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Best San francisco, california Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of san francisco, california cinema — measured across 2,708 indexed frames from 35 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

San francisco, california films over-index on utility pole, tie and neon sign — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

    Orson WellesDP Charles Lawton Jr.IMDb 7.5TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Michael O'Hara, against his better judgement, hires on as a crew member of Arthur Bannister's yacht, sailing to San Francisco. They pick up Grisby, Bannister's law partner, en route. Bannister has a wife, Elsa, who seems to like Michael much better than she likes her husband. After they dock in Sausalito, Michael goes along with Grisby's weird plan to fake his (Grisby's) murder so he can disappear untailed. He wants the $5000 Grisby has offered, so he can run off with Elsa. But Grisby turns up actually murdered, and Michael gets blamed for it. Somebody set him up, but it is not clear who or how. Bannister (the actual murderer?) defends Michael in court.

  2. 2

    Bullitt (1968)

    Peter YatesDP William A. FrakerIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Senator Walter Chalmers is aiming to take down mob boss Pete Ross with the help of testimony from the criminal's hothead brother Johnny, who is in protective custody in San Francisco under the watch of police lieutenant Frank Bullitt. When a pair of mob hitmen enter the scene, Bullitt follows their trail through a maze of complications and double-crosses. This thriller includes one of the most famous car chases ever filmed.

  3. 3

    The Maltese Falcon (1941)

    John HustonDP Arthur EdesonIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Spade and Archer is the name of a San Francisco detective agency. That's for Sam Spade and Miles Archer. The two men are partners, but Sam doesn't like Miles much. A knockout, who goes by the name of Miss Wonderly, walks into their office; and by that night everything's changed. Miles is dead. And so is a man named Floyd Thursby. It seems Miss Wonderly is surrounded by dangerous men. There's Joel Cairo, who uses gardenia-scented calling cards. There's Kasper Gutman, with his enormous girth and feigned civility. Her only hope of protection comes from Sam, who is suspected by the police of one or the other murder. More murders are yet to come, and it will all be because of these dangerous men -- and their lust for a statuette of a bird: the Maltese Falcon.

  4. 4

    Milk (2008)

    Gus Van SantDP Harris SavidesIMDb 7.5TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Using flashbacks from a statement recorded late in life and archival footage for atmosphere, this film traces Harvey Milk's career from his 40th birthday to his death. He leaves the closet and New York, opens a camera shop that becomes the salon for San Francisco's growing gay community, and organizes gays' purchasing power to build political alliances. He runs for office with lover Scott Smith as his campaign manager. Victory finally comes on the same day Dan White wins in the city's conservative district. The rest of the film sketches Milk's relationship with White and the 1978 fight against a statewide initiative to bar gays and their supporters from public school jobs.

  5. 5

    Basic Instinct (1992)

    Paul VerhoevenDP Jan de BontIMDb 7.1TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    A former rock star, Johnny Boz, is brutally killed during sex, and the case is assigned to detective Nick Curran of the SFPD. During the investigation, Nick meets Catherine Tramell, a crime novelist who was Boz's girlfriend when he died. Catherine proves to be a very clever and manipulative woman, and though Nick is more or less convinced that she murdered Boz, he is unable to find any evidence. Later, when Nilsen, Nick's rival in the police, is killed, Nick suspects of Catherine's involvement in it. He then starts to play a dangerous lust-filled mind game with Catherine to nail her, but as their relationship progresses, the body count rises and contradicting evidences force Nick to start questioning his own suspicions about Catherine's guilt.

  6. 6

    The Conversation (1974)

    Francis Ford CoppolaDP Bill ButlerIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Harry Caul is a devout Catholic and a lover of jazz music who plays his saxophone while listening to his jazz records. He is a San Francisco-based electronic surveillance expert who owns and operates his own small surveillance business. He is renowned within the profession as being the best, one who designs and constructs his own surveillance equipment. He is an intensely private and solitary man in both his personal and professional life, which especially irks Stan, his business associate who often feels shut out of what is happening with their work. This privacy, which includes not letting anyone into his apartment and always telephoning his clients from pay phones is, in part, intended to control what happens around him. His and Stan's latest job (a difficult one) is to record the private discussion of a young couple meeting in crowded and noisy Union Square. The arrangement with his client, known only to him as "the director", is to provide the audio recording of the discussion and photographs of the couple directly to him alone in return for payment. Based on circumstances with the director's assistant, Martin Stett, and what Harry ultimately hears on the recording, Harry believes that the lives of the young couple are in jeopardy. Harry used to be detached from what he recorded, but is now concerned ever since the deaths of three people that were the direct result of a previous audio recording he made for another job. Harry not only has to decide if he will turn the recording over to the director, but also if he will try and save the couple's lives using information from the recording. As Harry goes on a quest to find out what exactly is happening on this case, he finds himself in the middle of his worst nightmare.

