1201 Greenwich Street |
Joan Crawford lives
in blissful ignorance with new love Jack Palance at 2800
Scott Street in the 1952 nail biting noir thriller Sudden Fear.
Joan is a playwright and heiress who meets actor Palance on a train from
New York to San Francisco. Everything seems to be going Joan's way until
she discovers Jack is trying to bump her off. High strung Joan decides to
outsmart him, if she doesn't freak out first. Directed by David Miller.
Crawford was observed by Jack Kerouac,
who was strolling on Russian Hill one night and came upon Crawford and a
film crew shooting scenes at the Tamalpais Building, 1201 Greenwich at
Hyde. (Kerouac was living in the attic
study of Neal and Carolyn Cassady's place at 29
Russell Street, an alley off Hyde, a few blocks from the Sudden Fear
location.) In "Visions of Cody," Kerouac writes of "Joan Rawshanks
in the Fog." Through Kerouac's lens, the actress is contemptible. She can
"muster up a falsehood for money" before a thousand eyes. The writer also
lays open his own role as willing spectator. Kerouac observes, "I had never
imagined [a camera crew] going through these great Alexandrian strategies
just for the sake of photographing Joan Rawshanks fumbling with her keys
at a goggyfoddy door while all traffic halts in real world life only half
a block away and everything waits on a whistle blown by a hysterical fool
in uniform who suddenly decided the importance of what's going on by some
convulsive phenomena in the lower regions of his twitching hips, all manifesting
itself in a sudden freezing grimace of idiotic wonder just exactly like
the look of the favorite ninny in every B-movie you and I and Cody ever
saw..."
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