Hi all you Los Angeleno historians and film noirist super geniuses,
I am trying to nail down the background beach location where Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is driving around Phyllis Diedrichson (Barbara Stanwyk)'s daughter Lola (Jean Hetherington) on a Sunday after he and Phyllis have killed Phyllis' husband in Billy Wilder's glorious LA-based noir DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). It's definitely a So Cal beach location and the internet seems to suggest it might be Malibu colony though there is also supposition that it could be Venice (Sunset Pier) or Santa Monica or even PV. The big clue I see is a distinctive metal archway / gate / sign which passes by Walter's car as they drive along the beach. I slowed down the footage in the attached link from the film
here; at 52 seconds you get your best look at the arch.
This is a composite of the image of the metal beach archway I put together from various clips of the sequence above.
https://imgur.com/a/KHuXtxI
It's reminiscent of the Redondo Beach archway but that sport fishing arch / sign was too far from the ocean and didn't go up until the late 1960s and DOUBLE INDEMNITY was shot in late 1943. AI suggested it could be an arch at Venice (Sunset Pier) which works out timing-wise though there aren't any good pics of it that I can find for comparison. It could also be the SM Pier (a similar arch to today and the neon was turned off during the war) but it still doesn't seem quite right.
This Santa Monica beach archway from 1898 is the closest image I've found.
The shot is from this website:
https://oceanpark.wordpress.com/top/ocean-park-history/
Apologies for my clunky formatting, I'm new at all this! Thoughts / ideas on the answer?
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