtick, but not to make apologies for it, but things that people might be might take issue with that he says.
Knox: I used to be a huge Ellroy fan. I mean, the L.A. Quartet and the John Kennedy assassination trilogy, American tabloid and the Cold 6000 and the Bloods of Rover.
Rachel: Gosh, yeah. Incredible.
Knox: But the guy’s a madman. I mean, no question.
Rachel: Oh, and it’s sort of like a, I think a bit of it’s like a crazy like a fox situation too. I mean, he’s, I hosted him at a bookstore in Alameda in the Bay Area, and we had an event for his book, Perfidy. So I got to meet him and host him. And yeah, he’s a sweetheart. He’s very nice, super polite. And him and Eddie Muller are like just, they’ve bonded over the shared love of these films over the years.
But Eddie is very, to his credit, his aspect of the commentary is excellent, and he’s always very quick to distance himself from things that James might say. I think a lot of what he says is to just get a rise or just sort of … uh posit a persona and Eddie’s always like “Come on James like i don’t know but i’m not going along with you on that one,” like Eddie is very much dyed in the wool uh San Francisco.
Knox: yes
Rachel: Let’s fight the good fight um and so he maintains that even in their back and forth with their commentaries, but no Ellroy in person was always extremely chill respectful um and just a fountain of Interesting knowledge.
Knox: Good to know.
Rachel: Yeah.
Knox: Yeah. Well, do we have anything else to say about either of the movies?
Rachel: Gosh, thank you so much for letting me, you know, unspool my madnesses about these two films.
Knox: Look, I appreciate you so much for coming on the show. Do we have a bunch of more movies to do, Rachel?
Rachel: Oh, well, you know, we might start to have to dip into the 60s. And so that’s very much up to you.
The next movie that’s on my radar is Experiment in Terror. That is a film, I want to say, forgive me, the year escapes me. It’s early 60s starring Glenn Ford and Lee Remick. And it’s, at least for me, the shots that are burned into my brain are, I think it’s one of the first and only times I’ve seen on film, Lee Remick takes the streetcar across the Bay Bridge from Oakland into San Francisco.
Holy smoke. It’s just the way that that was shot was gorgeous.
Knox: Let’s leave it for the episode.
Rachel: Oh, yeah. And then there’s a big finale at Candlestick Park, which I don’t think has made an appearance in Noir Land previous to that. So it’s … It’s a good thriller. And again, with these two films, such a great tour of the city. These two are a really good double feature.
Knox: Well, I will be putting links to your … book and your website and to the movies. I’m actually going to try to put the movies, The Sniper and, uh, The Lineup on, on the Frisco, The Secret History Website. And whatever else you would like me to put on there for the episode.
But I want to thank you so much, Rachel. It’s just always just wonderful to talk to you about the lore of Frisco noir and its aesthetics and the history and everything. So thank you very much for joining me.
Rachel: Anytime. And thank you again, Knox, for having me back and thanks folks for listening and enjoying.
Knox: Okay. Well, that’s it. Thank you and bye for now.
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