Angel's Flight (1965)

[Steve-O]

There are some very interesting comments recently at the Noir of the Week on Angel's Flight...

Bill Gray said...
During the filming of this movie, they came to the Theater of Arts acting school at the Del Mar Beach Club in Santa Monica to get free extras. I was a student at the school and eagerly accepted the opportunity. The scene in which we were extras was shot during the day at a night club, I believe in the San Gabriel Valley. It was a hot summer day and we had to wear a coat and tie -- which was not very comfortable. The lady in this movie was most certainly Ann Richards, the wife of Stan Kenton. I was a big Stan Kenton fan and was impressed by her. Even though she was not the star of the movie; she did receive star treatment. In the scene Richards sang in the night club setting. We extras were the night club patrons and I was lucky enough to be placed at a table with a lady who was either her mother, or the mother of the other woman in the movie -- and because of this, our table was the only one receiving real beer during the shooting -- a real plus on a hot day. This lady was definitely Mrs. Stan Kenton.

Bill Gray
billdory@pacbell.net

and

djrickkaye said...
Wow, I hate to disagree with what sounds like a sterling memory but I just viewed this film (for the second time) in its entirety and the woman who sings in the strip club (a song called "Liz") is definitely not Ann Richards (although Richards does appear in the film.) I believe the woman who sings in the club may be a woman named Gaye Merritt who's name appears in the film's credits not only as having appeared in the film but also having written both the music and lyrics to "Liz".
Ann Richards does have a role though. She is definitely heard (but not seen) singing "Angel's Flight" over the opening and closing credits of the film and she is seen seated at the bar next to the male lead character in that same strip club where the other girl sings (Richards appears annoyed with the male lead character and gets up and walks away from him.) Ironically that scene appears shortly before the singing scene and the singing scene is hazy and shot from a distance so it might be easy to confuse things and assume Ann Richards not only sang the opening and closing theme of the movie but also sang on stage in the club. But clearly she did not, if you compare Ann Richards' voice, heard clearly on the theme song "Angel's Flight" to the voice heard in the strip club singing scene the voices are not the same plus the woman on stage is clearly dressed very differently than Ann Richards who was seen seated at the bar just minutes before. Even the hair style and figures are drastically different between these two women. I am 100% percent positive about this, I have studied Ann Richards music very well as I am a huge fan. I'd know her voice anywhere. Maybe at the time the extras in the film were somehow led to believe that the singer on stage was Ann Richards but it wasn't! At least not in the version of the film that was released.
Rick Kaye

[NOTW comment bot: comments from Noiroftheweek.com]

THE FILMS DIRECTOR KEN RICHARDSON, HAD BEEN MY SOUND MAN, A YEAR BEFORE ON A FILM WE SHOT IN SAN FRANCISCO.. IT WAS MY FIRST FILM ABOUT TWO GUYS WHO FIND A WALLET FULL OF CREDIT CARDS IN GARBAGE CAN, AND GO ON A SPENDING SPREE.. ANYWAY KENNY CAME A LONG WAY IN A HURRY, AND THAT ALWAYS IMPRESSED ME. FROM SOUND MAN IN SEPTEMBER 1961 TO FILM DIRECTOR IN 1962.. I VISITED THE LOCATION THE NIGHT THEY SHOT OUTSIDE BAR IN DOWNTOWN L.A. ....THEY WERE SHOOTING WITH A MITCHELL BNC CAMERA, THE STANDARD CAMERA THAT ALL THE MAJORS USED. HEAVY AS HELL THOUGH...I'M VERY PLEASED THAT THE FILM HAS SURVIVED AND IS GETTING SOME RECOGNITION...I THINK THAT KENNY DID A GOOD JOB AS DIRECTOR ... I DON'T KNOW IF KENNY AND HIS WIFE ARE STILL ALIVE, I'M 71 NOW, AND IF THINK KENNY WAS FOUR OR FIVE YEARS OLDER THAN I....IF HE IS AND READS THIS I CAN BE REACHED AT IRMIFILMS@AOL.COM....OLD TIMERS TEND TO GET NOSTALGIC AS THEY GET OLDER...TEN - FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT NOSTALGIA.... NICK MILLARD

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[NOTW comment bot: comments from Noiroftheweek.com]

is director ken richardson still alive?...

