Stay Tacky, Niagara Falls
Why I wouldn’t change a thing about my hometown
Why I wouldn’t change a thing about my hometown
It was on a chintzy patch of street in Niagara Falls called Clifton Hill that I was first alerted to the possibility that civilization was a mistake. There, in the shadow of an enormous sculpture of Frankenstein’s monster eating a branded Burger King Whopper sandwich, my underage mind muddied on enormous schooners of beer procured with a fake ID from an adjacent Boston Pizza, I watched two other drunk loafers come to blows in that messy, soused, all-canadian way — where they sort of thrash each other and toss out soft punches, which roll off buttery cheeks gone red with drunkenness, the brawl resolving when one combatant attempts to jersey the other by pulling his shirt over his head like they’re in a hockey fight.
A few blocks away were Niagara Falls—both the mighty Canadian- fronting
Horseshoe Falls and, on the American side, the comparably piddling Bridal Veil — with their pummelling cascades of water that make you feel small and stupid. But there, on that corporate-gaudy tourist-trapping strip, were two hammered chuckleheads locked in a sloppy, disgusting pas de deux, barely punching each other for no discernible reason while wreaths of neon lights sang their ambient buzzing song and an enormous promotional monster looked on, unfeeling. I remember imagining a cabal of ancient Greeks wrapped in cloaks, all assembled, gazing into a crystal ball and, witnessing this, gulping hemlock and cutting off humanity then and there. They saw — as I, young and blitzed on big beers, saw — that we were all basically doomed.
And this is what I think of when I think of Clifton Hill.
Just a block away from one of the world’s natural wonders, Clifton Hill advertises itself as a “world famous street of fun.” A stretch of road straddling Niagara Falls’ major casinos, it boasts the bulk of the town’s nonwaterfall attractions and is effectively an open-air amusement park, teeming with families, drunks, and a talking animatronic sarcophagus. It is also a walk-through allegory for Niagara Falls itself, which is a tourist town, a border town, a gambling town, a mob town, and depending on your disposition, a rather sad town. Imagine if Yellowstone had a Kelsey’s, an enormous Ferris wheel, a Skee-ball arcade, a go-kart track, a dinosaur-themed miniaturegolf course, and a mess of wax museums — a tourist district that proffers a totalizing holiday experience. The Falls’ abounding natural beauty is either
complemented or affronted by these justas-abounding man-made amusements. Again: depending on your disposition.
“It’s such a weird place,” says Canadian filmmaker Albert Shin, sitting in a sleek, modern, modular press-junket suite during the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where his film, Disappearance at Clifton Hill, made its world premiere (under the pithier if less evocative title Clifton Hill). “I can’t believe someone hadn’t set a film there yet.” Shin grew up around Niagara Falls, among other places. The city, and especially its touristbaiting main drag, has long occupied his imagination. His film, which will be released in theatres at the end of February, is what one might call a poison love letter to the namesake street and the city it so awkwardly defines.
Shin’s third feature, Disappearance at Clifton Hill opens on the muddied, brown-and-tan banks of the Niagara River, where a young girl named Abby, on a fishing trip with her family, watches as a little boy is kidnapped and jammed into the trunk of an idling car. Years later, an adult Abby (played by Downton Abbey’s Tuppence Middleton) inherits her family’s Niagara Falls motor lodge — a rundown, no-tell motel with a busted sign advertising JACU ZIS POOL. A slick Clifton Hill tycoon (Eric Johnson) attempts to charm Abby into offloading the motel, which he plans to redevelop as a “glow-in-the-dark paintball maze,” but she is more interested in piecing together the mystery of the missing boy whose abduction she witnessed in her youth.
Shin’s psychodrama includes crooked Niagara Falls impresarios; scheming married French Canadian dinner theatre magicians named “The Magnificent Moulins”; and a scuba-diving podcaster — played with weirdo relish by David Cronenberg in a rare onscreen appearance — who operates out of the basement of a local diner shaped like a ufo. The location is key to the plotting, with the Clifton Hill setting taking on the role (as per the cliché) of a character.
