Location, Location, Location!

If there's one surefire way to rile up moviegoers from any geographical region it is to mess around onscreen with their turf, as it were. For outstate Minnesotans, or southeastern Minnesotans, to be precise, any motion picture about Jesse James and his attempt to rob the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, has to be held up to the litmus test of the actual topography of that territory.

A contemporary depiction of the James-Younger Gang's
failed attempt to rob Northfield's First National Bank.

What immediately comes to mind is the 1972 film "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid," a cynical, darkly humorous revisionist western written and directed by iconoclastic filmmaker Philip Kaufman. Kaufman, who directed such diverse cinematic jewels as "The Right Stuff" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," was famously fired from directing "The Outlaw Josey Wales" by Clint Eastwood because of his meticulous attention to detail and his bleaker concept of the story.

"The Great Northfield Minnesota  Raid" contrasted the worldly vision and wonderment of pragmatic outlaw Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) with the petty mendacity and avarice of Jesse James (Robert Duvall).

"The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" earned choruses of sniggers among Midwest purists for its planting of Northfield - in fact situated in relatively flat farmland - amid the rolling hills of the filming location in Jacksonville, Oregon (pictured below).

The building that Cliff Robertson's Cole Younger passes on horseback, identified onscreen as Northfield College, was actually the old Jackson County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Oregon (pictured below). The filmmakers, at least, deserved an A for effort by accompanying the outlaws' arrival into the faux Northfield with a soundtrack recording of Northfield's St. Olaf's Choir singing "Hodie Christus natus" ("Today Christ Is Born").

The first major Hollywood take on Jesse and Frank James, 1939's "Jesse James," starring Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda as the Missouri-bred siblings, utilized locations in Pineville, Missouri, situated in the far southwest corner of the Show-Me State.

Frank James (Henry Fonda) makes a hasty exit from
the First National Bank of Northfield.

When director Nicholas Ray, of "Johnny Guitar" and "Rebel Without a Cause" fame, gave "The True Story of Jesse James" the glossy studio-backlot makeover in 1957 with stars Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter, chances are all the location photography, including the Northfield bank robbery, were shot at the 20th Century Fox Movie Ranch, located near Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains.

You can't park here! Youthful Fox contract players Jeffrey Hunter and
Robert Wagner as Frank and Jesse James find themselves cornered in
the First National Bank of Northfield, via Los Angeles County,
in "The True Story of Jesse James."

"The Long Riders" (1980), directed by Walter Hill, was unique among westerns for the casting of four sets of brothers as outlaw siblings: Stacy and James Keach as Frank and Jesse James; David, Keith, and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger; Randy and Dennis Quaid as Clell and Ed Miller; and Nicholas and Christopher Guest as Robert and Charley Ford.

The breathtaking depiction of the Northfield debacle in "The Long Riders" was filmed in Parrott, Georgia (population 156), in the southwestern part of the state.

A more or less modern glimpse of Parrott, Georgia

For most moviegoers, whether the plains of Northfield are substituted by the hills of southwestern Oregon or the crags of Malibu might seem like piddly quibbles, but liberties with and outright gaffes in motion picture geography have always been a source of bemusement as well as amusement.

Look at, for example, "The Sound of Music," the beloved 1965 musical starring Julie Andrews. At the end of the film, set in pre-World War II Austria, stalwart Christopher Plummer secrets the singing von Trapp family out of an Auschwitz abbey under the noses of the Nazis and leads them over a grassy hill to freedom in neutral Switzerland.

The problem here is that it's over 130 miles from Salzburg to the closest Swiss border, a straight line that would indeed have the von Trapp family "climb ev'ry mountain." As depicted in the film, that very first mountain they crossed would have landed them in Hitler's summer getaway at Berchtesgaden.

Hitler keeps an eye out for Julie Andrews in Berchtesgaden.

In reality, the von Trapp family did not traipse across the Alps, suitcases and musical instruments in hand, but rather, after informing relatives and friends, unceremoniously took the train to Italy, then sailed to America for their first concert tour.

