In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum says he used to live in New York and Rhonda Fleming says she’s never been there and Mitchum says that if she goes there, she’ll know one reason why he’s in San Francisco.
San Francisco, because of its natural beauty, its hills and bridges and bay, may be the most popular location for film noirs and crime dramas. Think of The Lady from Shanghai, Dark Passage, Woman on the Run, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry. These movies feature some of the distinctive landmarks of the city – Chinatown’s Mandarin Theater, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and Playland-By-the-Beach in The Lady from Shanghai; the Golden Gate Bridge in Dark Passage; Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero in Woman on the Run; the Presidio, Coit Tower, and Muir Woods in Vertigo; the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale on the mound at Candlestick Park in Experiment in Terror; Kezar Stadium in Dirty Harry; the many steep streets on which Steve McQueen drives his green Mustang in Bullitt.
Still, as a New York native, I must put in a plea for the city of my birth. Jules Dassin’s Naked City comes to mind because of the producer’s pioneering effort to shoot the film entirely on the streets and sidewalks of New York (photo right). In Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Clint Eastwood is a deputy sheriff from Arizona who flies into the big city to nab an escaped killer in Fort Tryon Park and leave for the airport from the heliport on top of the old Pan-Am Building, now named for Met Life. In The French Connection, Fernando Rey eludes Gene Hackman on the subway and dine on French cuisine at an elegant midtown restaurant while Hackman shivers in the cold holding a cardboard cup of coffee.
Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street gives us the subway and a shack on the waterfront where our hero resides; Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street treats us to art galleries and a desolate Central Park bench at dawn; 
John Farrow’s The Big Clock situates us in a magazine empire’s midtown skyscraper. In Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Manhattan Bridge in the background is a constant reminder of where we are.
Among neo-noirs and technicolor crime films, New York is home to The Manchurian Candidate, which features Sinatra’s favorite bar, Jilly’s, and the Central Park lake. In part one of The Godfather, Michael and Kay go to Radio City Music Hall on Christmas Eve. To elude a possible tail, the driver of the car taking Michael and his antagonists to the Italian restaurant with the best veal in the city begins to cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, then makes an illegal u-turn to deliver the group to the Bronx.
Die Hard with a Vengeance is a virtual tour of the town with stops in Harlem, Wall Street, the FDR Drive, Central Park, and Yankee Stadium. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are laugh lines in this 1995 movie that does its bit to combat racial prejudice by pairing the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. And you get to hear the odious villain say he loves “this country,” his words belying his scorn for Americans, such suckers, so trusting. Mind you, this is a movie you’re not supposed to like; you’re allowed to call it a triumph – of “blitzkrieg action,” perhaps – but only after first denouncing it as “bombastic mush.”
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