January 08, 2021

Beyond the Frame #24: Cut

January 08, 2021/ Chris Rogers

The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Previous pieces can be seen on INTJournal.com.

Architecture on screen can serve as metaphor, emissary or arena, as this series has shown. But it can also be merely another visual element of the finished film, alongside cinematography, costumes and effects. With two thousand years of achievement in a multiplicity of styles to choose from, the range of possibilities is vast. This final entry, then, simply enjoys cinematic moments that revolve around the building, in all its constructed variety.

If an Englishman’s home is his castle then the ultimate combination of occupant and fortified residence must be King Arthur and Camelot. To celebrate the fellowship of the Round Table in Excalibur, the monarch promises to build a hall about the table and a castle about the hall; thereafter this appears as glinting slabs of silver and gold, an obvious product of magic amidst the dark green of the forest. It is one of many connections between the fantastic and the natural in the narrative and the myth it follows.

Wood is one of the oldest of man’s construction materials. A pivotal scene in Witness sees fugitive detective John Book, hiding from corrupt colleagues within a traditional Amish settlement, take part in a communal barn-raising; during the course of a day dozens of men put the structure together, using only hand tools and sweat. Shot in a painterly way in contrast to the hard work depicted, a deeper authenticity underlies this effort – Harrison Ford was a professional carpenter before he found success as an actor, and so wielded hammer, saw and brace with credibility, whilst the timber used was selected months beforehand as a real family was to use the building after the production departed.

A community hub of a different kind is depicted in The Long Good Friday, when a challenge to a London gangster’s expansion plans includes a bomb devastating the Lion & Unicorn, an East End pub that he owns, just as he and his party arrive. Though typical of the drinking houses built to serve that city’s docks during the Victorian era it is in fact an imitation, erected for the film on a vacant plot in Wapping High Street. The mock-up stood opposite the junction with Scandrett Street, allowing repeated point-of-view shots from the approaching car in the moments before the explosion. Appropriately, given one of the film’s wider themes, apartments were built on the site years later.

The United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky is a stone and concrete pavilion, Modernist architecture from between the world wars. Executing – and foiling – the scheme conceived by Goldfinger to deny access to the gold within it meant extensive location shooting at the neighbouring US Army base bearing that famous name, and the villain’s Flying Circus really did pass within several hundred feet of the target building. When the action came even closer, however, Pinewood Studios in England had to take over, with a life-size replica of the exterior crafted on the backlot and, as the battle moved inside, a soundstage set for the invented multi-storey vault of chromed steel.

Moving up the scale of ambition, for more than sixty years every holder of the title ‘world’s tallest building’ could be found in New York. The most famous examples are the pre-war Empire State building and its post-war successor the World Trade Center. Both were completed just a few years before featuring in the original King Kong and its remake, respectively. Although miniatures were used for the last stand and final fall of the great ape in each version, only the update included substantial footage shot at the actual location. Filming the cavernous lobby of one of the twin towers at night when empty emphasised its impressive scale, whilst the five-acre piazza at the heart of the complex was thronged with extras staring at the body of the deceased Kong. Set in the same city is thriller Sliver, a high-tech variation on the voyeuristic neighbour plot set in a tall, narrow apartment block where the owner has installed hidden cameras. Shot almost entirely at Morgan Court, a Madison Avenue condominium block which still towers over its neighbours yet is only 33 feet wide, the building is filmed with a rare intelligence that recalls Hitchcock or the German Expressionists. Although relatively new at the time of filming in the early nineties, architects Liebman & Liebman had looked to the past for their design which evokes the Art Deco years in its ribbon windows, projecting balconies and curved corners.

