MovieChat Forums > The Dark Corner (1946) Discussion > Cab chase goofs in geography

Cab chase goofs in geography

posted 17 years ago by hobnob53
17 replies | jump to latest

Anyone familiar with Manhattan gets a laugh out of the scene where Mark Stevens steals the cab and drives off pursued by a cop (riding dangerously on the running board in a high-speed chase!).

The establishing shot of the building where the action begins shows it's near the corner of 42nd St. and Fifth Avenue, in midtown. But as soon as Stevens steals the cab (that shot was done on the Fox back lot), the film shows it and the pursuit car charging all over lower Manhattan, several miles farther south. Then, when he drives the cab to its garage, Stevens is shown speeding along Fourth Avenue in lower Manhattan one second, then turning the corner from First Avenue onto 60th St., on the east side in midtown, again four miles or more away from the prior shot. Why would the filmmakers commit these obvious errors anyway -- why not just film the action in the same area of town? Funny, and also annoying.

[–] Jessica-656 16 years ago

Perhaps they had to take what they could get. I'm sure it wasn't so easy to get permission to film on the busy streets of NYC, especially at the time. Thanks for the insider's view of NYC geography, but what I appreciated was that the movie had scenes filmed in the actual New York City of 1946 at all, instead of using studio backlots or Los Angeles as a stand-in for NY.

[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

You may well be right, but even so the geographic unreality of the chase is jarring to anyone who knows the areas involved. If they were only permitted to shoot in certain sections they could as well have confined themselves to those areas to maintain some sense of accuracy and continuity. I also found it curious that they used a fake name for the building where the chase begins (where the Clifton Webb - William Bendix encounter takes place), the "Grant Building" -- there's no such place, but it's clearly part of or adjacent to Rockefeller Center -- but then use what was a real-life taxi garage underneath the 59th Street Bridge, and identify the spot correctly (the sign on the cab's dashboard). (Today, that space houses gourmet shops, after many years of being an abandoned area.)

The inaccurate geography is annoying but not unusual -- probably hundreds of films shot on location have intercut scenes so that sites that may be miles apart are depicted as being right next to one other. But you're right, much better to have filmed on location than using fake studio back lot shots.

[–] mtevens 16 years ago

I remember seeing an episode of Kojak where there was a car chase that had the cars speeding along the same 4 or 5 blocks. They just changed the camera angles for a different perspective. Good if you didn't know the neighborhood. Bad if you did.

[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

Even if you didn't know the blocks you might have been able to tell they were passing the same place. That is bad.

The other thing about the chase in The Dark Corner is the cop on the running board happily firing his pistol at the cab ahead. Of all the brain-dead things to do -- firing a gun into an open street, with dozens of cars and hundreds of pedestrians around...not to mention the danger to the cop (clinging onto a car's running board with one hand while shooting with the other, all at high speeds around sharp corners), and to people and traffic from the car chase itself. Cops are trained not to shoot into open streets anymore, and luckily running boards have gone the way of the crank-engine, but we still have problems from high-speed chases -- in cities, suburbs and rural areas alike.

[–] Jessica-656 16 years ago

I was listening to the interesting DVD commentary by a film historian, who pointed out that TDC was actually a "B" movie at the time, which made it even more surprising that it would have *any* budget for location footage at all. As someone who has never been to New York, I have to say it looked fine to me, though I can certainly see why it would annoy you!

On the subject of shooting in the street - of course, it may all be just Hollywood fabrication, but I remember reading an account by a woman who grew up in Chicago in the 1920s. She recalled a time after there was an especially frenzied shoot-out between gangsters and police, when the mayor went on the radio to plead with the police not to endanger the safety of passing women and children quite so badly! Of course, that was 20 years earlier, and in Chicago, not New York, but it's possible that safety standards may have changed in the 60+ years since TDC was made...

As for renaming a landmark building, I don't find that so unusual. It's only in the last few decades that movie-makers have gotten more particular about that kind of thing, and if the original story called for "the Grant building", they probably just picked out a likely-looking building and renamed it! Remember also that non-New Yorkers were probably not as familiar with the city then as they are now. :-)

[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

Well, yes, of course, they just conjured up a fictional name for the building -- actually, although it's clear about where the "Grant Building" is [sic], they never pin down a specific building, so technically, no actual building was renamed. (The scene with the cabbie talking to the cop, where Mark Stevens steals the taxi, was filmed on the Fox back lot, however.)

I don't think TDC was quite a B movie -- more like a "lower A" if you will. (There was a grade between outright A's and B's, whatever one called it.) The stars were more than B actors, although this was more modestly budgeted than an A -- but equally clearly, somewhat costlier than the typical B.

