Chan Is Missing - Chan Is Married
Steve and Jo return to Chan’s hotel room (they had also tried earlier). Once again there’s no answer. But the neighbor whose door is opposite calls out through his closed door and tells them that they should look for the woman who took the photographs from Chan’s room. What the ? … the plot thickens.
Later, they persuade the manager to let them into Chan’s room but it was clear he had moved on. They find newspapers with cut-out articles - perhaps the clippings they had earlier found in Chan’s jacket pocket about the flag-waving murder at the parade? They could also see that a photo had been removed from a wall - they had heard Chan took photos at that parade and wondered if it could be one of those.
When a woman calls at their garage asking for Chan Hung, Steve follows her back to her house. He and Jo go there later and greet her with her daughter Jenny outside the entrance of her house; it turns out she’s Chan’s wife - they hadn’t even known that he was married. This shot was taken from her upstairs living room.
Then … Steve stays behind while the others enter the house. The sidewalk has three utility covers (arrowed) which helped lead CitySleuth to this location.
… and Now, the house is at 416 20th Avenue in the Richmond district (map). The small arrows point to the utility covers, unchanged in over 40 years; the large arrow points to the living room window through which the above shots were filmed. This same house was also used to film Steve and Amy’s kitchen scene earlier in the movie.
Chan’s wife (Ellen Yeung) hasn’t seen her husband since they separated over a year earlier. She tells them Chan never was happy in America … “He’s too Chinese”. The more he learns about Chan the more Jo realizes how little he had known about him. The window is the same one shown above.
The same room was filmed in Wayne Wang’s delightful 1985 follow-on movie Dim Sum: A Little Bit Of Heart. Note the same sofa. Interesting trivia - this was filmed in the home of Laureen Chew who plays Steve’s sister Amy in Chan Is Missing and who has a leading role in Dim Sum.
Then … Later, when Steve suggests they go to the police to report their missing $4,000 he gets ribbed mercilessly by Jo who’s often heard him complain about them. Steve gets defensive … “It’s a fine line between a criminal and a cop … forget you, man!”. This scene was filmed in front of Chester’s Cafe at 1269 Mason Street (a favored hang-out of theirs appearing several times throughout the movie - here it is in an earlier scene).
… and Now, the matching view looks south along Mason towards Nob Hill (the Brocklebank apartments visible on the left at the top of the hill, was the home of Madeleine, Hitchcock’s duplicitous femme fatale, in the 1958 movie Vertigo). The brick building on the right is the Washington/Mason Cable Car Barn and Powerhouse; the cluster of SF Muni vehicles on the sidewalk is in front of its garage both Then and Now.
The barn was built from 1885 - 1887 as part of the city-wide transportation system prompted by the 1873 invention of the cable car by wire-rope manufacturer Andrew Smith Hallidie (photo by Paul Vidler). The barn is still fully operational and since 1974 it has housed a free must-see cable car history museum.