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Travel the country at Cambridge’s cinemas

This weekend, local moviegoers can see the sights of two of America’s great cities without leaving the (equally great) city of Cambridge. From Friday through Monday, the Harvard Film Archive presents a lovingly curated series titled Visions of a City, or A Weekend in San Francisco . With its steep hills and iconic streetcars (to say nothing of its rich cultural history), San Francisco is a uniquely cinematic town, and the films selected by the HFA make for a rich guided tour. The series begins Friday with a pair of thrillers: “Bullitt” (1968), featuring Steve McQueen and some of the greatest car chases committed to film, and Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), which finds Gene Hackman at the height of Nixon-era paranoia. Saturday brings us into even more emotionally fraught territory with the classic psychodramas “Sudden Fear” (1952) and “Experiment in Terror” (1962), as well as Philip Kaufman’s remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), which transposes the original’s Cold War panic into a story about aging hipsters battling square conformity. Sunday is for film noir, with Delmer Daves’ “Dark Passage” (1957) and Don Siegel’s “The Lineup” (1958). The series ends on Monday, as it must, with arguably the most famous San Francisco film of all: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), which combines the eeriness of all the preceding films into one endlessly beguiling package.