BUNKER HILL GOES TO THE MOVIES

The New Grand Hotel, located at 257 Grand Avenue at the northwest corner of Third Street, was called the Crosley Hotel in RKO's Cry Danger (1951), starring Dick Powell as an ex-con trying to find out who framed him. The New Grand Hotel's corner delicatessen (at 291 Grand), exterior, lobby, interior stairway and second floor were used as locations. In the pan shots below, the car is driving north on Grand and turning west on Third. To see Charles W. Cushman's photo from 1952, click HERE. For more information on the New Grand Hotel, visit http://www.onbunkerhill.org/comment/reply/210#comment-form.   (Thanks to Rick Mechtly.)

A couple of important scenes were shot in the lobby shop of the New Grand Hotel.

The Amigos bar and upstairs rooms at 500 W. Third Street were the headquarters of gangster William Conrad in Cry Danger (1951). The bar was located on the southwest corner of Olive Street, directly across Olive from the Angels Flight Station. The Angels Flight Cafe on the northwest corner is visible in several shots.

One of Cry Danger's most prominent locations was the "Clover Trailer Park," which many viewers have assumed was located on Bunker Hill. However, a closer inspection puts it several blocks north at 650-700 N. Hill Place, north of Sunset Boulevard (now Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard), in what was then called Fort Moore (now part of Chinatown). The street’s only survivor from 1951 is the house just below the trailer park, at 644 N. Hill. The old Clover Trailer Park location is now a newly-built, ugly apartment building and its driveway, but the eastern view toward downtown Chinatown and the double-domed Post Office Annex on Alameda looks roughly the same as it did from the trailer park scenes sixty years ago.   (Color photos taken 6/2/2010 by Earl P. Reinhalter.)

The same year as Cry Danger, a film called The Ring used the old house across the street from the trailer park at 701 N. Hill Place, standing behind the actors, above. Note the same duplex at 644 N. Hill Place as seen in Cry Danger. The young actor below is Lalo Rios.

In the classic 1955 noir Kiss Me Deadly, the exterior and interior of The Castle, at 325 Bunker Hill Avenue, stood in for the boarding house residence of Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman), whose violent death early in the film launched detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) on a search through Los Angeles to find her killers. The twenty-room, Queen Anne-style mansion was built in 1882 by the Chicago meatpacking Armour family. Daniel F. Donnigan, a contractor who paved many of Bunker Hill’s streets, bought the house a decade later and lived there for many years afterwards. The most picturesque house on Bunker Hill’s most picturesque street, The Castle was among the last ones left standing when, in 1969, the City of Los Angeles’s Community Redevelopment Agency hauled it a couple of miles north to Heritage Square, just off the Pasadena Freeway. Vandals burned it down a few months later.

The Johnson house at 601 W. Sunset, on the northwest corner of Hill Place, was where "Ray Diker" lived in Kiss Me Deadly, even though the address given in the film was Flower Street (presumably on Bunker Hill). Director Robert Aldrich effectively used editing to blend Bunker Hill locations with other locations that looked like they should have been on Bunker Hill. This Victorian was actually several blocks north of Bunker Hill, and was torn down in the 1960s. The Clover Trailer Park in Cry Danger is just up Hill Place on the right.

In Robert Siodmak’s Universal Pictures classic Criss Cross (1949), several external and interior scenes were shot at a white hillside home at 215 N. Hill Street where Burt Lancaster lived with his mother. The house stood above the Hill Street tunnel that ran north-south between First Street to Temple Street; in the scene below, Lancaster gets off a streetcar at the corner of Temple and takes the stairs up to where a block of Hill Street ran above the tunnel. As you can see from the bottom photo taken from the Los Angeles City Hall, the house (just to the right of the center of the photo) was one of the last surviving structures north of First Street, just before the hill and the tunnel were removed in the early 1950s.

		The close-up shot, above, of Burt Lancaster is looking east toward the off-kilter Los Angeles Hall of Records on Broadway (now gone) and the City Building. Just below him is the elevated section of Hill Street and the walkway above the northern exit of the Hill Street tunnel. The photo at left, taken probably in the early fifties, is a reverse shot taken from the tower of the City Building, with the Hall of Records in the foreground, and the house at 215 N. Hill just beyond.

In the uncut 1954 version of A Star Is Born, Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) lives at the Lancaster Hotel at 121 N. Flower Street, where Norman Maine (James Mason) shows up one day to rekindle their relationship. This scene was cut from the general release to make way for a last-minute music number, but later restored for the 1983 video and the subsequent DVD/Blu-ray.

Bunker Hill stood in for Phoenix in 20th Century Fox's Bus Stop (1956). Don Murray and Arthur O'Connell get off the bus at Third and Grand, cattycorner to the New Grand Hotel and Delicatessen (see Cry Danger, top). Later they go looking for Marilyn Monroe, who lives across the street from the rambling, filigreed Brousseau mansion at 238 S. Bunker Hill Avenue (which was later used in the 1966 Glenn Ford film, The Money Trap, just before it was torn down). Like most Victorians in the neighborhood, the Brousseau mansion was an apartment building in 1956. (For a history of the house, see http://onbunkerhill.org/brousseau_mansion.)

In The Outsider, a 1968-69 NBC-TV show, private eye David Ross (Darren McGavin) visits Bunker Hill as it's being hauled away, hoping to find a cache of money hidden in an old house. He rides up Angels Flight, talks to the station agent about its history, then walks over to what's left of the Castle, the mansion that once stood at 325 S. Bunker Hill Avenue. The house has been cut into several pieces to await removal to Heritage Square (where it would later be torched). The episode, which ran in 1969, was called "Through a Stained-Glass Window."   (Courtesy of Gene Sculatti)

Click to view an excerpt of the program at LA Observed.

Looking west on 3rd Street:

BUNKER HILL LINKS

On Bunker Hill | a lost neighborhood found

AmericanFilmNoir.com

The Exiles (Shot on Bunker Hill, 1958)