Month: July 2013

Two doomed lovers look at the San Francisco skyline from a wonderful 1932 movie ‘One Way Passage’. Terminally ill Kay Francis recites a hymn, “Keep those golden gates wide open, keep those gates ajar.” along with William Powell, whose return to San Francisco means execution in the San Quentin prison. The camera captures the sadness on their faces as Kay Francis says, simply, “Lovely, isn’t it?”

Before director Don Siegel gave us one of the two greatest San Francisco police films with ‘Dirty Harry’, (the other being ‘Bullitt’) there was his 1958 copper caper ‘The Lineup’. The Cliff House and Sutro Bath scenes are as good as it gets for San Francisco locations, and the scene inside Sutro’s is mandatory viewing to any enthusiast of that wonderful structure lost to a fire in 1966.