Appalled by the Blue Thunder armed surveillance helicopter and a conspiracy to rationalise its deployment over Los Angeles, police pilot Frank Murphy steals the aircraft and triggers an extended aerial hunt around and between downtown’s skyscrapers. He and the ‘Special’ escape a heat-seeking missile by hovering in front of the reflective glass façade of the 52-storey ARCO building, showering debris on pedestrians below, but are stalked and then ambushed by the antagonist’s own helicopter from behind the uncompleted upper stories of the Crocker Bank Center’s towers. Helicopters were flown with unprecedented proximity in and to a complex urban environment to shoot the balletic duel that follows, with actor Roy Scheider performing some of his own take-offs and landings. With Last Action Hero the director who made the roof of another Los Angeles tower famous when it was taken over by armed robbers posing as terrorists repeated the trick with his tongue firmly in cheek. This time the top of the Hyatt Regency in the coastal suburb of Long Beach was the location, with a slapstick funeral scene involving a real crowd, a real helicopter and a real crane. A lift descending the outside of the hotel, though, was temporarily grafted on to the building – Post-Modern, like the film’s script – for the stunt sequence in which it features.

Given its plot revolves around extra-judicial assassination determined by algorithm and mass data mining, political drama is as critical to Captain America: The Winter Soldier as superhero action. Members of SHIELD debate the balance between liberty and security this idea represents, and ultimately do battle over the outcome. Locus of the programme and the moral and physical conflict it brings is the Triskelion, the agency’s Washington, DC headquarters, rising from Theodore Roosevelt Island just north of the Pentagon and towering above the Federal Triangle across the Potomac. Though entirely fictional, the building is convincingly embedded in the city’s built and governmental landscape, plausibly extrapolating recent local architecture in its design and pointedly placed within sight of both the Lincoln Memorial and the Watergate complex.

Old or new, palatial or modest, real or imagined, architecture brings texture, tone and meaning to film. This series has shown some of the ways in which that has been achieved, and perhaps prompted further investigation. For prior to moving beyond the frame, we need first to apprehend it. Thank you for reading.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

December 07, 2020

Beyond the Frame #23: Body Double

December 07, 2020/ Chris Rogers

The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

When circumstances preclude filming at a given building, it may be ‘played’ by another; a particular street can also be represented by one nearby. But sometimes a district, city or entire country have to be substituted for the scripted locale. To construct this level of illusion requires the mimicking not only of architectural style and materials but also road layout, topography, bridges and waterways.

An audacious Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill forms the central conceit of The Eagle Has Landed; following a betrayal, American forces are alerted and the attempt collapses into a pitched battle and siege at the heart of a village on the Norfolk coast. Filming, however, actually occurred in landlocked Oxfordshire, almost two hundred miles to the west, where the flint and patterned brick of Mapledurham’s buildings were a reasonable match for the East Anglian vernacular and the water mill, church and manor house the plot required were conveniently clustered and under the same ownership (a replica mill was in fact constructed adjacent to the original for the combat scenes). The location was also secluded, notwithstanding its closeness to the production’s London base at Twickenham Studios.

The challenge of simulating an urban environment can be met in several ways, as shown by two films set in the same city in different eras. To convey the deception of roguish Barry Lyndon taking a carriage through eighteenth century Berlin along what is implied to be Unter den Linden, filming took place in Park Sanssouci, Potsdam. Originally the grounds of the Neues Palais, the camera was positioned so that that villa was on one side of the shot and its Communs, or detached service complex, was on the other. Both were built in the florid Baroque style for Frederick the Great and so their projecting wings, porticos and external staircases appear as individual buildings lining the city’s principal street when seen at an angle. In The Blue Max, which follows a German pilot on the Western Front during the Great War, imperial Berlin is imitated by Dublin, a compact city with areas of well-preserved historic architecture. Some scenes were shot on the Irish capital’s streets, where the ornate covered bridge connecting Christ Church Cathedral to the Synod Hall across Winetavern Street suggests Germany’s Gothic architecture. Others were filmed in the grounds of Trinity College, whose main quadrangle with its central bell tower and enclosing Neoclassical buildings read as a town square when dressed and framed appropriately.

London might seem an unlikely candidate to duplicate New York, but diligent research has uncovered pockets of similarity. When the immortal antagonist of Highlander confronts his opponents in a Big Apple alleyway one night, the loft building that suffers from his destructive orgy was indeed a nineteenth century former industrial structure but one standing in Bermondsey, within London’s then derelict docklands. An abandoned warehouse due for demolition, it was close to the film studios – themselves established in an old factory – used by the production. Most of Bill Harford’s night-time walk of temptation and paranoia through Greenwich Village in Eyes Wide Shut employed an exterior set on the backlot at Pinewood, but several shots were obtained on real London streets whose building frontages had been carefully selected to correspond with the target city. Along Hatton Garden in Holborn and Worship Street further east in Shoreditch signs, road markings and items of street furniture were disguised, removed or covered, with American versions added in their stead.

