on-location shooting | First Impressions

I don’t remember hearing of THE DAY OF THE JACKAL(Fred Zinnemann, 1973) spoken of in relation to gay representation but here is the sauna pick-up scene, repeated in the current tv version to close the latest episode, but here filmed more discreetly so that viewers who don’t want to know don’t need to notice.

The use of real locations is also an enormous pleasure. See below the British Library at the British Museum, filmed in 1972, just before it moved to St. Pancras.

I love the use of the widescreen format, 1.85:1 spherical, blown up to 70mm in Japan to allow for wide views of a frame where the eye catches movements across it (see below), often featuring dozens of extras — it’s a highly populated frame — in which the eye can wonder through Zinnemann’s meticulous mise-en-scene. An interesting contrast to the current TV version, which I also like very much, but from a completely different era of filmmaking.

José Arroyo

THE SLEEPING CITY (George Sherman, 1950), starts off with Doctors being killed at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. What’s the cause? It turns out the poor Doctors, only being paid 50 dollars a month, are prey to a narcotics ring run from the hospital. They’re seduced into playing the horses for a quick win but quickly fall into debt and are then blackmailed into providing ‘the white stuff.’ Today’s British hospitals better watch out. The film’s title is a clear reference to Jules Dassin’s earlier THE NAKED CITY (1948), and like the earlier film, features great on-location shooting, in this case of the hospital itself and its surroundings.

Impressive on-location shooting (ending in drama) from the beginnng:

and similar, rhyming, scene at the end:

Almost exactly half-way through the film (a nurse (Coleen Gray) and a detective passing as a doctor (Richard Conte) go out to have a cigarette and the nurse says, ‘Blemishes are hid by night and every fault forgiven. The world should live by night. The dark draws people together. They can feel the need for each other. But the world gives the night to the sick. Keeps for itself daylight but lets men look into faces filled with fear and hatred. Are you filled with fear and hatred’?

The film is so potent, it’s preceded by Richard Conte as himself addressing the audience directly and telling us that what we’re about to see is fiction and that Bellevue and all its staff are upstanding citizens at the forefront of science. The film itself tells a more complicated story, hinted at by being framed by an actor playing a detective passing himself off as an intern, with all the ethical and moral dilemmas that places him in. I hadn’t really registered Coleen Gray before and she’s extraordinarily beautiful and effective here . I also loved Richard Taber as Pops Ware, the lowly, old elevator ‘boy’/ drug lord who brings a whole class dimension into the narrative.

There’s a superb drug montage:

and as you can see from these images, a wonderful noir feel to the whole narrative: