Montreal’s Impossible Car Chase


Blazing Magnum (1976) 1971 Ford Mustang VS… by Z-cinema

Found this clip on Reddit Montreal.

It’s a car chase scene from an Italian detective/crime flick from 1976 called ‘Shadows in an Empty Room‘.

It’s not quite Bullitt but not bad either.

There are a few ‘goofs’ in this sequence, namely that the car chase route is completely impossible (i.e. turning from Bleury onto René-Lévesque, then winding up in NDG and then the Turcot Yards). According to IMDB you can also spy a cop walking into a sex shop and can further spy a truck advertising Cinévision, one of the companies involved in the production (not exactly goofs per se, the latter a clumsy attempt at product placement).

I’d love it if someone could throw together a sketch of what route the cars took based off the clip above, just to further demonstrate the convoluted nature, but also to see what aspects the cinematographer wanted included.

And that said, we need more car chase scenes filmed on the mean streets of Montreal. As much as I want to get cars off our city streets, this is an exciting city to drive in and car chases seem to make our roads look somewhat more decent and less congested than they actually are.