ot with even greater depth of field shows Mike Hammer knocking on a door in the Angel's Flight neighborhood. Behind him we see first a long narrow alleyway, then a huge depth of field showing a Los Angeles city scape. This is an astonishing shot. Both the alley and the cityscape are irregular, just like the gas station. They are full of protuberances, and show a huge amount of specialized detail. The stairs view is bounded on the left by many protuberances from the building, mainly rectilinear, although there are some angular planes as well. A third similar shot shows the left hand side wall of Hammer's apartment. The tables and furniture form the rectilinear protuberances near Hammer's wall. 2) Aldrich often shows scenes with an L construction. For example, take the gas station, once the characters stop there and get gas. The front of the station is a long horizontal space. Then, at the left hand side of the station, we also see a walkway going straight back from the camera. The walkway is joined to the front of the station like the letter L. The front of the station forms the long part of the L, the shorter walkway the connecting stoke at the base of the L. Hammer's apartment is set up in a similar way. There is a long living room that is often shot so that it stretches from left to right, horizontally across the screen (just like the front of the gas station). Then at the left of the screen, a passage leading straight away from the camera leads to Mike Hammer's bed room (like the walkway at the left of the gas station). This is the same geometry of set design and camera set up in both scenes. The gym shows a similar L, but with the passage (the staircase) on the right hand side of the shot, not the left. The L construction shows movement in two completely perpendicular directions. This emphasizes the 3D nature of the shot. People do move along the short bar of the L: for example, at the gas station Cloris Leachman moves first down th...
