Ten American Cities and the Movies That Love Them

Chinatown is to Los Angeles as Taxi Driver is to New York.

By Phil Nugent

New York: Taxi Driver (1976)

Movies about New York tend to present it as either a dream setting for romance or a gladiatorial arena designed to kill you or drive you nuts. (A third group, practically as dead as the dodo, depicts it as just another place where people are trying to raise their families and live their lives.) In the 1970s, the idea that anybody could find happiness and fall in love in New York was all but banished from the screen until about 1977, when it was revived by the unlikely pair of Woody Allen (Annie Hall) and John Travolta (Saturday Night Fever); mostly, filmmakers from William Friedkin (The French Connection) to Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon) depicted New York as a shooting gallery where your level of heroism depended on how well you functioned in chaotic squalor. It was Martin Scorsese, the director most openly in love with New York at its most abrasive, who best realized a vision of the city as Hell — a visually electrifying view of New York through the eyes of the last person in the world who ought to be living there.

Los Angeles: Chinatown (1974)

Screenwriter Robert Towne updated a style of hardboiled detective story that, thanks to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, will always be associated with Los Angeles, and applied it to an alternate history of Los Angeles itself. Chinatown uses the collapse of the St. Francis Dam as the basis for a conspiracy story about how a vast, murderous plot brought water to the desert. It was such a successful piece of mythmaking — and so powerful are the movies — that today many people think that John Huston scammed and whacked half of Southern California to steal from Poseidon, just as many people think that Tommy Lee Jones and the gay Mafia killed John F. Kennedy. Chinatown itself is a movie-spawned dream of the thrill of both romance and corruption, and it would be less powerful if it were set anywhere but the city where the movies come from in the first place.

San Francisco: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegel, was set in a fictional small town in California — Anytown, U.S.A. The later Body Snatchers (1993), directed by Abel Ferrara, was set on a U.S. Air Force base. (The more recent The Invasion was made for no reason by bad people who will have to answer to their god.) Both settings have obvious possibilities for anyone using this time-honored alien-takeover story to satirize the drive towards conformity. But the idea really takes root in Philip Kaufman's version, set in San Francisco, a place of great beauty with an impressive cultural history, yet one that has spawned some of the goofiest trains of thought and creepiest movements on record. Kaufman and his cinematographer, Michael Chapman, manage to make everything beautiful and charming about the place look ominous. Their San Francisco is an ideal setting for a movie in which extraterrestrial colonizers talk self-help bilge to their prospective victims. It also features a dog with a dude's head. Some years, he could have been a plausible candidate in the mayoral race.

Chicago: The Untouchables (1987)

However painful or embarrassing it must be for honest citizens, Chicago's history as the brassiest of all organized-crime venues is a continuing gift to the movies, with returns coming in as recently as last summer's Public Enemies. The Untouchables has no pretense to historical reality; it's a big, melodramatic wallow in American mythology, as if Al Capone had been so thoughtful as to have his days storyboarded. But a reminder of Chicago's glorious past and present is always there in the on-location photography of architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, part of the reason it remains probably the best-looking American city in movies. There is still no more photogenic or history-enriched place in America to rob a bank; make your career plans accordingly.

Boston: Gone Baby Gone (2007)

Ben Affleck's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel goes easier on the cartoon accents and pop-eyed sociology than Clint Eastwood's version of Lehane's Mystic River; it feels like the work of someone who knows the territory. Not a man who has to prove his Beantown bona fides, Affleck is able to focus his attention on the complicated story while instinctively understanding what details and locations will best capture what Patrick Radden Keefe called "the city's clannish insularity, the fine-bore segregation of its neighborhoods... the mix of effete, overeducated latte swillers and 'gritty, working-class' knuckleheads." The movie's ambiguous use of Morgan Freeman serves as a subliminal reminder of the racial tensions that went public with the busing crisis, but it's the well-worn homes and the cast — especially Amy Ryan and her sidekick/voice coach, Jill Quigg — who nail the local vibe. Capturing a city can often be a simple matter of casting the right people, even if your iconic Boston babe, Ryan, happens to hail from Queens.

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