›› CiNEMARiN Movies in the county that Hollywood couldn’t tame…
Through Marin, darkly Bogie and Bacall give Waldo Grade traffic the slip in ‘Dark Passage’ by M at t hew St af for d
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n 1947 Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Hollywood’s most famous couple, arrived in San Francisco to begin a month of on-location filming for Dark Passage, their third movie together. Bogart instigated the project after he read and liked David Goodis’s original novel, the first of a dozen or so moody masterpieces adapted for TV and the movies (including Down There, the source material for Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player). It tells the story of an innocent man who escapes from prison to find his alleged victim’s real killer, and screenwriter-director Delmer Daves, a San Francisco native, took the opportunity to showcase his city in all its hilly, fog-swept, low-down, upscale, photogenically sinister glory. And since the story begins with Bogart sneaking out of San Quentin, a fair amount of post-WWII Marin County was showcased as well. After escaping in a laundry truck, our hero tumbles into some East Corte Madera underbrush, scuffles with a nosy passerby and has the tremendous luck to come upon the gorgeous young Lauren Bacall, who not only helps him escape malevolent Marin in the back of her station wagon, she believes in his case so much she won’t stop until his name is cleared (even if that means letting him shack up in her incredibly elegant Telegraph Hill duplex). Their flight over southbound 101 is highlighted by vintage glimpses of a single, two-way Waldo Tunnel and a white-knuckle trip across the road-blocked Golden Gate Bridge. (Another admittedly oblique Marin reference later in the film: the character played by the great Agnes Moorehead lives in the Tamalpais Apartments on Russian Hill.) Dark Passage is very much a movie of its time, combining in one lustrous package the postwar craze for film noir, on-location
shooting, expressionist cinematics (the first third of the film is shot from Bogart’s point of view) and that day-after-Hiroshima ennui (viz the brief scene between the two lonely strangers in the bus station). It’s also one of the goofiest, most improbable movies of the 1940s, with far-fetched coincidences and plotting holes you could drive a cable car through, but, like the man said, if you want real life, you’re welcome to it. Among the film’s compensating charms is its steady parade of colorful supporting characters, its moody jazzand-foghorn soundtrack, Bogart’s effortless charisma and those vintage glimpses of the Headlands, the Filbert Steps, a Hopperesque Lower Fillmore diner and the Powell-Market cable car turnaround. (Trivia time: that newspaper photo of Bacall’s father is director Daves in a brief cameo; the singer crooning Johnny Mercer’s “Too Marvelous for Words” is the great Jo Stafford; and the Bogarts had a suite at the Mark Hopkins, spending much of the shoot at the Top of the Mark.) Dark Passage is the centerpiece of the 10th annual Film in the Fog festivities Saturday night, Oct. 1, in the Presidio. (Appropriately: some of the movie’s most memorable moments take place at Crissy Field and Fort Point.) The fun takes place on the lawn of the Main Post Theatre at 99 Moraga and begins with a live performance by indie rockers Grass Widow at 5:30pm followed by a vintage newsreel, a cartoon and the film du nuit at 7:15. There will be free popcorn and purchasable delicacies from the Presidio’s Kitchen 39, or pack a picnic along with blankets, warm clothes and low lawn chairs. Admission is free; call 561-5000 or visit sffs.org for further information✹
ViDEO I was a teenager assassin Sixteenyear-old Hanna Heller has revenge on her mind. Mission-trained as an assassin since birth by her father in the remote Arctic wastes, she knows only efficiency, lightning reflex and remorselessness. Now at the peak of Teenage girls being ‘remorseless’? Sorry, but we’re not buying it. her skills, she flips the switch on a battery transponder dad dug up, allowing U.S. intelligence to swoop in and find their rogue asset’s missing child. Director Joe Wright’s action thriller HANNA constantly surprises, with a visual urgency that transforms the beauty of three continents into unfamiliar moonscapes (a perfect mirror for Hanna’s alienation), and a trancelike Chemical Brothers score that’s still rattling around my head. Freshly escaped from one of America’s rendition-friendly pits of hell, Hanna will head for a German rendezvous if she can steer clear of Marissa Wiegler, a former lead spy with big secrets to keep. An agency on her trail—along with Marissa’s own super-seedy henchmen—she finds herself sidetracked on a personal mission to solve the mystery of her own genetic difference from other children. Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett star. A film that defies easy categorization, but that’s been flying off the shelves at my store, this little homage to extreme homeschooling is not to be missed. —Richard Gould
›› MADE iN MARiN
a look at the movies Marin made famous
Bogart Matt’s time at matthewstafford@yahoo.com.
Fred Ward crosses Cape Canaveral Air Force Station—aka Hamilton Air Force Base—in The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s ode to the original Mercury 7 astronauts. In the acclaimed 1983 film Ward played astronaut Gus Grissom, the second American to fly in space (Grissom died in the 1967 Apollo 1 explosion). Hamilton was used extensively in the Academy Award-winning film—a perfect Marin fit to mirror Canaveral’s sun-drenched, palm-tree decked Floridian landscape. Built in 1933 and 1934 under the supervision of Howard B. Nurse, Hamilton Air Force Base was designed in a Spanish Revival style that was popular at the time. Many walls were covered in stucco and roofs were tiled to replicate California missions, with recessed porches and wrought iron castings lending familiar Spanish-influenced touches as well.—Jason Walsh Mr. and Mrs. Bogart, heading south in the car at the right, cross over the Marin County line. 22 PACIFIC SUN SEPTEMBER 23 – SEPTEMBER 29, 2011