New York has also been emulated by American cities. The principal location for Escape from New York, in which Manhattan Island has become a walled maximum security prison, was another city on another river almost a thousand miles distant: St Louis, Missouri. Given its troubled recent history – widespread damage to the downtown area after a major fire, closure of the railway station and one of its theatres – this was perhaps fitting. A corner site with extended vistas provided a suitable place for Air Force One to crash, the Grand Hall of the then deserted Union Station was the Duke’s lair and the New Masonic Temple became the New York Public Library. Even St Louis’ Chain of Rocks bridge was exploited, as the fictional 69th Street Bridge.

Washington, DC attracts political drama on screen as well as off but security, logistics and cost considerations have meant it too has attracted impersonators. The car and helicopter chase in Die Hard 4.0/Live Free or Die Hard was staged on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, with the camera kept low to conceal the absence of the capital’s distinctive governmental architecture. It was the turn of Cleveland, Ohio for equivalent sequences in Captain America: The Winter Soldier; its rooftops, roads and freeway overpasses are the background for car and foot pursuits involving the principals. For obvious reasons the real White House was off limits to the makers of Olympus Has Fallen, and so ‘flats’ of its lower floors only were erected on open ground in Shreveport, Louisiana with the remainder of the residence along with its proper setting – including trees, neighbouring buildings, even lampposts – supplied by computer-generated imagery.

Both New York and Washington, DC were planned on a grid, as was the centre of Philadelphia where the opening scenes of the apocalyptic action film World War Z are set. They were not, however, shot there or in another American city but in Glasgow, chosen for its architecture, wide roads and, yes, its own grid layout, a rarity in the Old World. George Square resembled corresponding spaces in Philly and enabled mass panic to be choreographed effectively and photographed from the air, whilst the surrounding streets are lined with closely-packed, large and consistently-sized buildings that could be extended upward through more CGI.

Changing countries is axiomatic when the setting of a film or scene is a danger zone, as with thirty years of dramas concerning the Middle East. The western United States – principally Arizona and some areas of California – offers the safest if less topographically correct option for such productions; rather closer to the objective, Spain has proven more suitable, replacing for example Beirut in Navy SEALS. It is Morocco that has become the most representative destination, though, a very specific heritage – incorporating many cultures from the area – allowing its architecture and settlements to replace Libya in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Somalia in Black Hawk Down and Iraq in Green Zone. With even greater proximity to Saddam Hussein’s former fiefdom, Jordan was used for The Hurt Locker – its director returned to that country to make Zero Dark Thirty, where it stood in for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The sands can shift, though. Saudi Arabia was once perceived as friendly to the West but after 9/11 The Kingdom had to be filmed not in the state where it is set and after which it is titled but in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The Soviet-Afghan War forms the background to Rambo III and The Beast/The Beast of War, made contemporaneously with that conflict, so both were shot in Israel. Yet by the time of the aforementioned World War Z with its key Jerusalem sequence, that country was itself passed over as a location in favour of Malta.

If film frequently conjures architectural deceptions, these must be the grandest. Even they must be grounded in realpolitik, however.

November 09, 2020

Beyond the Frame #22: Long Shot

November 09, 2020/ Chris Rogers

Sometimes the built environment in film extends outside our atmosphere, allowing man to survive whilst in orbit around Earth, on a journey toward another body in the Solar System or voyaging beyond the infinite. Self-contained, highly specialised and with limited real-world precedents to draw on, generating a convincing habitat of this type is a challenge. The best examples, though, are successful dramatically as well as technically.

For destinations closest to home, filmmakers have been influenced by actual hardware and considered speculation in parallel. The sun is the centre of life but became the heart of darkness for the crew of Icarus II in psychological horror Sunshine. Embarking on a mission to restart our star with a nuclear device, their ship with its realistically functional interiors is protected by a vast, circular sunshield comprising thousands of mirrored facets. Its design thus reflects their objective, literally and metaphorically, setting up the theme of personalised fate for each. Astrophysicists and NASA assisted in conceiving the craft.

