It was Macat who persuaded Columbus to shoot the sequence using the techniques and black-and-white negative film stock of movies from the 40s. The high-key lighting, high-contrast aesthetic would evoke “a cross between film noir and the really crazy stuff you see in early television, like Playhouse 90 or One Step Beyond,” said production designer John Muto.

Like most of the other interior shots in Home Alone, including all the scenes inside the McCallister family home, the sequence was shot on a sound stage in the abandoned New Trier West High School gymnasium. The entire set consisted of just a couple of walls. (Webster suspects that the walls were reused in the “real world” of the movie, for the set of the police office. “We didn’t have the biggest construction budget.”)

Johnny’s office was designed especially for maximum dramatic backlighting potential: pebbly-textured translucent glass on the door and a Palladian window that would sinisterly spotlight him at his desk through Venetian blinds.

Ralph Foody, who plays Johnny, at his desk between takes. HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. © 2015 FOX.

Set decorators Eve Cauley and Dan Clancy fitted the room out with a private investigator’s tools of the trade: an old typewriter, a pair of binoculars at the window, a grabaphone (a style of cradle telephone partly made popular through its appearance in silent films), and a Colt 1921AC Thompson submachine gun—the very Tommy gun that Cagney himself totes in the 1935 mobster movie G Men. There’s even steam rising from an obscured cup of coffee on Johnny’s desk.

For further ambience, artificial mist was pumped into the set. The lighting was intense: the old-style film stock required four times the amount of light to expose than normal film. The resulting heat from the lamps was considerable. Even in the Chicago winter, Macat said, the actors “were sweating up a storm.”

Consistent with the shooting style of Home Alone, much of the scene was shot with low, wide angles that capture the action as if a child were perceiving it. Macat is still pleased with the way Snakes dies toward camera and continues to be sprayed with bullets face-down on the floor. “This seemed like stuff that could deliver a good fright to a kid,” he said, happily.

Sketches of the set design. HOME ALONE © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. © 2015 FOX.

Before the shoot, actor Michael Guido had been onstage, performing in a light-hearted theatrical comedy at the Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. After his curtain call, he rushed out of the theater and into his car and drove 15 miles north, arriving in Winnetka for the most unusual of late-night acting gigs by 10 P.M.

According to casting director Janet Hirshenson, Guido had nailed the audition. He had the speech pattern, comic timing, and, crucially, the look and facial structure of someone from an earlier era. “People back then had different diets,” she told me. “The ideal look was more Ryan Gosling than Brad Pitt. Those lips were not in vogue.”

“I was definitely channeling Cagney,” Guido remembers about his audition with Columbus. “Chris was laughing when I finished the scene and encouraged me to go a little further with it. It felt good and he must have liked it, because he gave me the part.”

Guido was actually cast not as doomed Snakes, but as sleeve-gartered Johnny. Columbus swapped the actors’ roles because Ralph Foody, the other, craggier character actor cast in the sequence, had recently undergone knee-replacement surgery and was unable to keel over for the dramatic death scene. (Foody died in 1999.)

“That was perfectly fine with me since they were both fun roles,” said Guido. “But a few years later I realized that I was just about the only actor from the original film who was not invited to be in the sequel because my character was ‘dead.’ Oh well.”