The Bedroom Window | 1987

This Hitchcockian thriller, from Curtis Hanson who went on to direct LA Confidential, sees Terry Lambert (Steve Guttenberg) ending up in all kinds of trouble when he puts himself forward as sole witness to a sex attack seen by his boss’s wife, Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert), with whom he’s enjoying a post-party coupling.

It’s set in east coast seaport Baltimore (seemingly an altogether different city from John Waters’ ‘Hairdo Capital of the World’), but much of the film was shot in North Carolina, at Wilmington’s DEG Film Studios, now EUE/Screen Gems Studios.

The crime is witnessed from the bedroom window of Lambert’s apartment at 12 East Mount Vernon Place, overlooking the George Washington Monument, on Charles Street, Central Baltimore.

Lambert follows creepy suspect Carl Henderson (Brad Greenquist), to West Federal Hill, south of the city, where it sounds like he’s living with Mrs Bates, alongside the railroad tracks at at 134 West Randall Street at Race Street.

But over in North Carolina, the ‘Fells Point Saloon’, the nautical themed bar where Lambert unwisely keeps tabs on Henderson, is 314 Nutt Street in Wilmington.

You won’t find ‘Edgar’s bar’, the place dressed up with neon quotes from Edgar Allan Poe where Denise (Elizabeth McGovern) works. It isn’t real, but it celebrates one of Baltimore’s famous residents (you can see Poe’s actual house at 203 North Amity Street, less than a mile southwest of the Washington Monument).

Lambert has a clandestine meeting with Sylvia at one of Baltimore’s most public places, the modern five-storey steel’n’glass centrepiece of the Inner harbor development, the National Aquarium, 501 East Pratt Street on the North West Harbor Basin. It’s home to thousands of fish, birds and aquatic mammals, including bottle-nose dolphins and beluga whales, displayed in natural surroundings including a whole section of tropical rainforest.

There’s a bit of location cheating at the ‘Townsend Theatre’, where Sylvia gets knocked off while attending the ballet.

The exterior is the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Museum Drive, but the interior is not Baltimore at all, but home of the ‘renowned North Carolina School of the Arts’, the art-deco Stevens Center Theater, 401 West Fourth Street, downtown Winston-Salem in North Carolina.

Bud & Joe’s, the bar where Denise goes all slutty to act as bait, is long gone. It stood on Harper Avenue at the Boardwalk in Carolina Beach.

Strangely the movie ends with a car crashing at the fountain at the junction of Market Street and 5th in Wilmington. If it looks naggingly familiar to the sharp-eyed movie buff, that’s because it’s right outside the ‘Deep River’ apartment of Isabella Rossellini from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

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