For the last couple of months, I've been scanning the "Last Chance" section that HBO Max helpfully adds, so that you can see which movies and TV shows are about to disappear from the service and plan your watching accordingly. It's a nice feature, which I wish more streaming services offered, though I also wish HBO Max were a little less glitchy as an app.
This month there were relatively few things I wanted to watch in Last Chance, so after I finished Bullitt, I moved on to the Dirty Harry movies, all of which are available on HBO. While Harry Callahan and Frank Bullitt are very different characters, they fit together nicely as Neo-noir cop films, and it helps that they all have soundtracks by Lalo Schifrin and are set in San Francisco. In fact, seeing the city as it was back in the late 60s and early 70s (I haven't yet watched the last two Dirty Harry films) is amazing, because SF is pretty different from back then.
As some background, I'd previously seen the first Dirty Harry film, but not since college, and I've caught bits of The Enforcer (the third movie) on TV over the years, but never watched it start to finish. Bullitt, meanwhile, is familiar to me more as a reference (the car chase, Steve McQueen on the movie cover), but I also hadn't seen the full movie before.
In both cases, it's been fun looking at where individual scenes take place and seeing how different they look now. The biggest thing has been the bits that take place on the Embarcadero, which is now an open thoroughfare with great views of the bay but then was dominated by an elevated freeway. That freeway, which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, was by its demise generally considered to be an eyesore, so the city took the opportunity to remove it and opened the area up.
That said, when Bullitt and his partners are guarding their witness, they put him in a hotel just by the Embarcadero, in a room at the same height as the freeway's top level. The views you get of the area there and in the Dirty Harry films are much grubbier than the neighborhood is now.
It's fair to say that much of SF is grubbier in those movies than it is now, even despite the big homeless problem that the city currently has. Though it's also a lot more working class than we imagine the place to be now, since the tech industry hadn't quite taken over yet. As a result you get scenes and references that hark back to the working class Irish and Italian communities, not to mention the Black community (The Enforcer has a subplot around some black nationalists), which have maybe been forgotten in the last few decades.
The other fun thing about the early Dirty Harry movies (moreso than Bullitt) is the little slices of big-city weirdness you get in between the large plot points. There's the foot chase in the Enforcer, where Harry and the criminal he's chasing accidentally crash a porno shoot, but there's also the jumper in one random scene in Dirty Harry and the brief flashes of nudity that we see when Harry's staking out a building or chasing the Scorpio killer.
Stuff like seeing a woman receiving her guests for the evening completely nude, or glimpses of a gay interracial date through Scorpio's gunsights, is intended to show the weirdness of a big city in the wake of the hippy era, the weirdness of a big liberal city, and the general chaos that Harry Callahan lives in daily. It's a little dismissive (the second movie, Magnum Force, is co-written by the rather conservative John Milius) but also charming in its depictions of this bygone world.
It's also funny seeing Harry shaking his head at "wokeness" fifty years or so before the current culture war we find ourselves in. Now, of course, conservatives are mostly railing against LGBTQ people and especially trans people, while then they'd had it with women's lib, but it's clear that the arguments then were the same as what we're hearing now.
As a final point, the other thing I find interesting about that era of film-making is that they even set the movies in SF at all. Mute Witness, the book that Bullitt is based on, is apparently set in New York, but became SF when being translated for the screen: I feel like nowadays you're more likely to see the opposite case, where the source material is in San Francisco but for the screen becomes New York. Dirty Harry's another movie series that doesn't really have to be set in SF, and I can also think of films like The Towering Inferno that I guess were set in San Francisco for cultural reasons that are lost now.
It seems too bad that you don't get many movies just randomly set here anymore. Now it seems that every film that wants to depict life in a big city just automatically opts for New York or Los Angeles, unless the story has to be set somewhere else. One example is (500) Days of Summer, which was apparently set in SF in the screenplay but switched to LA.
The reason this bothers me is that, despite all the undeniable problems (the heartbreaking homeless encampments, the soulless co-optation of the city by the rich, and the ridiculous levels of income inequality), the city is dramatically sited and carries more stories than just tech people. I still haven't seen The Last Black Man in San Francisco, but it sounds like it makes great use of the location, though I wonder how much SF is a character in the film the way it is in the Dirty Harry movies.
That's probably to do with the fact that big cities in America now all want to be New York, but fail. And if every city's just a cut-rate NYC, why not just film in the real one and take advantage of that? I just question why we've decided (or why Hollywood has decided) that everything in New York is automatically more relevant to everybody than the rest of the country. One of the great things about the Wire was how it dug into Baltimore, rather than just being another crime show in New York; we have this cultural understanding of New York that makes, perhaps, for easier storytelling, but I think we're missing out on the opportunity to get under the skin of other cities, and show that worthwhile stories take place everywhere else, too.
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