2800 Scott 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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