The same agency helped the Bond adventure Moonraker, allowing research visits to and shooting at its facilities and sight of proposals for space stations whose cylindrical components informed the final design of villain Drax’s orbital lair. Their angular arrangement, however, was inspired by a child’s mobile, visual interest overriding strict accuracy. Conversely the Tiangong complex featured in the intimate disaster movie Gravity was planned by China for the coming decade but at the time comprised only a single module circling Earth; the production extrapolated logically for its architecture of cylinders connected by nodes. Psychological drama Love replicates the long-established International Space Station, including – in a structure with no meaningful ceiling or floor – an interior whose every surface is utilised. With a miniscule budget, scavenged scrap and consumer products were carefully employed for this illusion. Less anchored in reality is the version of the ISS seen in action horror Life, one with smoother surfaces and where the size and solidity of viewports and panels are plot- rather than life-critical.

The Mars-bound Capricorn One appeared familiar to those raised on America’s Moon shots, lending believability to this post-Watergate conspiracy thriller. The characters’ terse transmissions and solemn saluting may have been counterfeit but the equipment itself was – more or less – genuine as NASA, where the film’s director and producer both had contacts, once again facilitated. The organisation provided technical support for the simulated launch of an Apollo-era rocket stack and a lunar lander – a mock-up, fittingly – for sequences ‘on’ the red planet.

The cylinder and the tube are strong, easy to construct and simple to rotate, the better to induce artificial gravity. Allegorically, their underlying form – the circle – has widespread and profound meaning across world cultures, representing concepts of infinity and self-discovery. All of these aspects are caught in the majestic 2001: A Space Odyssey with its multi-stage journey from Earth via the Moon to Jupiter and onward. Bridging such distances requires more effort, in reality and on the screen, and so a gently spinning Space Station 5 and the Jupiter-bound ship Discovery, its crew quarters occupying a centrifuge, were realised with the contributions of industrial designers, scientists and illustrators alike. The result is an intently thought-through world in which man has obtained mastery over time and space but not yet his purpose or destiny.

Fifteen years later a sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, foregrounded the tensions of the Cold War even as it extended the original film’s setting (to encompass Jupiter’s moon Europa) and spiritual ideas. As such new ship the Leonov retained the concept of a centrifuge but was massive, awkward and textured; a utilitarian aesthetic was applied to the inside, which was lit mainly by computer consoles and displays. Both helped set up a visual opposition to the bright elegance of the Discovery and represent the perceived technology level of the Soviet Union. Similarly the shuttle serving a mining complex on Io, another of Jupiter’s moons, in gritty thriller Outland was part of a wider ambiance for the film inspired by “the building of the Alaska pipeline, or the day-to-day operations right now on off-shore oil rigs” according to its writer-director. An industrial look of gratings, exposed metal and prefabrication included harsh lighting by a cinematographer whose only previous experience was a punk musical.

A fleet of commercial freighters orbiting Saturn for a purpose supported neither by their crews nor, it transpires, their client is the basis for eco-drama Silent Running. Budgetary considerations may again have been the primary driver, but selection of a decommissioned aircraft carrier as the location for shooting interior scenes provided real verisimilitude for a lone rebel taking action against the cynical apathy of his colleagues. In horror film Event Horizon the Lewis and Clark is heading for Neptune, at the far edge of the Solar System. Although an interior of moulded panels and modular corridors was by now familiar a stylised darkness inf(l)ected the design of this vessel, suiting the extreme theme.

**2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT (1984)**

The sense of isolation deepens in interstellar space, a region known only to unmanned probes in reality. Another team of jaded professionals manning a well-used tug find their routine interrupted by the eponymous Alien; once more, a lone agitator takes charge. This time certain of the Nostromo’s spaces convey a specific mood – a cramped, business-like bridge, a womb-like computer room, dripping, steam-drenched bilges. Sets built with ceilings, a rarity, promoted the necessary claustrophobia. The circle returns in the design of the metaphysical Solaris, where a scientist arrives to assess a research station orbiting the titular world. His discovery that the planet conjures memories of the dead to haunt the living, driving some to a fatal future, confirms the symbolism of the motif. A rather different atmosphere is the goal in romantic drama Passengers, as a couple are revived prematurely aboard deep-space ‘sleeper ship’ Avalon. Far more consciously science fictional in its overall appearance, the extravagant, organic interior spaces are based on contemporary hotel, retail and apartment design right down to flora in the central atrium.

