Montreal City Weblog

Kate 14:10 on 2024-05-05 Permalink Reply  

• Robert H 17:50 on 2024-05-05 Permalink

  I think it’s wonderful that Montreal is attracting more film production from out of the city, especially the bigger budget American and international projects that bring so much money to the city and opportunities for local technicians, actors and studios. This is gratifying to see given the ferocious competition with other cities for this type of business.

  I’ve become used to recognizing bits and pieces of the city in various movies and I feel like I have a little insider connection. More than once, I’ve been amused to follow a scene of characters walking down a street I know and then watch them turn a corner only to find themselves in a part of town I know is kilometres away.

  I’m a bit jaded now, though; as a viewer, I only get really excited about movies where Montreal plays itself. Such movies where Ville Marie is actually a co-star are quite rare, even rarer if they’re any good. The only three that come to mind are Jésus de Montréal (directed by Denys Arcand), The Score (one of Brando’s last performances), and Afterglow (Julie Christie!)…wait, there was something else from the early sixties with the late Robert Shaw, which I’ll have to google…

• Kate 19:36 on 2024-05-05 Permalink

  You’re thinking of The Luck of Ginger Coffey in which Montreal plays itself. There’s also a cameo at 7:14 which old Montreal anglos will recognize.

  You should also enjoy the car chase from Blazing Magnum (1976) part 1 and part 2 which was shot all over town but spliced together interestingly.

• Nicholas 21:27 on 2024-05-05 Permalink

  Wikipedia has a good list of films shot in Montreal, including ones shot and set here. It’s (obviously) not complete (doesn’t have Blazing Magnum, for example).

• Kate 21:40 on 2024-05-05 Permalink

  Not even under its alternative titles, Strange Shadows in an Empty Room or Una magnum special per Tony Saitta. Will have to fix that.

• Robert H 01:01 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  Yes, Kate, that’s it! Robert Shaw as Ginger Coffey, affable but feckless, and Montreal in wintery black and white looking rather Edinburgh-ish. I’ve only seen clips, so I’ll give this a watch. It should be interesting to see Shaw, a fine actor, between his white-haired Spectre assasin in From Russia With Love and his doomed shark hunter in Jaws over a decade later.

  That Blazing Magnum (never seen it) car chase was hilarious and complete with cheesy seventies soundtrack muzak, not quite Bullitt, French Connection, or Bond level, but pretty good, and they managed to cover a lot of central Montreal: Look! There they are at what used to be the Park/Pins gordian knot; next shot: down by the elevated Bonaventure expressway! My favorite shot, which they caught from three angles, was the three cars zooming in formation, momentarily airborne, down the Hôtel-de-Ville slope just south of Sherbrooke by the pedestrian stairs. I’m also struck by how seedy and gritty the city looks: parking lots, rundown buildings, the shabbiest locations. Even with all the graffiti and orange cones, Montreal looks better now.

  P.S. I appreciate your editing. I do go on, and on!

• Uatu 02:17 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  The TV show Ransom featured Montreal as the city where the head office of the negotiation firm was located.

• MarcG 07:44 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  I wonder if the Fourniers were involved in that car chase scene.

• walkerp 13:41 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  Wait you seem to be suggesting that Strange Shadows in an Empty Room is watchable somewhere. I missed it when they screened it at Fantasia and have been looking for it everywhere without any success. Do you all have a link or a place it can be purchased?

• Ian 14:26 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  it’s on MGM+, Prime Video, and a bunch of other places online

• CE 14:43 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  I have a friend who lived in LA and said it was difficult to watch movies because he got distracted by how much locations would shift around from scene to scene.

  Another American movie where Montreal very much plays itself is The Whole Nine Yards (2000) which is not a very good movie and the supposedly Francophone character speaks English with a French from France accent.

  What was the name of the movie from, I think, the 80s where a scene or two are shot in Le Lux? There are a couple great scenes shot around Place des Arts where the whole area looks almost bombed out.

• dhomas 15:59 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  @Ian your link is to letterboxd for US streaming services. It is not available to stream on any Canadian streaming services, unfortunately. Unless you count piracy.

  As for movies filmed in Montreal, I remember recognizing parts of Mirabel airport in the film Warm Bodies.

• Kate 16:11 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  CE, you made a comment about it four years ago – Crazy Moon.

• Blork 21:17 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  I made a blog post about locations in “The Luck of Ginger Coffey” back in 2017: https://www.blork.org/blorkblog/2017/03/08/montreal-location-scouting-with-ginger-coffey/

  BTW, the film is adapted from the novel of the same name by Brian Moore, who lived here in the 1950s. He later wrote (among other things) “Black Robe,” which was adapted to film in 1991. His little known “The Revolution Script” is a fictionalization of the October Crisis, and is really worth a read if you can find a copy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Script

• Kate 21:33 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  Good blog entry, Blork. But when the movie was made, that wasn’t the Gazette building, it was the Montreal Star.

• walkerp 22:57 on 2024-05-06 Permalink

  The DVD is $106!
  I can’t even find it on the darkweb.

• dhomas 08:20 on 2024-05-07 Permalink

  @walkerp I got a digital copy I got from… “online sources” some time ago (possibly after the last time it was discussed on this blog!). I’m a bit of a digital hoarder, so I hang onto everything. I don’t know if the source I got it from still exists, and even if it did, I wouldn’t want to post it here. If you want it, maybe Kate can put me in contact with you and I can send you a direct link to it from my library.

• Blork 09:51 on 2024-05-07 Permalink

  I don’t think so Kate. According to my reading, the Montreal Star had two addresses in its lifetime, and the last one was on St-Jacques. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Star Unless that was just the editorial offices with the printing presses being on St-Antoine, but I can’t find any reference to that.