San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

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San Francisco is a town made for noir. Long before Hammett’s muse seduced him with fog and mist to pen The Maltese Falcon, European explorers and Christian missionaries had already laid the groundwork for the genre. Just ask the Ohlone indigenous peoples. The city’s history is a shadowy one. It is founded upon the spilling of blood.

From its origins as a frontier boomtown to its ascent as an imperial financial giant, the city of Saint Francis has served as an inviting home to all manner of transgression and villainy. Drawn to the romantic landscape by the lure of possibility, millions have flocked here to cast their stakes in the hope for prosperity, pleasure, and a personal freedom seldom dreamed of elsewhere. Following the imperatives of manifest destiny, the city’s pioneers engaged in fraud, larceny, kidnapping, and murder. The prospect of gold led many to their demise while establishing a terrain ruled by the human passions. Frank Norris so beautifully captured this in his classic novel McTeague, later transformed into the epic film Greed, by legendary director Erich von Stroheim. It is a classic tale of dreams gone awry. The avaricious appetites of the story’s characters lead them into a spiral of destruction where the possibility of redemption is completely vanquished. By the tale’s end, our antiheroes are left with only two possible options: jail or the grave. What could better illustrate a noir sensibility?

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