The Firm | 1993

There’s trouble ahead when ambitious young Harvard grad Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) lands a job with a powerful but dubious law firm in Memphis in another John Grisham adaptation.

The opening university scenes were actually filmed at Harvard University, East Cambridge and in Harvard Square, Massachusetts.

Mitch heads into central Boston for an interview with prestigious 'Bendini, Lambert and Locke' in the impossibly luxurious suite of the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, 138 St James Avenue in Copley Square. This is the same hotel in which the MacManus brothers manage to take out nine mobsters in Troy Duffy's 1999 The Boondock Saints.

Taking up the position, Mitch relocates to Memphis, Tennessee.

The rooftop party is atop the famous Peabody Hotel, 149 Union Avenue (home of the marching ducks who troop down from their penthouse to splash about in the lobby fountain every morning), and it’s also in the Peabody that Mitch confronts the mob brothers at the end of the movie.

The oldest cemetery in Memphis, Elmwood Cemetery, 824 South Dudley Street, becomes the last resting place of the Firm’s ex-employees, while private detective Eddie Lomax (Gary Busey) works out of the historic Cotton Exchange Building, 65 Union Avenue.

It's just over the Mississippi River to West Memphis, Arkansas, to find the greyhound track, where FBI agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris) is set up. This is the Southland Greyhound Park, 1550 North Ingram Boulevard.

The Firm’s luxury getaway is on Grand Cayman, largest of the three Cayman Islands (The Firm was the first movie to be shot in these islands).

The ‘tax avoidance’ meeting takes place at what was the grand 240-room Hyatt Regency Grand Cayman Resort and Villas, now Grand Cayman Beach Suites, Seven Mile Beach on West Bay Road, on the prestigious strip of the island's west side north of George Town.

And though 'Abanks Diving Lodge' was a set, built on the island’s North Sound in Newlands, it was intended to be kept as a tourist attraction, though no longer seems to be functioning.

The company’s condo itself is the Great House, 1329A West Bay Road, on Seven Mile Beach, a condominium of twenty six residences “adorning four hundred and twenty feet of perfect white sand overlooking the Caribbean Sea”, as it's described.

The night-time party, which leads to Mitch’s little indiscretion on the beach, was at The Planet (formerly Rumheads), the beachside bar of the, now gone, Holiday Inn, where the Ritz Carlton now stands.

On to Washington DC, where Mitch attends a seminar at the W Washington DC Hotel, 515 15th Street at Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The hotel has also been featured in No Way Out, with Kevin Costner, Robert Zemeckis' sci-fi Contact, with Jodie Foster, and The Godfather Part II.

The furtive meeting with the FBI takes place by the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, at the foot of the Mall.

Mud Island in Memphis is the setting for the climactic chase. Not actually an island, the 52-acre park is a small peninsula, surrounded by the Mississippi River to the west and the Wolf River Harbor to the east, containing the Mississippi River Museum, where Mitch tries to hide himself, as well as River Walk, a five-block long scale model of the Mississippi itself.

The Monorail, and footbridge above, which lead to the island, both feature in the climax, and begin at 125 Front Street at Adams Avenue, downtown.

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