OF WALKING AND HITCHING

We went to Lone Pine to do some walking.  Lone Pine is a rustic little town, halfway into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with one stoplight, some motels and an Indian reservation.  

Chances are you’d go there if you were heading for Mount Whitney.  The big attraction is the Alabama Hills: some very fancy rock formations.  The hills were given the name during the Civil War by some Southern sympathizers, after the success of the CSS Alabama as a commerce raider (which is admittedly not so attractive).

Lone Pine also has a Film History Museum, and this is the big thing about the Alabama Hills: they make a great backdrop if you’re making a movie: pretty much any kind of movie.  Imdb lists 344 movies or TV shows with scenes shot there.

They can stand in for anywhere you like, so they appear in Gunga Din, Charge  of the Light Brigade, Bad Day at Black Rock, Tremors, and many, many cowboy movies Including Yellow Sky, with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter (below):

In recent years they’ve also appeared in Iron Man and Django Unchained.

There’s a book by Dave Holland, titled On Location in Lone Pine, which would definitely help you find where specific movies were shot, though I only found and bought a copy in the Film Museum gift shop after we’d done our after we’d done our walking around.  As it was, we drove up Movie Road, got out of the car and consulted a sketchy map, but let’s face it I’m the kind of man who likes a sketchy map.

But one movie not mentioned in On Location in Lone Pine is Ida Lupino’s 1953 noir extravaganza, The Hitch-Hiker.  I’d seen it before but since there was a DVD for sale in the shop, I bought it and decided to watch it again, which I’ve just done.

The movie is heavy on the noir and frankly a bit light on the plausible motivation, but it’s supremely watchable, not least for the shots of the Alabama Hills, but more for the performances, by Edmond O’Brien as the good guy who picks up the hitchhiker (hitchhiking, after all, being a specialized form of walking), played by William Talman, a man so bad that he has a frozen eyelid and sleeps with one eye open.

Inevitably the guys are mostly in car, supposedly making a 500 drive mile through Mexico (using a sketchy map), but in fact the Alabama Hills really aren’t all that extensive, so you know they must have just driven around and around the scenic parts, never straying very far from town.

But in the end if the car breaks down and they have to walk the last stage of the journey.  Edmond O’Brien has twisted his ankle by this time and is frankly behaving like a bit of a girl.

In fact it’s easy to read a proto-feminist message into the movie – that none of these men is really all that manly, and the bad guy is no man at all without his gun.

Later in the weekend we went in search of a ghost town named Saltdale, and more or less found it.  There really isn’t much that looks like a town anymore but there’s plenty of salt.  It’s a good place to walk, and I think it’d be a great place to shoot a movie.

WALK OF VIOLENCE

And speaking of limps, I just saw an interestingly odd movie titled Act of Violence.  It’s a very noir movie, set in and around Los Angeles, shortly after World War Two – it was released in 1948 - and although it has some standard nourish elements, not least car chases, there are some interesting walking elements too.

As IMDB more or less has it: “An embittered, vengeful POW (played by Robert Ryan – he’s the guy with the limp – that’s him above, crossing the street) stalks his former commanding officer (Van Heflin, who’s trying to live a new and decent life in the California hinterlands – a fictional town called Santa Lisa) who betrayed his men's escape attempt from a Nazi prison camp.”  Meaty stuff.

It’s directed by Fred Zinnerman and based on a story by Collier Young, who was married to Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino, among others, so you know he wasn’t afraid of strong women. He also created Ironside, a hero who it must be said didn’t do a lot of walking.

Act of Violence has scenes set all over the place, including Big Bear and Glendale (the Glendale station stands in for Santa Lisa), but it’s when Van Heflin goes to downtown L.A. for some kind of trade conference, and falls in with some bad seeds, that things get really psychogeographic.

We see the mean streets of Bunker Hill, the Angel’s Flight Railway, the 3rd Street Tunnel (that's it above I think – though, if you told me it was the 2^nd Street Tunnel I wouldn’t argue with you).  The city looks magnificently menacing and magnificently unfamiliar, and no place for anybody to go walking at night.

Noir though the movie may be, the poster, is definitely colorful.