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San Fransisco is a full-fledged character of the film. The script-writer
Samuel Taylor wrote to me that although Hitchcock did love the city,
He was only familiar with « what he saw in the restaurants and through
the windows of hotels and limousines. » He was « what you might call
a sedentary person. « Yet he had decided to use Mission Dolores and,
strangely enough, the house on Lombard Street where Scottie lives,
« because of the red door. » Taylor was in love with his city (the first
script-writer, Alec Coppel, was « a transplanted Englishman »). He put
this love into the writing of the scripts, and perhaps even something
more, if I’m to believe a rather cryptic phrase at the end of his letter:
« I rewrote the script at the same time as I explored San Francisco and
recaptured my past… « Words that could fit the characters no less
than the author, and that allow us to reinterpret the entire score of
the film in a different key, following Gavin’s clue at the start when he
describes Madeleine’s wanderings and the way she lingered, on the
far shore of Lloyd Lake, staring at those pillars with their emblematic
name: the Portals of the Past.