The Gauntlet, Clint Eastwood in Phoenix, Arizona in 1977


If you're like me, you really enjoy movies that are shot in locations in cities that you know. Phoenix, Arizona is my favorite city, so a movie like "The Gauntlet", which is from 1977, really gets my attention.

When I first started seeing this movie, on TV, I would wait patiently through all of the story, acting, etc. to see the scenes that show downtown Phoenix. Of course, it's just a movie, but if you look carefully, past all of the shooting, etc., it can be a good view of what Phoenix looked like in the 1970s.

In the most important scene in the Gauntlet, Clint Eastwood's character is driving a bus to deliver Sondra Locke's character to the Phoenix police headquarters. Yeah, as often as I've seen that movie, I really have no idea what it's all about, sorry! And, as you can see from the movie poster above, the bus gets shot up with about a million bullets, and gives a good opportunity to see the buildings on Monroe in the 1970s.

Driving up the steps of the Civic Plaza in 1977, 2nd Street and Adams. St. Mary's Church is in the background.

In the movie, Phoenix Symphony Hall is used as the Phoenix police headquarters. Well, the exterior, anyway. So the bus travels east along Monroe and then ends up on the steps of the Civic Plaza, just north of Symphony Hall, on 2nd Street and Adams. Yeah, I know it's not quite right, but it's just a movie, and Monroe had tall buildings that the stunt men could stand on, and shoot from. At the time, Adams dead-ended at an open plaza with steps leading up to it.


By the way, you can see the difference that the new Civic Plaza was making to the look of downtown Phoenix in the 1970s. In the opening scene, the camera pans from what used to be right across the street, between 3rd and 5th Street on Washington, which was pretty awful, to the beautiful, new, shiny Civic Building just to the north. This movie shows the beginning of the renaissance of downtown Phoenix, which really started picking up momentum in the '80s and '90s and continues to this day. And it shows a whole lot of shooting at a bus, too!

Looking down at Monroe in the 1970s.

Patricia Castro, wife of Governor Raul Castro, with Clint and Sondra
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more