The Lady From Shanghai - At The Courthouse
Then … Bannister is about to begin his defense of O’Hara. Elsa meets him at the courthouse, worried that he is intent on losing the case, a verdict that would conveniently send his wife’s lover to the gas chamber. At first glance, this appears to have been filmed in the Fairmont Hotel’s Laurel Court at 950 Mason Street in Nob Hill.
… in 1907 … here’s a vintage image of the Laurel Court taken when the rebuilt Fairmont Hotel reopened after the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. Note the chandelier hanging from the diamond-patterned domes, the marble pillars topped with ‘ram’s horn’ capitals and the ornate lamps attached to the side of the pillars. All of these features are seen above.
and Now, the ceiling of the Laurel Court has three of those large domes; the center one, below, still has its original chandelier. The wall and ceiling surfaces have been redone and the lamps removed from the pillars but the architecture remains unchanged. Note the design of the railings in the center of the room, also evoking ram’s horns, the same as in the movie view in the ‘Then’ image above.
But the movie scene was filmed not at the Fairmont but on a Columbia Pictures movie set that reproduced in great detail the Laurel Court architecture. Why go to so much trouble and expense? Just ask Alfred Hitchcock who recreated San Francisco’s Ernie’s restaurant, both interior and exterior, at Paramount Studios in Hollywood for a scene in ‘Vertigo”.
While Elsa greets her husband and his associate a couple climbs a staircase behind them. This is the biggest clue revealing that the location was a movie set - the only staircases in the Laurel Court are and always have been the two large curved staircases in the center of the room (above).
and Now, for additional confirmation, CitySleuth walked the Fairmont’s Laurel Court with chief concierge Tom Wolfe searching for the same alignment of doorway, pillars, railings and steps as in the movie scene. The closest match in the room is that pictured below but in comparing it with the Then image above, the alignment is different and there are no railings or stairs here. Neither do the striations in the marble pillars match. Tom and CitySleuth both concluded the movie scene could not have been filmed here.
In the 1948 movie I Remember Mama there was another amazingly realistic studio recreation, this one of the Fairmont’s lobby area, described in more detail here.