It Happened at the World's Fair/The Parallax View. Two icons of American life—Elvis Presley and political assassination—coinciding at the Space Needle. The Elvis picture is bad, but its location shoot at the Century 21 Exhibition does capture the sleek, bursting foolishness of the city on the edge of Tomorrow, a Space Age wonderland where a Monorail ride lasts exactly as a long as it takes for Elvis to sing a song. (How right it was for Presley's pelvis to be near the thrusting World's Fair monuments—if only he didn't look like a wax figure of himself.) Alan Pakula's Parallax View is great, and it catches the rancid, paranoid aftertaste of the U.S. in the seventies, as the Needle is now both a glassed-in trap (where a politico is shot) and scary vertiginous saucer (from which the assassin falls to the depressed streets below). 1963/1974.

Trouble in Mind. 1940s film noir vibe meets futurism; which means you must have the Alaskan Way Viaduct. As gunslinger type Kris Kristofferson arrives in RainCity (Alan Rudolph's fictional warp on Seattle), the Viaduct streaks across the smoky backdrop, boxcars slinking underneath. A movie frame creates its own architecture—consider the vectors of Angelina Jolie's KOMO reporter in Life or Something Like It, for instance—and the Viaduct looks so cool and heavy-gray and symmetrical, it must be a dazzler left over from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. (For another save-the-Viaduct vote, see the underrated existential Sly Stallone action picture, Assassins.) This dreamy movie ends at the old Seattle Art Museum (now Seattle Asian), its Deco Northwest interiors doubling for the home of the villain played by Divine. A shoot-out destroys a great deal of glass art. 1986.

The Fabulous Baker Boys Jeff Bridges's apartment: one of those old brick buildings that make up the backbone of a city like Cleveland, but in Seattle stands out as a rare dinosaur of oldness, a picturesque exception. Bridges's apartment has a window that shears out into a view of the city (which elsewhere emerges as a jazzy, neon-lit coolsville where a man in a tuxedo can walk home from work at dawn and where Michelle Pfeiffer might crawl across a piano to kiss you after singing "Makin' Whoopee"). Of course, the apartment does not exist: it was set-dressed in an upper floor of Masin's Furniture Warehouse in Pioneer Square. 1989.

McQ/Singles. When John Wayne made his cop movie in Seattle, nothing could have seemed squarer: the movie galumphs and Seattle was in its pre-Emerald decline. But it's now part of the cinematic time capsule, from the era of Ted Bundy and the occult TV movie The Night Strangler. Because the Duke moors his boat in Fremont, we get a glimpse of a frowzy neighborhood profile since erased by development in the software-coffee years. Which brings us to Singles, released at Seattle's trendy high, even if director Cameron Crowe already had local cred by settling nearby (and shooting his lovely Say Anything… here). The Capitol Hill apartment building that serves as the locus for romance is the kind of ordinary place that suddenly turns into an intersection for movie love simply because somebody decided to point a camera at its welcoming shape. That, and putting Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon there, changes a lot. 1974/1992.

Police Beat. The green-blue metroscape through which a bicycle cop named Z passes is full of Seattle places seen anew. Check out the shots of the Evergreen Point floating bridge, where Z pauses a couple of times; the double-barreled bridge is seen once from above, spreading out across the water like a pair of legs in readiness, and once from below, where its arches give a churchy grace to Z's brooding. 2005.