San Francisco has always looked good on film, but in The Sniper (1952) and The Lineup (1958), the city becomes something more than scenery. It becomes a character—a maze of steep streets, fog, waterfronts, alleys and lonely neighborhoods where killers can disappear and cops have to pound the pavement to find them. Rachel Walther, author of Born to Lose: The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, joins me to talk about two very different pieces of Fifties’ Frisco noir.

The Sniper follows a troubled veteran who stalks women with an M1 carbine, while police struggle to understand what is driving him. Shot largely on location, the film offers an unusually intimate view of the city without ever actually naming San Francisco. Then comes The Lineup, where two very strange hitmen arrive in town to retrieve heroin hidden in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers. Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, steam rooms, Sutro’s Baths, the Cliff House and a spectacular chase across the city all come together in one beautifully grimy piece of Frisco noir.

Along the way, Rachel and I talk about director Don Siegel, the Hollywood blacklist, the Film Noir Foundation, Eddie Muller, the lost San Francisco of free parking and empty streets—and the way these old crime pictures can sometimes feel like a decoder ring for the darker machinery of American life, and one San Francisco that exists now mostly on celluloid.

Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coastal hills with artists, poets, lovers, eccentrics and other people who had apparently misplaced their alarm clocks. The vast Pacific was there, the mountains were there, the fog came and went through the canyons, and for a while it was possible to imagine that a person might simply walk away from the machinery of modern life and disappear into the California landscape.
Naturally, the San Francisco Examiner could not let that happen. In 1947 the paper sent reporter Clint Mosher south with a mission: find the dirt on Miller and his bohemian companions. What followed was a four-day campaign portraying the Big Sur artists as a cult of anarchists, nihilists and general enemies of decent civilization. There was marijuana, surrealist poetry, barefoot girls, a dismembered mannequin, Central American jungle music and enough sinister laughter to frighten the average subscriber straight back into his chrome-and-bakelite toaster kitchen. Miller himself was less interested in the American Dream than in escaping it, and the Examiner seemed determined to make that escape look like the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.
But there was something wonderful underneath all the newspaper thunder. Miller believed the artist had a duty to go against the crowd, to choose the uncertain road, even poverty, rather than surrender the imagination to convention. Big Sur gave him a place to live that philosophy. The Examiner gave him a villain. And postwar America, busy building suburbs, appliances, conformity and a new industrial future, suddenly found itself staring at a bunch of strange people on a mountain who appeared to be having a pretty good time. This is the story of Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the newspaper crusade that tried to turn bohemia into a public menace.

My friend Nero Nava’s weekly radio show. An hour of talk and an hour of music.

Fog rolls into the North Beach basements, and Nick DeJohn is still not talking — a garrot saw to that back in May of ’47. Part Two picks up the case cold with Freddie Francisco’s break down of rumors in the Tenderloin whisper stream, jumps forward to a judge’s chambers where DA Edmund “Pat” Brown torches his own trial rather than let a liar keep the stand, then rewinds to fill in the backstory. 

A crab fisherman’s wife walks into a police station with an extortion complaint and walks out having cracked a mob murder. Four men plotting in a back bedroom, not realizing the walls have ears — and one very unlucky woman caught listening.

The Grand Jury scene reads like  paperback fiction nobody would believe: a widow turning hysterical on the stand, a son dropped at a movie house hours before his father’s killing, and Leonard Calamia — the friend who delivered Nick to the wolves. He runs, changes his name, even gets himself elected an election worker in Albuquerque, and still can’t outrun a Christmas package. The trial turns into theater — memories evaporating on the stand, until a secret witness nobody knew existed turns up watching it all from a bay window above the murder scene.

And because this story never ends a chapter quietly: a California Attorney General’s daughter is kidnapped when three men jump into her car and make her drive barefoot through Golden Gate Park, grilling her about her father’s business in Chicago. When they let her go, finally, they drop one last name, a mobster on the lam. Part Three, next week.