In a galaxy far, far away occurred the swashbuckling adventure that was Star Wars. Created by a generation familiar with home-built hot rod cars but also a superpower arraying exotic weaponry against a supposedly inferior enemy, it featured the clinically monochrome curves of the Death Star – the circle again – as well the patched and customised Millennium Falcon.

Far from his home world or hovering a few hundred miles above it, man continues to explore, illuminate and imagine. Architecture provides him with a refuge in which to do all three, revealing – on film – what is here at least as often as what is out there.

October 06, 2020

Beyond the Frame #21: Outtakes

October 06, 2020/ Chris Rogers

Film has represented buildings in use and those that have been lost but between those states lies another: the ruin. Artists have long been attracted to the romance and aesthetic qualities of abandoned structures, whilst poets wrote of grand architecture ravaged by time, hubris or divine intervention. With the invention of cinema filmmakers, too, found inspiration in conflict, disaster and fantasy to explore the buildings man has left – or might leave – behind.

Architectural past and present are weighed in The Long Good Friday, as a gangster seeks to redevelop the deserted quays and empty warehouses of London’s docklands through a partnership with his transatlantic counterparts. Increasingly violent clashes disturb the deal when personal drama is subsumed by political reality. Another city with a seagoing past and a future of uncertainty is Venice, which provides both setting and metaphor in Don’t Look Now. Its crumbling palazzos, flood-prone canals and an old church under restoration are intimately interwoven with the fears and desires of a couple mourning the death – by drowning – of their young daughter.

The devastation wrought by war, and especially the events of World War 2, has been an obvious spur. In Saving Private Ryan and Cross of Iron, a small group of soldiers engages in combat within an everyday setting ruined by war. In a town square and a factory respectively, buildings reduced to shells and the very earth torn by explosions stand for the wider war and the experiences of the men themselves. When the fighting starts, its effect on this urban fabric anticipates the fates of many of the latter. Eventual Allied victory allowed cinema to depict the impact of war on an entire city, with one in particular attracting attention. In Berlin Express, The Train and Germany Year Zero, audiences saw at a simple, visceral level how the capital of the Third Reich had been laid waste. Yet these films can also be read as a rebuttal of the theory – practised by the Nazi regime – that buildings should be designed to decay majestically over time, to be fêted like those of past eras. Later coverage of Berlin’s architecture centred on the Cold War but continued to feature the aftermath of its ‘hot’ predecessor, with Funeral in Berlin and Wings of Desire stressing that ideology and economics left buildings and districts in a ruinous state decades on.

Extrapolating from other post-war concerns, this time those felt by the emerging ecological movement and broader counter culture, a series of films imagined the consequences of a range of environmental and socio-political disasters. Many featured the ruination of the population as much as buildings, and New York was chosen to suffer most often.

Horror parable Wolfen was shot in the South Bronx, where a church was built and demolished for the film but a decade of economic hardship, rampant crime and ‘white flight’ had left entire streets of derelict apartment blocks as ready-made ruins. Revealingly, director Michael Wadleigh left the industry after the film’s release in favour of touring the developing world and activism in sustainability. Action drama The Ultimate Warrior conjured its atmosphere of starving groups dependant on painstakingly-nurtured roof-top crops through careful framing on location and use of a more controllable California backlot set. Cyberpunk thriller Escape from New York also denudes the city of its characteristic overcrowding, acidic commentary on one of the Big Apple’s distinctive characteristics.

