Focus Features

Liverpool's greatest cultural contribution is arguably in the field of music – from the Mersey Sound and the Beatles in the 60s to Echo & the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood to modern day bands like The Coral and the Zutons – but it also has a considerable claim to be a major movie city too. Over the years, numerous film productions have used the city city as a backdrop (sometimes even pretending it was Russia), and there has been an impressive diversity in the movies that dropped anchor on Merseyside. In this whistle-stop tour of Liverpool-set flicks, we take you from a 1950 Ealing comedy not set in Ealing all the way through to the movie about an unlikely young millionaire that he made long before he made Slumdog.

Ealing movies were predominantly set in London (such as the landmark comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers and Passport to Pimlico) or given some quaint rural setting (see Whiskey Galore!, The Maggie and The Titfield Thunderbolt), however the Merseyside-set The Magnet diverged from that usual formula. A comic tale of Catholic guilt, director Charles Frend's film centers on Johnny (James Fox), a young boy who obtains a magnet by dishonest means, then is overcome by such remorse that he believes his actions caused the death of a TB patient and so decides to run away from the seaside town of New Brighton to nearby Liverpool. Though large chunks of the film were shot in Liverpool and nearby Birkenhead, the actors were predominantly not local – with the exception of the gang of boys who Johnny meets near the end of the film – meaning that the accents are mostly not authentically Scouse.

The great British director Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Queen) graduated from television directing to make his feature debut with this affectionate tribute to the private detective genre. The Liverpool setting is central to the film, and is announced with a caption in the movie's very first shot as we hear Albert Finney – who plays a restless bingo caller – deliver his first dry, Humphrey Bogart-esque monologue. On turning 31, Finney's character decides to pursue his dreams and advertise his services as a P.I., and quickly gets a case closely resembling one from a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe adventure. Released on DVD earlier this year, Gumshoe may now be something of a poignant viewing experience for Liverpudlians as it depicts city landmarks – such as the Lecce Street employment exchange – which were long ago consigned to rubble.

Merseyside during the depressed Thatcher years was the setting for Chris Bernard's bittersweet romantic comedy Letter to Brezhnev, which had the tagline "From Liverpool to Russia, with Love." The film centers on two twentysomething Scouse girls, idealistic Elaine (Alexandra Pigg) and her brasher, more pragmatic best friend Teresa (Margi Clarke), who meet and fall for a couple of Russian sailors (Peter Firth and An Education's Alfred Molina) who are on leave in the city. Set on the backstreets and docklands of the city, Bernard's movie juxtaposed the desperation of unemployment-hit Liverpool with the tough times of those behind the Iron Curtain, presenting love as just as realistic and tangible source of hope as anything else for its protagonists. A popular and critical hit at the time of release, Letter to Brezhnev was not above being playfully biting about its setting; at one point, a taxi driver exclaims, "Just look at this city, whoever did the planning for all this wants his balls roasted."

After establishing his reputation initially as a short film director, Liverpool director Terence Davies made his first feature length movie with this semi-autobiographical diptych about a working class family in the city in the 1950s. An exercise in "memory-realism," Distant Voices, Still Lives evokes the director's recollections of growing up with a domineering father and the influence of music and cinema on his life and the lives of those around him. As Davies' childhood home on Kensington Street was demolished on 1961, he used a similar looking street in London's Whistler Street as its double, while the rest of shooting took place in real locations such as Liverpool's The Futurist movie theater and Merseyside's Formby Sands.

In the early 1990s, the world was rapt by the wondrous talents of the Three Tenors – Luciano Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo – and so the time was ripe for a movie about a great tenor from times past. Peter Chelsom's Hear My Song, however, was far from a straightforward take on the great Irish tenor Josef Locke: the singer had disappeared from public life after troubles with the taxman, and in Chelsom's movie fictional Liverpool nightclub owner Micky O'Neil (Adrian Dunbar) tries to save his ailing establishment by booking the enigmatic Mr X. (Ned Beatty), who may or may not be Locke. Ironically, life imitated art as the success of the movie prompted the real Locke to come out of hiding to perform for the Prince and Princess of Wales at the 1992 Royal Variety Show, singing "Goodbye" as his final public performance.

