A couple of weeks ago my friend Chuck made a Facebook post about a movie he had been in many years ago, and it brought back some memories for me. Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, for some reason Hollywood randomly noticed the Pioneers Museum. Subsequently a few made for TV movies were filmed there, especially in the historic old courtroom. I remember these productions quite well because at the time I was working in a pro camera shop downtown called Shewmaker's, and film crew members stopped in once or twice to pick up movie-making related supplies. Anyway, these movies required extras, so lots of local folks got to be "background," including some of my friends.
The movie in which Chuck had a small role was called "The Incident", and it starred the venerable Walter Matthau as a small town defense attorney in WWII era Colorado who is compelled to represent a Nazi who's been accused of murder. In the film, there is a POW camp located just outside of town (the old Alexander Film Company's headquarters were used for the location) and it was chock full of captured Nazis. Chuck got a non speaking role as a menacing Nazi who threatens to beat up Walter Matthau with a baseball bat.
The house that stood in for Walter Matthau's home was featured quite a few times in the film along with many other familiar locations, such as Bancroft Park, Fairview Cemetery and the Garden of the Gods. Out of curiosity I decided to see if I could actually find the house. Clearly it was in Old Colorado City, and after driving around for just a few minutes I came across it on Pikes Peak Avenue just west of 17th Street. It's a beautiful home and my internet snooping tells me it that it was built in 1908 and is currently worth between $925,000 and $1,000,000.
As for the movie, Pat and I watched it on Amazon Prime after Chuck dredged it up on Facebook, and since I'd never actually seen it before I was very amused to spot a few other friends in it, too: Tony, Elizabeth and Eric. They all looked so young! And of course it was fun to see all the locations used around town. It's worth mentioning too that it was a decent film, by no means was it a clunker. We were entertained. So if you want to see what Colorado Springs looked like in 1990 while masquerading as "Lincoln Bluff" in 1944, you should give it a watch! And if you do, when you get to the scene where Walter Matthau is being threatened by three Nazis in the infirmary, Chuck is the strapping young man on the left.