Speaking of films about World War II, following the success of 1962's "The Longest Day," the epic portrayal of the D-Day landings on Normandy beaches, Columbia Pictures announced an upcoming picture about the Battle of the Bulge, the last major counteroffensive operation mounted by German troops in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium and northeast France.

Generals Omar Bradley, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
George S. Patton confer in war-torn Bastogne, Belgium.

The studio touted the advisory participation of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bernard L. Montgomery, key generals involved in the conflict. Shortly after Columbia announced that filming was to start, rival studio Warner Bros. registered the title "The Battle of the Bulge." Columbia initially obtained an injunction against Warners but dropped it when the latter agreed that its movie would not use the names of real-life military participants, including Eisenhower, Montgomery, Omar Bradley, and George S. Patton!

Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, and Dana Andrews
portray fictional officers in "Battle of the Bulge."

The Warner Bros. picture, "Battle of the Bulge," held some promise, with director Ken Annakin (who directed the British and French segments of "The Longest Day") helming an impressive cast featuring Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas and James MacArthur, but ended up delivering a botched history lesson with plot-holes big enough to drive a Sherman tank through. Not the least of which was substituting the wintry woods of the Ardennes with the arid expanses of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range near Madrid, Spain.

(Above) Fact: December 1944, Ardennes; (below) fiction:
Sierra de Guadarrama mountains

The film was vigorously denounced by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the onetime Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who emerged from retirement as the President of the United States to express his outrage over the picture's glaring inaccuracies. The filmmakers added a backhanded excuse in the closing credits with the disclaimer: "To encompass the whole of the heroic contributions of all the participants, places, names and characters have been generalized and action has been synthesized in order to convey the spirit and essence of the battle."

Nowhere was the action more "synthesized" than in the movie's overblown version of the Battle of Celles on the day after Christmas 1944 when the U.S. 2nd Armored Division smashed Germany's 2nd Panzer Division. Filmmakers reduced the decisive encounter to a heavily armored Old West cowboys-and-Indians shootout on the prairie.

The Battle of Celles: (top) fact vs. (bottom) fiction

Moving on to a more contemporary arena of combat, the fields, rivers, jungles, and deltas of Vietnam were substituted, with varying degrees of suspension-of-disbelief, by such diverse American locales as Fort Benning, Georgia, in John Wayne's "The Green Berets" (this is the film notorious for showing the sun setting in the east); Valencia, California, in "Go Tell the Spartans," starring Burt Lancaster; Cromwell, Connecticut, in "Jacknife," with Robert De Niro and Ed Harris; Kentucky in "In Country," starring Bruce Willis; Fort Hunter Liggett, California, in Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers"; Kauai, Hawaii, in "Uncommon Valor," featuring Gene Hackman; and Fripp Island, South Carolina, in "Forrest Gump," starring Tom Hanks.

John Wayne and special forces enjoy the fall colors of Georgia
- er - Vietnam, in "The Green Berets." You call that a jungle?

Mexico made for an interesting Nam by proxy in Sylvester Stallone's "Rambo: First Blood Part II," while by far, the most intriguing cinematic juxtaposition was Stanley Kubrick's transformation of London and Kent locales into Vietnamese landscapes in "Full Metal Jacket."

The indefinable auteur Stanley Kubrick wanders through the
London rubble of a Vietnam battle zone in "Full Metal Jacket."

More convincing surrogate scenery for Vietnam was photographed in the Philippines for "The Boys in Company C" (which gave real-life drill instructor R. Lee Ermey his first screen role); Chuck Norris' "Missing in Action"; "Hamburger Hill," featuring Dylan McDermott and Don Cheadle; Oliver Stone's "Platoon"; and Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."

R. Lee Ermey dresses down Stan Shaw in "The Boys in Company C."

Nine years later, Ermey tears into Vincent D'Onofrio
in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket."

Even closer to home in Southeast Asia was Thailand, which provided locations passing as Nam in "Good Morning, Vietnam," starring Robin Williams; "Casualties of War," with Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn; "Air America," featuring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr.; "Operation Dumbo Drop," with Danny Glover and Ray Liotta; and "The Deer Hunter," starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken.