In time, Abby’s sleuthing is compromised by emerging concerns about her mental health and the unreliability of the various narrative threads she’s weaving together in her mind. She is a liar. Or schizophrenic. Or bipolar. Or some unstable combination of the above. She has a hard time cleaving memory from imagination. She slips in and out of identities, pretending to be people she’s not.
Like Clifton Hill itself, Abby exhibits a great capacity for reinvention.
IRemember coming across a photograph of my paternal grandparents posing on a Niagara Falls lookout, dressed to the nines and looking vaguely like the stars (or at least two extras) from a playful caper by Hitchcock. Even when I was a kid, the Falls’ romance seemed bygone, a shell of its exhausted ambitions. The closest I got were conspiracies about each side of Clifton Hill being owned by rival families, Montague vs. Capulet–style, or harrowing stories of nineteenth-century hotel owners sending boatfuls of wild animals over the Falls’ precipice in an early bit of carnivalbarking hucksterism. The Falls were not a place to fall in love and enjoy a soak with one’s paramour but a place to be avoided, like a haunted funhouse at the bottom of a dead-end street.
Shin is quite right in noting how, despite the status of Niagara Falls as one of Canada’s key tourist destinations — welcoming an estimated 13 million visitors annually, most of whom hail from within Canada — very few films unfold there. There are a few early comedies. There’s Canadian Bacon. And there’s Henry Hathaway’s Niagara, in which Marilyn Monroe (billed as “a raging torrent of emotions that even nature can’t control!”) arranges for her jealous husband to be murdered in a tourist tunnel carved into the rock behind Horseshoe Falls. That film captures something of the honeymoon capital of the world’s midcentury idyll and invests it with the turgid intrigue of film noir.
Shot under extreme secrecy, with the misdirecting title “Jane of the Desert,” Disappearance at Clifton Hill takes a different tack. Shin reduces the roaring falls themselves to the periphery while foregrounding the infrastructure cobbled around them in all its gaudy neon and wan desperation.
“It’s always about just getting them to stay one more day,” says Shin, describing the area’s eager allure. “They come for the Falls. Then, how can they get them to stay for something else? So they built this whole thing. . . . They built stuff for children. They built stuff for adults. Casinos.” Shin’s movie elbows back against the shimmer and PR blather. As one character describes the Hill: “The haunted houses aren’t actually haunted. And the funhouses aren’t actually fun.”
Such withering appraisal didn’t exactly endear Shin’s production to the so-called city fathers. In advance of Clifton Hill’s premiere, Toronto’s Now Magazine tantalizingly described it as “the movie Niagara Falls doesn’t want you to see.”
“It is not a true — in any way, shape, or form — picture of Niagara Falls or Clifton Hill, from what I understand,” says Tim Parker of the Victoria Centre bia, which represents business interests in the Falls area. “Clifton Hill, in any film, documentary, or context, is always put out there, for all intents and purposes, as a honky-tonk or a tourist trap —all of those slang words that obviously don’t depict Clifton Hill as it is today.”
Parker hasn’t seen Clifton Hill. His conclusions are drawn from the opinions of his colleagues who, he believes, have seen it, or have at least read early versions of the script. They’re also informed by thirty years of experience working on and around the Hill — including thirty years as the manager of the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Odditorium, an attraction whose “array of weird,” boasts its promotional blather, “will leave you awe-struck.” Parker’s concern about Clifton Hill feels almost reflexive, like the result of decades of hearing people slag off what is, in his words, a “well-displayed hill of fun.”
Even before Shin’s film came along, Clifton Hill had suffered some lousy press. Last summer, the St. Catharines Standard reported on a seventeen-year-old hustler who plied his trade on Clifton Hill, nicking purses and wallets inside the Great Canadian Midway. In his statement before an Ontario court, the paper wrote, the teenager’s lawyer made shady reference to the “criminal underworld” of