Victoria on Film

One thing I’d hoped to include in the book was a bunch of still photos from various movies shot in Victoria. Although I did put in descriptions of the movies, Hollywood wanted outrageous sums of cash to reprint the stills in a (hopefully) money-making book. This blog is a strictly nonprofit venture, however, so I figure it's OK to use the images here. All these films are at the Greater Victoria Public Library or Pic-A-Flic.

Commandos Strike At Dawn (1942)
Saanich Inlet is a glacially overdeepened valley filled with salt water. It is, by definition, a fjord – which is why it became a location for this wartime propaganda piece starring Paul Muni, about a Norwegian fishing village that rises up against its Nazi occupiers. In this scene the Allies land on the beach at Bamberton. Apparently parts of the village constructed for the movie still stand near Hall’s boat yard at Goldstream.

Vixen! (1968)
Victorians will laugh their ass off during the opening to this X-rated classic, in which the Inner Harbour, the Parliament Buildings, and (here) the Empress hotel figure prominently. The rest of the movie, about a crazed nympho who seduces guests at a fishing lodge, ostensibly takes place in Canada. But how much of it was filmed here? I emailed Harrison Page, who played the draft dodger and now stars in the TV series JAG, and he set the record straight: “No, we did not film in Canada, we shot in Northern Calf. [California] for Canada.” So now you know.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Victoria plays Jack Nicholson’s hometown in Washington State. Here he rides the Mill Bay ferry, the oldest continually operating route in B.C. Unfortunately, the mansion in Brentwood Bay that served as his family’s home, and the coffee shop and gas station on Highway 1 where he abandons Karen Black at the end of the film, have all been carelessly demolished. (Read that story here.)

Bird on a Wire (1989)
In this romantic caper flick, Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn are pursued by a motorcycle cop along Fisgard Street and up Fan Tan Alley. The scene makes the alley appear far longer than it is in reality, but shows it off to good effect. Bastion Square and the old Carnegie Library earn plenty of screen time too.

Little Women (1994)
Winona Ryder strolls up a dirt-covered Humboldt Street to meet Gabriel Byrne, and her destiny. The Union Club is in the background, along with the lovely Belmont Building, which was constructed in 1913 out of reinforced concrete. It's named after the Belmont Saloon, which operated on the site in the 1870s.

X2: X-Men United (2003)
The evil Stryker leads a helicopter assault on Professer Xavier's mutant training academy, played by Hatley Castle (the home of Royal Roads University). The castle is fencing off its grounds and will start charging $12 for tours this summer, so see the place now before you need a helicopter to get in without paying.

UPDATE (May 23, 2009): As a reader noted below, another made-in-Vic film is 1973’s Harry in Your Pocket, starring James Coburn, Walter Pidgeon, Michael Sarrazin and Trish Van Devere, about a team of pickpockets working around the Pacific Northwest. Last week, this hard-to-find flick finally turned up on Turner Classic Movies. Here’s a fun clip of the thieves hustling tourists in downtown Victoria:

If you want to see the whole movie, Modcinema has it on DVD.

Rattenbury Murder Redux

One question that’s remained unanswered for 70 years is who really killed Francis Rattenbury, the architect of Victoria’s famous Parliament Buildings and Empress Hotel. As I mention in the Notoriety chapter, it’s always been suspected that the murderer was Rattenbury’s dope-addicted wife Alma, instead of George Stoner, their young chauffeur – who confessed to the crime, was sentenced to death, and then received clemency after Alma committed suicide.

In the 1997 edition of Terry Reksten’s biography of Rattenbury, she mentioned that in 1990, Stoner was busted for incedently assaulting a boy in a public toilet. (Police found the 73-year-old Stoner “naked in a cubicle, save for his socks, shoes and hat.”) I’d heard that Stoner had died not long ago. So I wondered, did he tell anyone on his deathbed what actually happened in the Rattenbury case?

I contacted the public library in Bournemouth, the quaint English seaside town where the murder took place in 1935. (The Rattenburys moved there in 1929 because of its similarities to Victoria.) The case was the O.J. Simpson trial of its time, and according to the sheaf of articles the library sent me, it was still in the news – the Rattenbury’s Villa Maderia, for example, was just as plagued by break-ins today as it was after the famous trial, when it was ransacked by souvenir hunters. But it was mainly in the news because of Stoner, who chose to remain in Bournemouth despite his scandalous past.

The articles spelled out Stoner’s life after the trial. He got out of prison in 1942, joined the army, and participated in the D-Day invasion. He lay low after that, but resurfaced in 1977 at a London production of Cause Célèbre, Terence Rattigan’s play about the Rattenbury murder, which suggested that Stoner committed the dastardly deed. Stoner reportedly sat stock-still during the performance, and dodged reporters immediately afterward. A decade later he was in the news again, when he tried to stop the BBC from making a TV version of the play; the producers changed his character’s name to Bowman, and the play was aired in 1987. (A VHS copy is at the Greater Victoria Public Library.) Reporters continued to hound him. Finally, in 1999, he made a statement to the Bournemouth Daily Echo: “The whole crime was committed on an emotional basis. Both I and the lady involved were in a highly emotional state.”

