the Hotel Bristol enigma
In the WW2 thriller Cloak and Dagger (Fritz Lang 1946), Gary Cooper arrives in Switzerland at an unconvincing Zurich airport, made Swiss by 'Welcome to Switzerland' signs and some tourism posters:
|
|
|
|
The locale is all the more unconvincing in that Zurich did not have an international airport until 1948. (See here a 1950 travelogue that shows the new airport, 'probably the most modern in Europe'.)
We do see an exterior shot of the control tower of the airport at which his aeroplane is supposed to be landing, but it must be an airport somewhere else:
We do see an exterior shot of the control tower of the airport at which his aeroplane is supposed to be landing, but it must be an airport somewhere else:
That somewhere else is Croydon:
Croydon Airport
From 'Zurich Airport' Cooper heads straight for his hotel, represented firstly in this view of a busy street:
There is a Hotel Bristol in Zurich, but it doesn't look like this. In fact, no Hotel Bristol in Switzerland looks like this. (When I first researched this question I could find no picture of a Hotel Bristol that looks like this, neither in Europe nor further afield.)
When Cooper signs in, under a different name, the registration sheet itself bears the name of an entirely different hotel:
|
|
There doesn't seem to have been a Neues Posthotel in Zurich, but there was one in St Moritz, so perhaps this is a memory of someone's skiing holiday.
The film's Neues Posthotel exists only on paper, but its Hotel Bristol is real. What we see looks like stock footage - Gary Cooper isn't shown on that street, suitcase in hand - but stock footage is by definition film of something real, and it was frustrating not to know where that real hotel was. There is a wonderful website listing the more than two hundred Hotels Bristol around the world, see here, but none of the hotels listed at 'All Bristol Hotels' looked like the one in Cloak and Dagger, suggesting that the one I was looking for no longer existed, or had changed its name.
I examined many postcards of Hotels Bristol from the past, a sample of which is available below. Some come close, but none is the real thing.
The inquiry had been taken up (see here) by Roger Williams, compiler of the 'All Bristol Hotels' list and author of the entertaining High Times at the Hotel Bristol, devoted to narratives that attach to hotels bearing this name: see here.
I examined many postcards of Hotels Bristol from the past, a sample of which is available below. Some come close, but none is the real thing.
The inquiry had been taken up (see here) by Roger Williams, compiler of the 'All Bristol Hotels' list and author of the entertaining High Times at the Hotel Bristol, devoted to narratives that attach to hotels bearing this name: see here.
It was my correspondent Digby Warde-Aldam who finally identified the mystery Hotel Bristol in Cloak and Dagger as the one in Vienna, pointing to a website about it (now offline) where the photograph below left appeared:
|
Cloak and Dagger
|
I had seen many photographs of the Vienna Hotel Bristol, but in none did the entrance look like this, and no photograph showed the caryatids visible in the film, but I knew that it definitely was the Vienna hotel I could see that in the film frame the balustrade atop the building beyond the hotel is part of the Staatsoper across the street:
It was a relief to have the enigma solved.
(Many thanks Digby.)
(Many thanks Digby.)