Alley #31 -- May 21, 2012

In Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart playing, a former police detective, follows Kim Novak, playing the wife of an old school friend of Stewart's, into an alley.  She parks her car and enters a nondescript door.  Stewart follows her and winds up in a dirty-looking room.  He looks through a door and sees her in a beautiful flower shop with a distinctive tiled floor.  This was Podesta Baldocchi, an old San Francisco florist.  The shop on the left used to be the home of Podesta Baldocchi.  The alley, a short extension of  Campton Place, has been closed off with a gate for several years.  I suspect the owners of the shop got tired of Hitchcock fans.  Ironically, this alley was only used for a couple of shots looking back towards Grant Avenue.  Hitchock needed an alley that was open at both ends, rather than one that dead-ends like this.  Most of the shots and the door were filmed in nearby Claude Lane, which goes all the way through the block between Bush and Sutter. 

This post was too late for the blogathon, but please feel free to use the link to contribute. 

Thank you to Ferdy on Films (http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/), The Self-Styled Siren (http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/) and This Island Rod (http://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/) for organizing this year's blogathon.

Please consider donating to the National Film Preservation Foundation. For the Love of Film III is raising money to place The White Shadow, a 1923 Graham Cutts movie on which Alfred Hitchcock served as assistant director, on the internet for free viewing.