That’s all he would say. Stoner died in a nursing home on March 24, 2000 – the 65th anniversary of the murder. So unless he kept a diary, we will likely never know who the real killer was.

UPDATE (July 17, 2006): A reader inquired why I said that Alma was "dope-addicted". A number of writers about the Rattenbury case have mentioned Alma's possible addictions. For example, Terry Reksten said this: “Alma may well have developed a drug dependency during the years she spent with the ambulance corps during the war. In battlefield hospitals both morphia and cocaine were used as anaesthetics and while morphia was known to be addictive, the properties of cocaine were not clearly understood. But cocaine was known to increase vitality and the capacity to work and since it was generally regarded as a harmless drug, Alma may have begun to use it to keep her going for long hours of unaccustomed hardship and labour .... [and] Alma certainly had an addictive personality. Self-denial was alien to her. One drink, more often than not, led to two or three more. She was a chain smoker who found it difficult to finish a meal without pausing between courses to smoke a cigarette. Rattenbury’s children, Frank and Mary, who were twenty and twenty-five at the time l’affaire Rattenbury became the talk of Victoria, remain convinced and take some comfort from their conviction that “dope” played a role in their father’s entrapment and they may be right.” (page 198)

Sir David Napley's 1988 book, Murder at the Villa Madeira, also explores the question in depth. Stoner's defence was that he was addled from cocaine, but Napley argues that Stoner had no idea what cocaine looked like. Instead, the events of the trial suggested something else was going on: “Clearly, from the questions which Casswell [Stoner’s lawyer] put to her [Alma] in cross-examination, he must have been told by Stoner that she was in the habit of taking drugs .... The description which Stoner gave of the appearance of cocaine was an exact description of heroin. Moreover, Stoner’s solicitor at the committal proceedings put it to Dr O’Donnell, on Stoner’s instructions, that Alma was a drug addict. Taking those facts together, is it not possible that Alma was taking drugs and that one of them was heroin? In Canada there were a number of people who believed she had been on drugs and that this had originated from her contact with and experience of them during the war.” (page 221)

The reader also wanted to know more about Stoner's life after the trial. Above right is an excellent article from the January 28, 1999 Bournemouth Daily Echo summing up the case and its aftermath.

King of The Boondoggles

I had coffee yesterday with Times Colonist writer Jim Gibson to chat about the book, and we swapped bits of Victoria trivia. (Something I didn’t know was that Craig Russell, the famous drag queen, toured here in the 1970s specifically because of the city’s connection to Tallulah Bankhead, who’s discussed in the Notoriety chapter.) At one point we talked about the various fraudsters that have passed through town. And Jim said, “You know, you missed the biggest of them all: Frank Hertel.”

I knew about Hertel. I had to explain that there were a bunch of great stories that I left out of the book because they were mentioned in its predecessor, Victoria: Secrets of The City, and my publisher wanted 70% new content. One advantage of a blog, however, is that I can reprint some of the old stories here.

.... Perhaps the most grandiose con artist of them all was a German businessman and former used Mercedes dealer named Frank Hertel (see photo), who blew into town in 1984 boasting that he would turn Vancouver Island into a high-tech centre, thanks to his fantastic plans to triple the output of oil wells and generate thermal power from water. Hertel’s International Electronics Corporation took over a monumental downtown office building, and he was feted by every politician in town and named Citizen of the Year by Victoria’s Chamber of Commerce. But less than two years later, after his complex network of research investment-credit deals collapsed, Hertel disappeared – only to resurface in Venezuela, beyond the reach of pending charges of tax evasion.

Is Hertel still in Venezuela? Inquiring minds – and federal auditors – would love to know. I'll post more stories from the first book as time permits.

UPDATE (April 15, 2006): Frank Hertel was back in the news this week, when the 15,800 square-foot mansion he once owned at 3195 Humber Road went up for sale for $25 million, a record asking price for this city. The house has doors covered in gold leaf, a desalinization plant, and 19 TV sets, the Times Colonist helpfully said.

The T-C mentioned Hertel’s tax-evading flight to Venezuela, but failed to ask my question above: Where is he now? While I was on CFAX promoting the book, Terry Spence reminded me that George Jones was Hertel’s former lawyer. So I gave Mr. Jones a call, and he filled me in.

It turns out Hertel is still alive. “Schweiny,” as he was nicknamed (from schweinehund, “bastard” in German) did well in Venezuela, taking up residence with the sister of the minister of defence, and convincing the government to invest in one of his oil-well inventions, a “downhill steamrigger.” But no more wells were being found in Venezuela, and Hertel suffered a heart attack, so he departed that fair land – and is now back in Europe, trying to raise money for oil-recovery projects. Jones spoke with Hertel a few months ago because the tax department finally returned all his records relating to the IEC case – which Jones is sure Hertel would’ve won (his brother was acquitted by a jury) if he hadn’t fled the country.

UPDATE (May 15, 2009): Hertel was arrested in London last week, and may be extradited back to Canada to face charges. More details here. Hertel’s former mansion is currently listed for $29 million.