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[NOTW comment bot: comments from Noiroftheweek.com]

I cover "Angel's Flight" in my upcoming book, "Los Angeles's Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction's Mean Streets and Film Noir's Ground Zero." http://www.electricearl.com/labh/

comment by Jim Dawson



This comment was made at Noiroftheweek.com.



2012-06-14T13:31:30.086-05:00

[Steve-O]

I cover "Angel's Flight" in my upcoming book, "Los Angeles's Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction's Mean Streets and Film Noir's Ground Zero." http://www.electricearl.com/labh/

comment by Jim Dawson



This comment was made at Noiroftheweek.com.



2012-06-14T13:31:30.086-05:00

love the cover!

[NOTW comment bot: comments from Noiroftheweek.com]

The NYTimes magazine has an interesting "Character Study" piece on William Thourlby:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/ny...ime-alone.html

comment by Untouched Takeaway



This comment was made at Noiroftheweek.com.



2012-08-05T05:56:20.560-05:00

[NOTW comment bot: comments from Noiroftheweek.com]

Hello Thom, just wanted to tell you that Deane Romana died in March 2011. I tried to set him up with a company that reissues films on DVD, but he wasn't very cooperative with them. By the way, I give you a tip of the hat in my new book, Los Angeles's Bunker Hill: Pulp Fiction's Mean Streets and Film Noir's Ground Zero.

comment by Jim Dawson



This comment was made at Noiroftheweek.com.



2012-08-08T21:29:01.093-05:00

[Steve-O]

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2006

Angel's Flight (1965)


Posted by Don Malcolm

Let’s begin with a digression. The sense of place in noir is a key element in how these films distinguish themselves. As location shooting became more commonplace, urban scenery began to dominate the visual style of noir, becoming a kind of shortcut for establishing the narrative environment.

Paradoxically, however, American film historians haven’t done a very good job in cataloging and analyzing the use of urban locations. There are exceptions, of course. Thom Andersen’s visual essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, is an ambitious attempt to find the real city amidst its many guises in the movies. This effort takes its point of departure from the dawn of noir, where location shooting began to be a more self-conscious matter, establishing the urban setting as either a subtext to the story being told or a subliminal character within the film itself.

Silver and Ursini’s recent book, L.A. Noir, alludes to Andersen’s work but mostly fails to build on it in any meaningful way. Its filmography, encompassing just 36 films from both noir and neo-noir, exposes the shallowness of its construction. A few connective paragraphs of generalized urban history have been superimposed into a series of geographically-organized film synopses.

The arc of the book is meant to indicate that noir, as represented in Los Angeles, has shifted its ground from a vertiginous, claustrophobic sense of corruption to a horizontal homogeneity that inexorably eats away at the suburban landscape. Such an arc is a bit too pat, since most of the vertiginous atmospherics in noir are studio constructions. What’s really needed is some better way to compare the visual strategies of noir and neo-noir as represented in urban location shooting. Alas, L.A. Noir isn’t going to get us there.

Andersen’s points about the anonymity of vast portions of the city ring truer, and suggest that we need better and more specific points of reference for understanding the changes in noir that resonate with the evolution of L.A.’s urban environment.

One of those key points of reference is Bunker Hill. Andersen chronicles it in various segments in Los Angeles Plays Itself, showing how it is a signifier for a pivotal period of Los Angeles urban history. Noir chronicles the decline of
Bunker Hill in a series of location settings spanning the first decade after WW II in films such as Criss Cross,Cry Danger (a film completely overlooked by Silver and Ursini), Losey’s remake of M, and Kiss Me Deadly. The Bunker Hill and Angel’s Flight rail car sequences in these films are all remarkably evocative, but also contain significant differences that resonate within the films themselves.

