Is San Francisco the ultimate Noir city?
It's my favorite locale for the genre. For one thing, there's that fog.
"No, I don't like to cook, but I have a chicken in the icebox, and you're eating it."
The fog may be part of it but there is also the architecture of all of the old buildings as well as some of the new ones, those steep hills, curved side streets, the water front, the bay and a number of other things to the general atmosphere particularly when it is all filmed in film noir black and white. Unlike some other classic film noir movies like "The Maltese Falcon" that only used establishing shots of San Francisco "Dark Passages" was really filmed mostly on the streets, steep sidewalks and other locations in the city.
TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.