  7. 7

    The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

    Gabriele MuccinoDP Phedon PapamichaelIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    Based on a true story about a man named Christopher Gardner. Gardner has invested heavily in a device known as a "bone density scanner". He feels like he has it made selling these devices. However, they do not sell well as they are marginally better than x-ray at a much higher price. As Gardner works to make ends meet, his wife leaves him and he loses his apartment. Forced to live out in the streets with his son, Gardner continues to sell bone density scanners while concurrently taking on an unpaid internship as a stockbroker, with slim chances for advancement to a paid position. Before he can receive pay, he needs to outshine the competition through 6 months of training, and to sell his devices to stay afloat.

  8. 8

    Vertigo (1958)

    Alfred HitchcockDP Robert BurksIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Following his early retirement as a detective from the San Francisco Police Department, John Ferguson - Scottie to his friends - becomes obsessed with two women in succession, those obsessions which trouble his long time friend and former fiancée, Midge Wood, a designer of women's undergarments. The first is wealthy and elegant platinum blonde Madeleine Elster, the wife of his college acquaintance Gavin Elster, who hires John to follow her in Gavin's belief that she may be a danger to herself in thinking that she has recently been possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, Madeleine's great-grandmother who she knows nothing about, but who Gavin knows committed suicide in being mentally unbalanced when she was twenty-six, Madeleine's current age. The second is Judy Barton, who John spots on the street one day. Judy is a working class girl, but what makes John obsessed with her is that, despite her working class style and her brunette hair, she is the spitting image of Madeleine, into who he tries to transform Judy. The initial question that John has is if there is some connection between Madeleine and Judy. What happens between John and individually with Madeleine and Judy is affected by the reason John took that early retirement: a recent workplace incident that showed that he is acrophobic which leads to a severe case of vertigo whenever he looks down from tall heights.

  9. 9

    The Intern (2015)

    Nancy MeyersDP Stephen GoldblattIMDb 7.1TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    A retired 70-year-old widower, Ben (played by Robert De Niro), is bored with retired life. He applies to a be a senior intern at an online fashion retailer and gets the position. The founder of the company is Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway), a tireless, driven, demanding, dynamic workaholic. Ben is made her intern, but this is a nominal role - she doesn't intend to give him work and it is just window dressing. However, Ben proves to be quite useful and, more than that, a source of support and wisdom.

  10. 10

    The Rock (1996)

    Michael BayDP John SchwartzmanIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Stanley Goodspeed, who lives in Washington, D.C., is a biochemist who works for the F.B.I. Soon after his fiancée Carla Pestalozzi announces that she is pregnant, Stanley gets a call from F.B.I. Director James Womack. Womack tells Stanley that San Francisco's Alcatraz Island has been taken hostage, along with eighty-one tourists, by Marine General Francis Xavier Hummel who, for years, has been protesting the government's refusal to pay benefits to families of war veterans who died during covert military operations. The death of his wife Barbara on March 9, 1995 drove General Hummel over the edge, and now he's holding hostages in order to get his point across. Stanley is needed because General Hummel has stolen some VX gas warheads and has announced that he will launch them onto San Francisco unless his demands are met. Stanley knows how to disarm the bombs, but he needs someone who knows Alcatraz well enough to get him inside. That man is former British Intelligence Agent John Patrick Mason, who has been in prison for the past thirty years without a trial because he was accused of stealing the private files of J. Edgar Hoover. In 1962, John became the only inmate ever to escape from Alcatraz, and he stayed out of Alcatraz long enough to father a daughter named Jade Angelou. Despite his extreme hatred of the F.B.I., John agrees to help Stanley. When John and Stanley are sent into Alcatraz with a Navy S.E.A.L. team, General Hummel's men kill the entire S.E.A.L. team, leaving Stanley and John to work on their own to rescue the hostages.

What san francisco, california films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a san francisco, california frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — utility pole is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • utility pole2.5×
  • tie2.3×
  • neon sign2.0×
  • trench coat1.9×
  • necktie1.9×
  • suit1.9×
  • suit jacket1.8×
  • collared shirt1.7×

How san francisco, california films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate san francisco, california from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 84%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 2,708 frames from 35 films carrying the san francisco, california label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/san-francisco-california

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used