Last weekend I saw W.C. Fields' last starring movie: Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941 - original story credited to our own
Otis Criblecoblis). Towards the end of the movie, there is a 5 minute chase scene which has excellent exterior shots of the warehouse district downtown, Atwater Village, and the Cahuenga Pass. At least 3 Noirish LA posters have commented on this chase:
3940dxer and
GaylordWilshire back on page 1417, and
Scott Charles elsewhere.
Here's a link to a brief 2 minute, 40 second clip from the first portion of the chase, well worth watching:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VT...xYA0_LNIZi2Vtb
The most interesting to me are the downtown shots. And it is good I googled before putting effort into identifying each of them: last year, John Bengtson made a terrific and detailed
blog post on these locations: In the comments section of Bengtson's blog, Scott Charles contributed a missing chase location ID.
The downtown venues were shot in the area bounded by E 6th, Alameda, E 7th, and the river:
Google Maps
Bengtson has some great "then and nows" - well worth seeing. Here's a "then" that he didn't include.
It fits between his location 16) and 17). Fields' car careens east down Produce Street past the Certain-Teed Products company warehouse and makes a quick jog south towards the California Warehouse building, then left to continue on the next east-west street which is Wholesale St. Here is the Sanborn map:
lapl.org
At 1:00 there is a scene of well-dressed citizens exiting south through an arcade from E 6th to Produce Street. They are immediately set upon by Fields' car and are forced to jump out of their shoes to get out of the way in time.
This is followed by a view of 2 confused motorcycle cops driving in circles outside an adjacent building with a sign "Beekeepers Supplies - Honey Beeswax."
Universal Pictures
I wondered if this were a real business or just something made up for the movie. I looked in the CDs and found that bee products actually were a thing, although the only business listed was several blocks away from where Bengtson placed these shots. But looking more closely at the Sanborn above, there is an "apiary supplies" building at 1300 Produce. Searching for that address yielded several entries for the Diamond Match Company, which does not appear to be insect-related at first sight.
This company, according to Wikipedia, continues to be the leading producer of matches (12B/yr) in the USA, and was controlled in the 1920s by Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish Match King - "a genius and swindler," the "Leonardo of larcenists," according to John Kenneth Galbraith. Kreuger operated Diamond Match as his personal Ponzi scheme until his (suspicious) death in 1932.
So what about these bees? Google provided the answer in an AP wire story from August 3, 2004:
CHICO, Calif. (AP) -- One of the original Diamond Match factory buildings in Chico has gone up in flames, apparently a victim of arson.
Firefighters found that doors and support timbers had been piled up near a staircase to feed the blaze that engulfed the building early Monday.
The 13,000-square-foot building constructed in 1905 was used to raise bees and to make honeycomb frames from wood left over from making match sticks. The bees helped pollinate the area's crops, and the company often purchased the resulting honey.
Operations at the plant ended in 1989, and the current owner of the 137-acre factory property had hoped to restore it and other original buildings to anchor a development to include single-family homes, townhouses, apartments, shops and restaurants.