Robin Williams and Forest Whitaker go cycling on a
Thailand street in "Good Morning, Vietnam."

On the topic of "The Deer Hunter," which so painstakingly endeavored to present a quaint portrait of the steel works community of Clairton, Pennsylvania, none of the movie was actually shot there, as the filmmakers opted for other mill towns in the Monongahela River Valley of the tristate area. As a matter of fact, the titular deer hunting scenes, supposedly set in the region's Allegheny Mountains of the Appalachian range in the eastern U.S., were filmed for whatever reason in the Cascades of Washington state on the other side of the country.

This is the rolling landscape of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains.

This is the foreboding skyscape of Washington state's Cascade
range, a long, long way from steel town.

The makers of Jackie Chan's 1995 action comedy "Rumble in the Bronx" barely made any effort to conceal the filming location as Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. The crew initially put up fake New York-style graffiti during the day and removed it in the evening, while trying not to include any mountains in the background. It wasn't long before Chan urged the production team to focus on the action without being concerned about the scenery.

The hovercraft commandeered by Jackie Chan in "Rumble in the
Bronx," as well as a helicopter used in the film, displays
a Canadian registration.

Jackie Chan steers the hovercraft onto a golf course where the
syndicate boss is playing against the backdrop of the mountains
of New York City - make that the Pacific Ranges of Vancouver.

Vancouver has stood in for so many U.S. cities in motion pictures that it became known as "Hollywood North." A close north-of-the-border rival for film locations fronting as the Big Apple would be Toronto. "American Psycho," "Serendipity," "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," and "The Incredible Hulk" were all set in New York City but featured Toronto backdrops, earning the Ontario capital the nickname "New York North."

One New York movie that was actually filmed there but still got it wrong was 1972's "The Valachi Papers." Produced by Dino De Laurentiis as competition for Francis Ford Coppola's epic gangster saga "The Godfather," the picture was based on a controversial book by Peter Maas, who wrote the biography Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System, and was intended as Charles Bronson's heralded debut as a legitimate dramatic actor.

Early in the proceedings, a scene set in the 1930s includes several 1960s and '70s cars on the street. The most obvious gaffe occurs in a bit from the 1920s, when Valachi, eluding an early morning police pursuit, plunges his auto into the East River just north of the Brooklyn Bridge, where the newly constructed twin towers of the World Trade Center are clearly visible against the dawning horizon.

The Twin Towers opened a few months after the film was released.

Admittedly, "The Valachi Papers" was made long before digital special effects, and besides poorly supervised production values, the film featured an Italian crew and was directed by an Englishman, Terence Young, who was more at home directing the 007 films "Dr. No," "From Russia with Love," and "Thunderball" than he was maneuvering through the mean streets of New York, but for crying out loud, even the movie's poster featured the WTC.

Skewing a skyline is one thing but screwing up elementary geography is unforgivable. Case in point is 1969's "Krakatoa, East of Java," which dramatized the cataclysmic 1883 eruption on the volcanic island in the Dutch East Indies that ended up swallowing most of the island and its surrounding archipelago in a fiery cauldron. Over 36,400 deaths were attributed to the eruption and ensuing tsunamis.

Presented in Cinerama as a precursor to the 1970s disaster film cycle, which would be officially inaugurated with 1972's "The Poseidon Adventure," "Krakatoa, East of Java" boasted an international cast that included Maximilian Schell, Brian Keith, Diane Baker, Sal Mineo, and Rossano Brazzi. The picture was nominated for Best Special Visual Effects, losing to its sole competitor in the category, the cheesy stranded-astronauts space opera "Marooned," but what everybody seemed to have overlooked at the time was that the Indonesian island of Krakatoa was, is, and always will be, west of Java!

Although it doesn't pose a geographical quandary, Alfred Hitchcock's geographically titled chase thriller "North by Northwest" does present a dilemma in placement, namely in the presence of suave, Bondian villain Phillip Vandamm's expansive Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home poised just over the sculptures of Mount Rushmore.

It's highly doubtful that the country's park services would allow the construction of a private residence hovering above a national memorial, but, hey, when you're Alfred Hitchcock...