Andersen takes the story further, in his magnificent reconstruction of the nascent “neo-realism movement” in Los Angeles filmmaking, beginning with Kent Mackenzie’s exceptional "docu-noir" The Exiles, which shows Bunker Hill in the late 50s as a neighborhood clinging to life by its fingernails, a dumping ground for the expatriated Indians who try to overcome the effects of their dislocation. We are pretty much past the realm of noir as we commonly define it by this point, but the echoes of it to be found here are suggestive and haunting.

Even later, and not unearthed by Andersen, is Angel’s Flight, a low-budget noir-exploitation hybrid set smack in the middle of an even-grubbier-than-before Bunker Hill. A great deal of effort was made by the principals involved in Angel’s Flight to use the setting as a metaphor, creating a tragic story around a fallen “angel”—a beautiful young woman traumatized by a rape into murderous revenge with men who make sexual advances. Angel’s Flight has more of the feel of a downbeat Mexican “cabaretera” film, where the decay and squalor of the physical surroundings seeps into the souls of the characters.

One can also trace a lineage to the more lurid slasher films which began to pop up a few years later, and to Abel Ferrara, whose interest in combining sex, sin and religious guilt may have first been ignited by the awkward sequence where the sexually conflicted Liz (who has responded to her forced sexual “awakening” by becoming a stripper) performs her act; as it proceeds, the viewer is painfully aware of the struggle within Liz as she performs. Though she is extremely attractive, it’s clear that she is tremendously uncomfortable with her own body. The camera shifts from her body to her eyes, and holds there for a montage where images of candles appear through her, dissolving into a scene where Liz is surrounded by candles in a squalid storefront church.

It’s an awkward scene technically, but a resonant image nonetheless, considering how much it links in terms of the film’s setting, plot and theme. The other gazer on Liz whom we are linked with is a down-on-his-luck, boozing writer who witnessed one of her murders while drunk. A former crime reporter, he hooks up with an old friend on the police force and goes undercover into Angel’s Flight to act as bait for the killer (who chooses only “pretty men” to kill). When he sees Liz dance, he begins to understand that she may be the killer, and once he befriends her, that her violent acts are a result of her victimization. Falling in love with her, he tries to save her.

The basic plot of Angel’s Flight has many similarities with The Screaming Mimi, but much of the exploitation aspects in the latter film have been eliminated in favor of an increased emphasis on this parallelism between physical and spiritual/psychological deterioration. By merely referring to the original traumatic event instead of depicting it onscreen, the film stays focused on the broader ramifications of a dangerous environment and its effects on those forced to exist in it.

60s starlet Indus Arthur, in her first film, is at the peak of her youthful beauty here, and this greatly aids her performance, which centers upon a projection of innocence and melancholy. William Thourlby, best known for his work as a male model (he was the original Marlboro Man), is stretched a bit beyond his means, but he improves as the film plays out.

There are many more mysteries about this film that a major-league film noir detective should tackle. The striptease sequence extends into an oddly filmed but strangely haunting singing performance featuring post-cool jazz vocals that sound like offshoots from the film’s oblique soundtrack (created by Bolivian composer-musician Jaime Mendoza-Nava, the only member of the production team to have a significant career in the film industry). The IMDb shows a role in the film for Australian-American actress Ann Richards, but it seems more likely that the singer in the post-striptease sequence is in fact a jazz vocalist of the same name, who was herself on the downward slide after a short period in the spotlight (as wife to Stan Kenton and featured singer on several of his late 50s/early 60s records). That would explain the references appended to the beginning of the print we have of this film, where she and Arthur (who both died in the 80s) are eulogized.

Angel’s Flight is not a “great lost noir”; it lacks the skill and depth (and enduring sociological relevance) achieved by Mackenzie in The Exlies. But it does deserve to be fully restored as a very interesting curio of the very last embers of film noir, and for its striking use of Bunker Hill in its final death throes. The FNF would do right by its mission if it tracked down Thourlby (the producer as well as the star), who is apparently still alive, made a deal with UCLA to create a new print, and programmed a slot in NC5 to show it in s double bill with The Exiles as “Bunker Hill Noir’s Last Stand.” 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished...