Allied|The Warwick Castle, Little Venice — the pub where the war is discussed over a pint

Some of the film's most dangerous conversations happen in the least dangerous-looking room in it: a small London pub with a bar, a fireplace and men in uniform drinking as if nothing is wrong.

The pub is The Warwick Castle, on Warwick Place in Little Venice, a few steps from the Regent's Canal in west London. It has been a public house since the 1840s, and its survival is the reason it works on camera — the frontage is still stucco and dark green, the windows are still small and mullioned, and the rooms inside are still divided the way Victorian pubs were divided, into corners where two people can talk without the rest of the room hearing.

That last detail is the point. Allied is a film about who is listening. Zemeckis shoots the interiors so that you are always aware of the other drinkers just out of focus.

It is a working pub, not a set, and it fills up in the evenings with people from the canal-side terraces. Come at opening time on a weekday if you want the room to look like the film. Order at the bar, take the corner seat by the front window, and notice how clearly you can hear the next table. That is not an accident of the building. It is why the location was chosen.