That film presents the Statue of Liberty as the headquarters of Manhattan Island’s militarised gaolers, a wry subversion far subtler than her severed head appearing in the pulp-ish poster. But such is the importance of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s monumental sculpture that even part of her, in the right context, serves as cinematic shorthand for the brutal curtailment of the American Dream. This is true of the torch in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the crown in Planet of the Apes (via an overhead shot to which The Day After Tomorrow later pays explicit homage) and the head again in Deep Impact and Cloverfield. Presciently, perhaps, the actual statue’s head was displayed in a Paris park a few years before being shipped to America to top the body.

Much less commonly visited in these and other films with a destructive theme is the nation’s capital and democratic centre, making appearances by Washington, DC’s own architectural icons in Logan’s Run and Oblivion all the more powerful. Pointedly, an overgrown Lincoln Memorial and Capitol, listing Washington Monument and cratered Pentagon are not merely ruined but rendered incomprehensible to those who see them, all meaning and connection with their original purpose lost. This level of symbolism may explain its rarity.

Fantasy permits speculation about civilisations real and fictional through the medium of the ruin. In Alien the abandoned spacecraft is as unknowable as the creature, formed as it is from material that is biological as well as structural. The cathedral-like architecture of its undercroft features a grim inversion - a crypt full of eggs rather than bodies. Centuries earlier an abandoned stone tower becomes the home-in-exile of the eponymous Highlander, living a hard but peaceful existence with his wife. Later destroyed in a crucial fight between his mentor and his enemy, the shattered remains thereafter emphasise the pain of immortality for Connor MacLeod. The built achievements of entire peoples in South America, the Middle East and Africa have been lost to time in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Congo. Buried temples, cities and industry await discovery by those using aircraft and computers, each shown as the advanced technology of their day.

If ruins show where man has come from, they can also help explore where he might be going. The anime Ghost in the Shell is set in a future where human consciousness can be enhanced, transferred and hacked, and yet its climax takes place in a derelict museum from the previous century but one, situated in the oldest part of town. A police officer and a walking tank do battle – she is a cyborg and it is manned, whilst the prize is another form of being altogether. Behind them all looms a great stone relief, a Tree of Life whose branches depict stages in human evolution. Will each be discarded? Where next?

September 08, 2020

Beyond the Frame #20: Director’s Cut – The Bradbury Building

September 08, 2020/ Chris Rogers

Historically, most ‘Hollywood’ films have indeed been shot in Los Angeles, and there is one building in that city that has been used more often, to represent more places, than any other: the Bradbury. Completed in 1894 on a corner plot just a few blocks from City Hall, it has always housed individual businesses, each with their own front door within the building. Two dozen features have been shot there in the last seventy five years, its very particular architecture – and the skills of filmmakers – allowing it to pass for a number of other building types across a wide range of genres.

The Bradbury was designed by George H. Wyman and named after its owner, gold miner-turned-developer Lewis Bradbury. Its modest height – just five floors – and Italianate brick façades are seldom seen on screen, because it is not the outside of the Bradbury that attracted productions over the decades. Two entrances lead to a narrow passageway with walls of glazed and plain brick and ornate ironwork. Open to the glazed roof, this space widens at the first floor to leave galleries supported on iron columns, from where the remaining commercial units are accessed and which overlook the ground floor. This stepping back exposes the lifts, which now read as freestanding iron towers, their cars, cables and counter-weights animating the space. Two flights of stairs with scrolled iron balustrading switch back and forth across the walls as they climb towards the large skylight.

The Bradbury made its film debut in China Girl (1942), a World War 2 drama set in the Far East, playing the ‘Hotel Royale, Mandalay’. Immediately, it was the spectacular atrium that proved the draw. Many scenes are set on its stairs and galleries, which – richly finished in ceramic, hardwood and marble – already lent themselves to representing a hotel and required only exotic plants and louvred doors to evoke a Burmese setting. Studio sets extended and supplemented the building using imitations of its ironwork. Moving to the European theatre of the same conflict, the Bradbury became a London hospital in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). Now the same galleries were lined with beds full of wounded soldiers, with new arrivals triaged on the Mexican tiled floor of its lobby. Portrayed in the film as standing across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, the setting is probably intended to be the real-life St Thomas Hospital whose Victorian buildings would have been a reasonable match for the American stand-in.