I like the fact that they filmed a lot of it on location as well. My only point is that having gone to all that trouble they didn't bother to make the chase more logical and, well, correct in terms of its locales. I was born in Manhattan and live just north in the 'burbs today, and was just in the city last night -- in fact, right at one of the corners (a dark one, naturally) where they filmed a shot, so I get a kick out of seeing the same spot today -- and how little it's really changed in over 63 years. But a lot of people who see movies filmed in places they know, but which mix up locations as in TDC, always find that kind of a combination of annoying and amusing, as I do.

Oh, yes, shoot-outs were apparently common on open streets in most big cities in years gone by. I'm sure that Chicago story is right -- actually, I've heard that mayor's quote someplace. Same thing with car chases. What happens in the movie isn't far-fetched or simply a Hollywood invention, but unfortunately a reasonable facsimile of the sort of thing that really used to happen. You'd think people would have had more sense.

[–] georgegauthier 16 years ago

I was just happy to see some location shots from NYC when I was only two years old. I recognized many of the buildings in lower Manhattan during the car chase. Sure the geography was illogical but no worse than many another Hollywood productions.
In the Seven Ups, a car chase starts in the Bronx with the bad guys speeding south on Boston Post Road. They take a left onto Central Park West in Manhattan and head north via Riverside Drive, Henry Hudson Parkway and the George Washington Bridge. Right.
Did you see the latest of the Die Hard movies where McClane runs his car up a toll booth to knock down a helicopter? Aside from the dubious physics, there are not toll booths in Washington, DC, not a one.

[–] hobnob53 16 years ago

I haven't seen The Seven Ups in two or three years, but are you sure they begin that car chase in the Bronx? I don't remember seeing Boston Post Road at all. I remember that chase starting in Manhattan -- but in any event, without question, most of the pre-Riverside Drive portion was filmed along West End Avenue; they turned from there onto 96th Street, where an entrance onto Riverside is located.

I'd have to look again to get precise details, so I may be conflating or forgetting some locales, but they certainly did not turn directly from the Post Road onto Riverside, that's for certain: that turn followed an extensive chase north through the Upper West Side. (And as I said, I don't remember any Bronx shots in that chase anyway.)

The shots from the Jersey side of the GWB onto the Garden State Parkway also omitted several miles of territory and roads between the bridge and where the final parts of the chase take place.

I enjoy seeing scenes of old NYC too (I wasn't yet born in 1946, but in the 50s), but while you're right that so many movies throw scenes from disparate parts of a city together to make it look like these places are all adjacent to one another, there really is no excuse to do so. The Dark Corner's car chase would have worked as well and been real had they simply filmed it in one section of town, or at least not pretended that one street was right next to another several miles farther south. It may be common movie practice, but it's dumb.

Good catch about the DC "tollbooths" in Live Free or Die Hard. I lived there for a few years and never thought about that goof. The original 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still is also famous for its illogical and inaccurate geography of the city in its chase of Klaatu's taxi by the military, not to mention the inordinant length of time it takes to drive where he's going.

[–] 16 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Noir-It-All 13 years ago

Rocky is rife with geography gaffes, certainly Rocky's first early morning run. His neighborhood, Kensington, is located NE of Center City; it is unlikely for him to approach City Hall from the south, etc. But, city permits, the way certain locations appear on film, must all combine to become what we see on screen.

"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne

[–] jackboot 12 years ago

In The Line Of Fire has a chase across rooftops in Washington, D.C. which similarly takes place in wildly different locations from shot to shot, much the way the car chase was filmed in The Dark Corner. It's fun to pick these things out when you know the locations, but really, I think you're nitpicking over it. Yes, the jumps in location in Manhattan are pretty funny to see but most people would never know. Anyway, it makes for a memorable moment in the movie, both for the chase scene and for the interesting cutting that makes the scene jump around the city so much for amusement of those who are familiar with Manhattan. When they used to show this movie on AMC (twelve years ago or so? back when AMC actually showed classic movies) they introduced the film by pointing out the car chase scene and that viewers who were familiar with New York City would be amused by the sequence of shots that made the scene jump around the city.

[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

Yes, you know, I vaguely remember that old AMC introduction for this movie (either Bob Dorian or Nick Clooney)...back in the days when that was indeed a good channel instead of the non-descript, commercial-ridden piece of junk it's (mostly) become.

