The Natural | 1984
Hollywood bought up Bernard Malamud’s odd Arthurian-baseball novel and changed the ending to make an entirely different point.
Set in the Twenties and Thirties, the movie was shot entirely within the environs of Buffalo, upstate New York, which was fairly unmodernised, and happened to have a period baseball stadium, the 40,000-seater War Memorial Stadium, Jefferson and Best Streets, home of the Buffalo Bisons, which was used as the 'New York Knights Field'. Much of the stadium has since been dismantled to form a sports complex.
'Chicago’s Wrigley Field’ is actually All-High Stadium, the playing field of Bennett High School, 2895 Main Street, Buffalo, close to the ice cream parlor where Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) meets Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), which is Parkside Candy Store, 3208 Main Street – still in operation.
'Chicago's Union Station' was the old 1929 Buffalo Central Terminal, 495 Paderewski Drive, which closed in 1979. It was allowed to fall into a sorry state of disrepair but is currently under renovation. In 2005, it was used as the location for DW Kann's indie-horror Prison Of The Psychotic Damned and in 2017 for Reginald Hudlin's drama Marshall, with Chadwick Boseman.
The farmhouse is in South Dayton, about 40 miles southwest of Buffalo, where the the railway station is South Dayton Station.
The Ellicott Square Building, 283 Main Street became the fictitious 'Hotel Ellicott'. The hospital is the, now empty and deserted, Buffalo Psychiatric Center, 400 Forest Avenue.
This is a basic entry and due to be expanded.