Contemporary drama of a different kind saw the Bradbury begin its most enduring relationship, that with film noir. Beginning with Double Indemnity (1945), the Bradbury appeared repeatedly in films of this genre over the next decade, each showing the building in a slightly different way. In D.O.A. (1949) the Bradbury is named as housing the Phillips Import-Export Company, around which the plot revolves. Its exterior, revealingly, is substituted with that of another building but the Bradbury lobby is seen briefly as the lead character pursues his own killer, whilst the galleries and one of the staircases are used for the climactic confrontation. At the beginning of Shockproof (1949) the Bradbury’s upper levels contain a parole office and the height of the atrium permits a scene that tests characters’ and viewers’ reactions alike in the context of the film’s title. Two years on and M (1951) remade Fritz Lang’s earlier film in which both sides of the law pursue a child-killer. This time he takes refuge in the Bradbury, which is again named as such in the script and accurately described as “the building on 3rd Street”, prompting an architectural manhunt. This is both thorough (the criminal gang consults plans) and lengthy (comprising a sixth of the film’s running time) and moves from the basement to the roof, dwelling in the lobby and galleries. Befitting the story’s German origins, director Joseph Losey and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo – returning to the Bradbury after working on D.O.A. – brought a strong Expressionist sensibility to the sequence, employing acute low and high camera angles, shadows as defining elements and deep focus. Two years later again and the Bradbury is the office of private investigator Mike Hammer for I, The Jury (1953), based on the novel by pulp author Mickey Spillane. Here the Bradbury’s exposed ironwork helps support the illusion that it stands amongst New York’s tenements, known for their external fire escapes. Once more one of the Bradbury’s staircases provides the setting for the film’s major clash which, unusually for the period, is shot hand-held.

The 1960s saw a new wave of cinematic comedies, and the Bradbury gamely played its part. A flirtation with farce at the end of Good Neighbor Sam (1964) had Jack Lemmon’s identity-swapping character complicating his life for the final time in its lobby – acting, once more, as that of a hotel – before finding happiness. It is not known what the Bradbury’s management felt about the liberal use of house paint in the scene. Inevitably film noir was not safe from such treatment and the other literary giant of that genre, Raymond Chandler, provided the source for Marlowe (1969), in which James Garner as the title character investigates a complex mesh of murder, blackmail and missing relatives. Thanks to modish deconstruction, though, he does this in a lighter, more self-aware manner than his predecessors; the Bradbury hosts the offices of this dogged private eye too.

Thrillers with a twist emerged in subsequent eras, and the Bradbury remained adaptable. The heritage of film noir was honoured and extended in Blade Runner (1982), which had a femme fatale, urban pursuit and moody cinematography yet was also set forty years into a future of artificial life, flying cars and video phones. The Bradbury’s interior became that of a decaying apartment block abandoned by all but one resident, his unexpected guests causing another investigator to prowl its stairs and galleries; visible through its skylight was a drifting blimp advertising off-world travel. This was appropriate, given Wyman claimed his designs for the Bradbury were inspired by a passage in a then-recent novel of speculative fiction. Exploitation sequel Avenging Angel (1985) may lack polish but its final gun fight does exploit the horizontals of the Bradbury’s galleries and the verticality of its lifts and stairs through fast tracking shots along the former and careful character positioning on the latter. Horror visited the Bradbury in Wolf (1994), although this story of a middle-aged literary editor ousted by a younger rival but releasing his inner beast after a rural bite is as much metaphorical as it is literal. Will Randall stands on a landing of the Bradbury atrium in astonishment, eavesdropping on his company’s staff with newly-heightened senses.

One of the Bradbury’s more recent film incarnations presented yet another disguise for the building that also acted as a fitting summary of its contribution to that industry to date. In The Artist (2011), made as a near-silent movie melodrama in homage to that era, the Bradbury is the interior of Kinograph Studios where the lead characters work. In a key scene the fading star of the silents walks down the iron staircase, meeting a rising talent of the talkies on her way up. They chat and reminisce before each continues on their journey, although they will meet again.

The Bradbury has had a similar appeal to allied industries – many television programmes, pop promos and photo shoots have been undertaken there too – but George Wyman’s Los Angeles office block is likely to remain the location of choice for features wherever and whenever they are set.

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