Hitch's nose

One of the more interesting tidbits I recently picked up on the Internet is that some of the scenes from Alfred Hitchcock's "Topaz" that were set in Cuba were actually shot in the hills outside Salinas -- that San Juan Grade/Old Stage Road area that feels amazingly timeless and detached from the modern world. It seems that Hitch had an amazing nose for interesting locales... or did someone find them for him? In this case, Cuba was presumably unavailable. But I detect a common thread in Hitchcock's U.S. locations: the extremely wooden, hard-bitten Protestant agricultural communities of yesteryear, an America almost unrecognizable in today's flashy sea of coast to coast sprawl.