Though the Beatles never made a movie that was set principally in their native Liverpool (swinging London was the usual location for their antics), the 1990s saw two Beatles-themed movies in short order, The Hours and the Times (1991) and Backbeat (1994), both featuring Ian Hart as John Lennon. The former was shot in Barcelona, imagining a trip taken by Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein, while the latter was mostly about the Beatles' time in Hamburg – and the love affair between original member Stuart Sutcliffe (Somewhere's Stephen Dorff) and a German girl (Sheryl Lee) – but also had scenes in Liverpool. Though Backbeat had impeccable musical credentials (Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner, Nirvana's Dave Grohl and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore contributed to the film), Paul McCartney didn't like it's interpretation of history: "One of my annoyances about the film Backbeat is that they've actually taken my rock 'n' rollness off me. They give John the song "Long Tall Sally" to sing and he never sang it in his life. But now it's set in cement."

Later in the 1990s, Liverpool was also used for another film about a musical genius, in this case a biopic of the prodigiously talented cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Hilary and Jackie featured Emily Watson as du Pré and Rachel Griffiths as her sister Hilary – both earning Oscar nominations for their performances – but in some ways the true star of the film was Liverpool and the greater Merseyside area. Director Anand Tucker used the city and surrounding countryside with remarkable creativity, employing cultural spaces such as the Walker Art Gallery and St. George's Hall, Formby Sands for beach scenes and, most impressively, George's Dock to double as Moscow, for the scenes depicting the period when du Pré studied under master cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in the mid-60s.

Known as The 51st State when released in its native UK, this was a truly unlikely fusion of talents. Written by gas station attendant Stel Pavlou and directed by Hong Kong helmer Ronny Yu as his follow-up to The Bride of Chucky, Formula 51 was a high octane comedy thriller that starred Samuel L. Jackson as a kilt-wearing pharmacist called Elmo McElroy who travels to Liverpool to sell a killer new street drug and Robert Carlyle as the ex-hitman who he teams up with. The movie's supporting cast features Meat Loaf and Pirate Radio's Rhys Ifans as drug dealers called the Lizard and Iki respectively. As well as having the distinction of using the streets of Liverpool as the setting for a (pseudo-)Hollywood thriller, Formula 51 also set the pulses of Scouse viewers racing by having a derby game between Liverpool F.C. and their dreaded rivals Manchester United as the backdrop for one of the film's pivotal scenes.

In the 1990s, Hamlet 2 star Steve Coogan created a number of wild and wacky comic personas on British TV – most notably Alan Partridge, Paul and Pauline Calf, and Tony Ferrino – but for the first feature film he and writing partner Henry Normal penned, he did something nobody expected: he wrote his character as an everyday guy. The Parole Officer doesn't feature any excessive antics from Coogan but delivers great entertainment as a smart, fun comedy caper movie about a very mediocre parole officer (Coogan) who is framed for murder and must clear his name by stealing a CCTV tape showing the killing. Though set in Manchester, the entire movie was shot in Liverpool, and the bank which has the vital videotape in its vault is in fact the now defunct Bank of England branch on the city's Castle Street.

Years before he made Slumdog Millionaire, director Danny Boyle told another story of an impoverished youngster who hits the jackpot. Written by Liverpudlian scribe Frank Cottrell Boyce, Millions tells the story of Damian (Alex Etel), a boy obsessed by saints who discovers a bag of stuffed full of money which he believes came from God, and starts using it to do good deeds for others. Set in Widnes – a working class town 13 miles east of Liverpool – Boyle's movie was shot in several locations in the Merseyside area, including Liverpool's Lime Street Station. The heartwarming film was only a modest hit commercially but received great reviews, notably being chosen by Roger Ebert as one of his favorite films of the year.