Cary Grant rescues Eva Marie Saint before she's sucked into Abe
Lincoln's nostrils on Mount Rushmore in "North by Northwest."

In the category of seasonal faux pas, director John Carpenter's seminal 1978 horror opus "Halloween" was nominally noted for its use of artificial dead leaves to simulate the fall season during its springtime shooting schedule in South Pasadena, California, but what the camera couldn't hide, in a Midwestern setting, was the dreaded appearance of a West Coast palm tree on a street in the fictional Midwest hamlet of Haddonfield, Illinois.

By the way, only one species of palm tree, the California fan palm, is actually native to the state; everything else, from the ubiquitous Mexican fan palms to the feather-crowned Canary Island date palms, was imported.

There were no palm trees in 1993's "Grumpy Old Men," but for a movie so cherished by the people of Wabasha, Minnesota - its supposed setting ("Home of Grumpy Old Men" signs in the township declare) - not a frame of the film was shot there.

Slippery's Tavern is a popular, historic draw alongside the Mississippi River in Wabasha. Originally just a shack for bait, beer, and burgers, the joint burned down in the late 1970s and was replaced by the shoreline establishment with a gas dock and boat rentals.

For reasons known only to movie producers, art directors, and set designers, the makers of "Grumpy Old Men" decided to not only transplant Slippery's to Half Time Rec, an Irish bar and game center in the Como Park area of St. Paul, Minnesota (pictured below), but to redub the digs as Chuck's Bait Shop. supposedly in memory of Wabasha's former police chief.

Adding to the confusion, the filmmakers of the 1995 sequel, "Grumpier Old Men," utilized the 331 Club at 331 13th Avenue Northeast in Minneapolis (pictured below) as the exterior for Slippery's, or Chuck's Bait Shop, or whatever, with Minneapolis' Mayslack's Bar as the interior.

A site so minor as a drugstore in the opening credits for "Grumpy Old Men" was, in reality,  Poirier Pharmacy in Faribault, Minnesota, 70 miles northwest of Wabasha (pictured below).

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The church supposedly in Wabasha was really located in Center City, Minnesota, 103 miles north of Wabasha. The ice fishing hole shared by John Gustafson (Jack Lemmon) and Max Goldman (Walter Matthau) was filmed at Lake Rebecca in Rockford, Minnesota, 115 miles northwest of Wabasha. Gustafson's and Goldman's residences were next door to each other but in a neighborhood in the Lake Phalen area of St. Paul on Hyacinth Avenue, 76 miles northwest of Wabasha. The home of Ariel Truax was, in fact, directly across Hyacinth Avenue.

A supposed bird's-eye view of Wabasha was actually an overlook in Red Wing, Minnesota, 30 miles northwest of Wabasha. And something so simple as a scene in which Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margret make snow angels together was shot in Red Wing's Soldiers Memorial Park.

Sound stage photography was completed at Prince's Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen, Minnesota. By 1995, the studio had ceased leasing studio space, so interiors for the sequel, "Grumpier Old Men," were done at St. Paul's Energy Park Studios.

"Grumpy Old Men" screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson grew up in Hastings, Minnesota, a larger river community about an hour's drive north of Wabasha. He wrote the script when he was 19, specifically with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in mind. Lemmon had to talk an unimpressed and reluctant Matthau into agreeing to appear in the picture. Johnson admitted that otherwise, "It's a movie about three old people and ice fishing. It doesn't get much less commercial than that."

Roger Ebert commented in his review of "Grumpy Old Men," "Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau go together like a couple of old shoes, broken in and still comfortable, but still able to take a shine." Ebert noted, "In a holiday season where all of the other movies seem to specialize in varieties of doom and gloom, their grumpy old faces are actually the sunniest sight around."

Wabasha does host an annual Grumpy Old Men Festival, held on a Saturday in February, featuring an ice fishing tournament, minnow races, raffles, the Grumpy Plunge, hot dish luncheon, spaghetti feed, and chili feed.

So Wabasha still promotes itself as the "Home of Grumpy Old Men," and if that draws visitors and tourists to the community, no harm done. Just don't ask the locals to point out sights and locations from the film.