The once (and, hopefullly, future) home of the Julius Castle restaurant this building was featured as the home of the sinister Alan Spender (Richard Baseheart) in the 1951 noir thriller The House On Telegraph Hill. Valentina Cortese, who played the main role of Spender's intended victim, married him after the filming and divorced in 1960. Her story is told in Francesco Patierno's film Diva! (2017).
Julius Castle was also seen, this time as a restaurant, in The Raging Tide (1951). It looks like a castle because it was built in 1923 as a memory of another castle on Telegraph Hill, Layman's Folly, destroyed by a fire in 1903. The nickname "Layman's Folly" refers to Frederick O. Layman, who built the castle in 1882 to lure investors to the top of Telegraph Hill. Although the investors did not succumb for almost 20 years Layman's German Castle was the place to go for beer, band music, and broadsword duels. Apparently it made an indelible impression on Julius Roz, the first owner of Julius Castle.