Jim Dawson's history of Los Angeles's Angels Flight was published by Arcadia Publishing in August 2008. It features a chapter on the funicular's busy history in Hollywood films, especially films noir. Here is a filmography with stills from the movies.   Angels Flight is a trademark of the Angels Flight Railway Foundation.

Chapter 8 of Jim Dawson’s Angels Flight is called “Train to Nowhere,” a look at the films—mostly films noir—shot on and around downtown Los Angeles’s incline railroad at the southwest corner of Hill and Third streets, next to the Third Street Tunnel. Here’s a look at some of those movies.

All Jazzed Up was a 1920 comedy of errors starring Bobby Vernon (leaping from car to car) and Helen Darling.

The Impatient Maiden was director James Whale’s 1932 follow-up to his classic Frankenstein, starring Mae Clarke and Una Merkel (pictured on the Sunshine Apartments porch, on the Third Street steps and on an Angels Flight mock-up) and Lew Ayres.

In a pivotal scene of The Unfaithful (1947), Marta Mitrovich discovers while riding Angels Flight down to Hill Street that Ann Sheridan has murdered her husband.

Criss Cross (1948) starred Dan Duryea, Burt Lancaster, and Yvonne DeCarlo (pictured at a window of the Sunshine Apartments) in a noir tale about an armored car heist that goes wrong.

Hollow Triumph aka The Scar (1948) featured Paul Henreid as a man on the run from mobsters who escapes from two thugs thanks to Angels Flight.

In Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948), Edward G. Robinson hides out from his past life at the Sunshine Apartments on Third Street, across from Angels Flight. The film features a great pan shot from the bottom of Third Street to the top of the hill and back down to the Sunshine Apartments.

Act of Violence (1949) showed stalking victim Van Heflin's descent into figurative hell with a literal descent down the Third Street steps, across Clay Street beneath Angels Flight, and on down another set of steps to the Third Street Tunnel. (The trailer can be seen on YouTube.)

Once a Thief (1950) stars June Havoc (seen here on Clay Street) as a jewel thief hiding out on Bunker Hill who makes the mistake of falling for a local gigolo (Caesar Romero).

In Southside 1-1000 (1950) Angels Flight offers a handy getaway for a counterfeiter (George Tobias) and an undercover Secret Service agent (Don DeFore) trying to shake a couple of T-men who are following them.

In director Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of the German classic, M, David Wayne (seen here with a young victim at the foot of Angels Flight) stars as a child murderer on Bunker Hill.

In The Turning Point (1952) William Holden and Alexis Smith ride up Angels Flight and walk over to the Sunshine Apartments to interview a witness, only to find that mobsters got there first.

The Glenn Miller Story (1953), starring Jimmy Stewart and Harry Morgan, has several scenes at a mock-up of a pawnshop at the corner of Clay Street and the Third Street steps.

In Cry of the Hunted (1953) convict Vittorio Gassman breaks away from cop William Conrad in the Third Street Tunnel and escapes by running up the tracks and catching Angels Flight. Conrad runs up the Third Street steps to Olive Street, but his quarry is long gone. In lower right shot, Gassman relaxes between shots.

In Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Ralph Meeker (as Mike Hammer) parks on Clay Street and walks up the steps to the Hillcrest Hotel, opposite Angels Flight's station, to talk to a witness.

Lon Chaney Jr. is The Indestructible Man (1956), back from the dead to hunt down the men who sent him to the electric chair. Marian Carr is the girlfriend trying to warn his victims living at the Hillcrest Hotel across from the Angels Flight station on Olive Street.

In his short documentary Bunker Hill 1956 (1956), Kent Mckenzie followed a group of pensioners living on Bunker Hill. The photo below is looking east on Third Street from Grand Avenue toward Angels Flight's Olive Street station. (Courtesy of Milestone Films and the University of Southern California Moving Image Archive)

The Exiles (1961) is Kent Mackenzie's gritty semi-documentary about a real group of Native Americans (playing themselves) who struggled between two cultures on Bunker Hill's Clay Street, in the shadow of Angels Flight.

Angel’s Flight (shot in 1962, released in 1965) starred blonde Indus Arthur as a Bunker Hill serial killer running from the horrors of her childhood.

In The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies! (1964), director Ray Dennis Steckler's alter ego, actor Cash Flagg, has an existential episode on Clay Street when he realizes that a Gypsy hypnotist with a bad accent has turned him into a psychotic killer of beach carnival strippers. (Reportedly based on a true story.)

In CBS-TV's original 1957-1966 Perry Mason series, there was only one color episode. Called "The Case of the Twice-Told Twist," it first aired on February 27, 1966. In the opening sequence, Mason (Raymond Burr) and his secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale) park his new Thunderbird on Bunker Hill and take Angels Flight down to Hill Street to meet a client. Unfortunately, by the time they return to the top of the railway ten minutes later, thieves have stripped the car.

Los Angeles TV personality Huell Howser, host of KCET's Visiting With...Huell Howser, first visited the site of Angels Flight in late 1994, when the city was planning to rebuild Angels Flight--with its original cars, archway and station building--a half block south of its original location at Third and Hill. On hand was documentary filmmaker Edmund Penney (in orange shirt), who brought along color footage he'd shot in 1969, just weeks before Angels Flight was torn down.

An angel (Nicholas Cage) falls in love with a mortal (Meg Ryan) in City of Angels (1998). That's the restored Angels Flight across Hill Street behind him.

ANGELS FLIGHT LINKS

WIKIPEDIA: ANGELS FLIGHT

ANGELS FLIGHT™ RAILWAY

IMAGES OF ANGELS FLIGHT

VISIT OLD LOS ANGELES: HILL STREET & ANGELS FLIGHT

VISIT OLD LOS ANGELES; OLIVE STREET & ANGELS FLIGHT

LOS ANGELES CONSERVANCY TOURS

ANGELS FLIGHT PHOTOS

MORE ON "THE EXILES"

USC PHOTO HISTORY OF ANGELS FLIGHT

ANGELS FLIGHT ON YouTube:
  * Los Angeles Tramway Angels Flight
  * Sneak Peek of Angels Flight Railway
  * Angels Flight
  * The Bold & the Beautiful End Credits (Angel's Flight Short)
  * Act of Violence (1948) [trailer]