Even so, I really don't think it's nit-picking to point such things out. (It's fun, if nothing else.) What mainly gets me about this and the similar goofs in other movies other posters have pointed out is that in most cases these errors are completely unnecessary. There was no reason, for instance, that the car chase sequence in this movie had to be so glaringly and impossibly all over the place; it could just as easily have been written so that it took place in some logical (and humanly possible) areas of the city. The same goes for the other goofs people have noted here in other films. Such things usually occur more from laziness and a desire to cut corners -- dark or otherwise -- on the part of the filmmakers, than from necessity.

In the climax of another Manhattan-based movie, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), the three survivors living in New York City after a nuclear war chase each other around the streets, the two men with guns hunting each other while the third survivor, a woman, runs after them. Here too, the guys are shown abruptly popping up in wildly distant parts of the city: for example, they're on Wall Street one moment, then turn a corner and are suddenly at the United Nations, miles north...and they accomplish these incredible feats of speed solely by running around on foot!

[Talking about them being on foot, and using the words "feats" and "solely", was entirely inadvertent, pun-wise.]

[–] jackboot 12 years ago

Well, you know, making movies is a business and the cost and logistical considerations of shooting a car chase in the big city are, I'm sure, daunting to say the least. I'd be willing to bet that it was not so much out of laziness but out of an interest to contain costs and possibly also for the aesthetic decisions around the editing together of these kind of scenes (the footage from one shot might mesh together better with the footage from another shot from a unrelated location, as an example.) I'm sure that they were not banking on viewers taking such a keen eye to the shot to shot locations.

But it is fun to find these kind of goofs or flaws!

[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

True, cost is always a factor, but even so, a little effort toward greater realism wouldn't have hurt. Still, only people familiar with NYC would notice the problems in this movie, which of course also applies to people who recognize geographical goofs in other movies shot in places they know. Most of us just watch in blissful ignorance!

On the other hand, Hitchcock was pretty careful to have the correct NYC streets in the backgrounds throughout the beginning of North by Northwest, so it can be done. Then again, he put towering cliffs along the north shore of Long Island (where the spies tried to get Cary Grant to plunge off into Long Island Sound in the stolen Mercedes)...cliffs which decidedly do not exist!

[–] jackboot 12 years ago

Not only do those cliffs not exist, but as a further gaffe, when Thornhill is peering over the edge, from inside Mrs. Babson of Twining Road's Mercedes, the water appears to be some 100 feet below, where in the previous sequence, as he's approaching the cliff, we see waves breaking and sending spray above the roadway surface! Not gonna happen!

[–] geoffrey-jackson 12 years ago

hobnob53 on Wed Sep 12 2007 01:20:33

Anyone familiar with Manhattan gets a laugh out of the scene where Mark Stevens steals the cab and drives off pursued by a cop (riding dangerously on the running board in a high-speed chase!).

The establishing shot of the building where the action begins shows it's near the corner of 42nd St. and Fifth Avenue, in midtown. But as soon as Stevens steals the cab (that shot was done on the Fox back lot), the film shows it and the pursuit car charging all over lower Manhattan, several miles farther south. Then, when he drives the cab to its garage, Stevens is shown speeding along Fourth Avenue in lower Manhattan one second, then turning the corner from First Avenue onto 60th St., on the east side in midtown, again four miles or more away from the prior shot. Why would the filmmakers commit these obvious errors anyway -- why not just film the action in the same area of town? Funny, and also annoying.

Thank you for starting this thread. You prompted some interesting discussion.

I can see that sort of thing being annoying and detracting from the viewing experience. Not being familiar with the area I'm not aware of the factual and continuity issue. The sequence, however, worked quite well. I was particularly intrigued by the use of the running board. In fact, I thought the whole film was very well executed.

8/10

[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

Thank you, geoffrey-jackson. It is a fun topic to discuss.

The film is very good. I guess it's just a shame they goofed up the chase, seeing as how they took the trouble to film so much of the movie on actual NYC locations.

That cop on the running board was taking his life in his hands. We see that in a lot of old movies, and I really wonder how common it was for anyone to do that back then. Especially in a high-speed chase with sharp turns in the middle of a big city, it's almost a sure bet he'd be flung off as the car veered around some tight corner, or be hit by a passing car. I actually think that sort of thing was usually prohibited, or at least discouraged -- probably after they lost a few policemen. Today they even ban firefighters from riding on the tops or sides of fire engines because it's deemed unsafe. Running boards, however, are no longer much of an issue!

Not to mention that firing a gun ahead of you into a crowded city street, while zooming around at 50 miles per hour, is a pretty damned stupid thing to do.