706/ Los Angeles in Time To Kill (1942) and The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Reading - here - Alex Pavey's illuminating vis-à-vis of Raymond Chandler's The High Window and David Lynch's Lost Highway, I thought I'd look up the maps in the two films based on Chandler's novel (there are no maps in Lost Highway, as far as I can see). Unfortunately The Brasher Doubloon (John Brahm 1947) has no maps, and those I could make out from the rough copy of Time To Kill (Herbert I. Leeds 1942) to be found on YouTube are a disappointment:
These films evoke the topography of Los Angeles not through maps, then, but chiefly through reference to specific addresses. Here are the addresses we can read in Time To Kill:
In The Brasher Doubloon Marlowe's office address is shown on a telegram (see the beginning of this post), and we also see these addresses:
Los Angeles isn't my territory and I haven't investigated these addresses to know if they are all authentic. I know that two in The Brasher Doubloon aren't the names of the places that we are taken to. Elizabeth Murdock's house on 'Dresden Avenue' is in fact the still-standing Rindge House at 2263 South Harvard Boulevard:
And the 'Florence Apartments' where George Anson Philips lives are in fact the now-demolished Gladden Apartments at 100 South Olive Street, Bunker Hill:
Bunker Hill historian Jim Dawson says that, according to Chandlerist Loren Latker, Chandler lived in this building in 1917. The building also appears in the 1952 film The Turning Point, based on a Horace McCoy novel:
The only other exteriors in the two adaptations of The High Window I know anything about are the eponymous locations from which the first husband of Mrs Murdock is defenestrated. In Time To Kill the evidence is - as in Chandler's novel - photographic:
This is the Hall of Justice at 211 West Temple Street (built 1925, still standing):
In The Brasher Doubloon the evidence is cinematographic, a film taken by the blackmailer as he was filming Pasadena's Rose Parade:
This is the Pacific and Southwestern Trust and Savings Bank at 234 East Colorado Boulevard, built 1925 and still standing:
For more on Los Angeles in literature and film see Alex Pavey's website and blog, here.
To close, here are some shots I like from The Brasher Doubloon: