Few things throw me out of a film more than bad backdrops or wrong-looking topography. A location has to more or less look the part or forget it.
I’ve no problem with the Philippine jungle standing in for Vietnam in Apocalypse Now, or Spain’s Almeria section subbing for the Old Southwest in those Sergio Leone westerns, or David Lean building a temporary set at Spain’s Playa del Algarrobico as a stand-in for World War I-era Aqaba. The locations seemed right plus I didn’t know any better so no worries. But if I do know better, watch out.
The “Florida” setting of the Seminole Ritz hotel in Some Like It Hot, for example, is impossible. Southern Florida is flat as a pancake, and yet we can see the hills of San Diego’s Point Loma in the distance during the “Cary Grant in a sailor hat meets Sugar” beach scene.
I hated it when Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, John Savage and those other factory-mill goons went hunting in rural Pennsylvania, and they wound up near the rocky peaks of Mount Baker in the state of Washington. I immediately checked out of that awful film when I saw those effing mountains.
One of the worst all-time offenders is Franklin Schaffner‘s Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston‘s rocket ship crash lands in what might be Arizona’s Lake Powell or maybe somewhere in the Mexican Sonoran desert. And then we’re at the Fox ranch in Malibu Canyon, and then we journey to the high-cliff California coast and suddenly we’re in what remains of New York City…adjacent to Zuma State Beach at Point Dume.
As Evelyn Mulwray‘s Japanese gardener says about her salt-water pond and how it affects nearby plants, “Velly velly bad.”
And yet I don’t go out of my way to be a hard-ass. If a film is set in Oklahoma, the scenery only has to resemble Oklahoma. Which is why Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma! (’55), which was actually shot in the green-grass sections of Arizona, passes muster.