A sequence in Funny Face (1957) features two famous French staircases. First up is the Opéra Garnier, Place de l’Opéra (made famous in Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, The Phantom of the Opera):
Followed by the Daru Staircase in the Louvre - Funny Face (1957) photo shoot sequence. - YouTube
Early each day to the steps of St. Paul, the little old bird woman comes.
Swayambhunath Stupa
Kathmandu, Nepal
(It is absolutely worth the climb!)
The Filbert Steps in San Francisco are locally famous. They go up the steep side of Telegraph Hill on the bay side up to Coit Tower.
All very impressive, and famous, I’m sure. But remember that the point of this thread is stairs that are famous because they appeared in movies, or other works. What movies did these appear in?
Alfred Hitchcock cameo in I Confess is pretty well known, but I don’t know if the steps themselves are famous. I have spent a few minutes Googling, but I can’t identify them. Does anyone know?
And for Doctor Who fans …
Too bad. Staircases are a complete subcategory of Buster Keaton gags.
L’Escalier Casse-Cou (Breakneck Steps), Quebec City
Are we sure about this? I did find that name in my search, but they don’t look the same to my eyes.
Look at the gallery on the wiki page. The photo from 1892 is similar to the perspective in the Hitchcock film (which was filmed in Quebec City).
The tiles are only on the vertical part (risers) of the steps, the steps themselves are still concrete.
Well, my motivation in creating this thread was to get a list of famous locations that one could visit and say, “Hey, I saw these steps in a movie!” That’s kind of hard to do when the stairs existed only for a few days of filming before being broken up. But if any of Keaton’s gag stairs are preserved in a museum somewhere, feel free to mention them.
Noted. Makes sense. Much obliged.
The steps in “The Music Box.”
The main staircase of the royal palace at Caserta has featured in countless films.
The main staircase of the Palazzo Madama and the steps of the Gran Madre di Dio in Turin are two of the most memorable locations in the car chase in the original version of The Italian Job.
The 199 Steps in Whitby were made famous not by a film but by a novel - Dracula.
That’s a brilliant example, if I don’t say so myself! (Oh, wait a minute… maybe I already did…)
Here’s another example: there’s a huge cliff at Friars Bay, Peacehaven, East Sussex with several flights of stairs cut into it. These stairs were the filming location for the very first episode of Mr. Bean, in which the title character laboriously descends them and then goes to great lengths to avoid exposing himself to another beachgoer when changing into his swimming trunks.
A lot of Bean fans have visited the steps and posted photos and videos online.
The Escadaria Selarón in Rio. Especially in music videos and Amazing Race shows, but also appeared in The Incredible Hulk
The steps at Swayambhunath Stupa, have definitely been in films. I’ve spotted it a couple of times but couldn’t name the films.
Not sure that qualifies, or if you’re only meaning steps that were a big part of the film.
I’m not so interested in steps that have merely been used in shooting locations, but rather ones where the depiction is so famous that the steps have become a sort of tourist attraction as a result.