20 Things You Didn't Know About The Blues Brothers
7. The Highway The Pinto Fell From Was Nowhere Near Chicago
At the climax of the final car chase, the Bluesmobile juuuuust about goes over the edge of an unfinished highway. The end of the scene contains some great visual gags; unfortunately, the crew had to travel to the City of Milwaukee to get them, as Chicago had nothing in place which would suffice.
The scene was shot on an unfinished part of Interstate I-794 using an off-ramp that was still under construction. The ramp was never actually finished, and was torn down in the years following the film. The highway project it was part of wasn't totally completed until 1998.
The film makers weren't exactly subtle about the jarring transition in the scene from an obviously low-level off-ramp to a Pinto falling hundreds of feet to its doom. In the photo above, the large brown building in the far left of the frame is the tallest building in Milwaukee, the US Bank Center. Eagle-eyed viewers who know their American geography noticed right away that the shots came from different locations.
In the end, though, does it matter? We got to watch a Pinto full of Illinois Nazis plummet 1000 feet.