Angels Flight® in the Movies.
Angels Flight® debut on film was probably Good Night, Nurse! (1918), but it got its first real close-up in a 1920 one-reel comedy of errors, All Jazzed Up.
Angels Flight® appears in the 1947 movie The Unfaithful with Actress Marta Mitrovich.
1948 film Hollow Triumph withPaul Henreid’s
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948).
The noir film Criss Cross (1949).
In the 1951 remake of the classic Fritz Lang film, there is a scene in the opening credits shot from inside one of the Angel’s Flight cars, of a man jumping in at the last minute as it starts to ascend. The scene continues to go on for several more moments as the car makes its way up the hill, and a man, who is presumably the child killer, looks out the back door at the nighttime traffic.
Angels Flight® features in the 1952 crime thriller The Turning Point, with William Holden and Alexis Smith taking a ride up it to follow a lead.
Angels Flight® is seen in a 1953 TV episode of Boston Blackie called “Death Does a Rhumba”.
In Cry of the Hunted (1953), Jory (Vittorio Gassman), a prisoner being transported, escapes and rides the Angels Flight® to evade capture.
Angels Flight® appears in The Glenn Miller Story (1954). Early in the film when Miller (James Stewart) visits a pawn shop on Clay Street, the adjacent Angels Flight® is clearly visible.
Angels Flight® appears in the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly at about 55’45”, as Ralph Meeker portrayed Mike Hammer, who drives an automobile underneath the funicular tracks in order to park prior to a visit of one of the old Bunker Hill mansions which had been turned into a flophouse and in which a “person of interest” in his case resides.
Angels Flight® appears in the 1956 film Indestructible Man at about 40’00”. Lon Chaney Jr. rides up to Olive Street and the Hillcrest Hotel. Marian Carr later rides down to Hill Street.
The 1956 Kent Mackenzie short film Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Renewal features Angels Flight®.
Angels Flight® is seen several times in the 1961 Kent Mackenzie film The Exiles, which dramatizes the lives of several real Native Americans living on Bunker Hill in 1958 (when the film was shot). The DVD of The Exiles also includes the 1956 Kent Mackenzie short film Bunker Hill: A Tale of Urban Renewaland the 1969 short film, The Last Day of Angels Flight®.
In 1963 the railway appeared in the cult trash horror classic The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, where one of the characters walks up the hill alongside the tracks.
Angel’s Flight® is a low-budget 1965 film noir about a Bunker Hill serial killer, shot on and around Angels Flight® in both the downtown and Bunker Hill neighborhoods.
There is a scene shot on the railway in They Came to Rob Las Vegas released in 1968.
The only color episode of the original Perry Mason TV series, the February 1966 episode “The Case of the Twice-Told Twist“, has a brief scene in the opening act, where Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale) ride Angels Flight®.
There is a brief shot of the Angels Flight® in the introduction of the January 1969 Dragnet episode “Narcotics DR-21“.
Edmund Penney’s 15-minute documentary from 1969, Angels Flight® Railway, features footage shot in 1965 and during the funicular’s last days in 1969.
The Last Day of Angels Flight® was a documentary filmed on the day the railway closed in March 1969. Filmed and narrated by L. A. native Robert Kirste.
On November 23, 2010, NBC’s The Biggest Loser featured the ride in part of a challenge in which the contestants have to either walk the stairs for 5 points or take the train for 1 point. The winner, accumulating 100 points, won a 2011 Ford Edge.
Angels Flight® is featured in The Muppets (2011) when Jason Segel‘s character sings the Academy Award-winning song “Man or Muppet“.
- The closed Angels Flight® was operated for a single day[34] to film Ryan Gosling’s and Emma Stone’s characters riding it in the 2016 film La La Land.
Angels Flight® appears in the 2017 TV movie The Saint. The scene had Adam Rayner as Simon Templar and Enrique Murciano as FBI Inspector John Henry Fernack.
Season 4 of the Amazon Studios series Bosch first aired April 13, 2018 features the landmark and is based on Michael Connelly’s book Angels Flight®, the sixth book in the Harry Bosch series.
Perry Mason, Season 1 of HBO’s Origin story first aired June 21st 2020. The landmark featured in this tale set in 1932.
