Ghost Town: Nights on Bunker Hill

A man with no memory searches for his past, blundering through a dark labyrinth that is the city of Los Angeles. The film is Somewhere in the Night (1946), and the man, George Taylor (John Hodiak), has had his identity wiped clean by an exploding shell in the South Pacific. Released from the hospital, he follows a few clues into a tangled web of unsolved murder and a missing $2 million. But while others scramble after the loot, he simply wants to know who he is, to be released from the utter solitude of a world in which everyone is a stranger.

About halfway through the movie, George follows a lead to a house at 512 W. Second Street on Bunker Hill, where he hopes to find a witness to a killing he may or may not have committed. He parks on a steeply sloping street below an elegant but forlorn-looking Victorian house. When he knocks, the ghostly face of a woman appears behind a lace-veiled window. Surprisingly, she does not hesitate to invite a strange man into her home at night. The parlor she leads him into is stranded in another century: antique chairs and clocks, densely patterned wallpaper and carpet, china figurines on the mantel, and doilies everywhere. The woman, Elizabeth (Josephine Hutchinson), wears a lace collar fastened with a cameo pin; she is pale, middle-aged, with a face like a faded paper flower. And she is the first person George has met who seems to remember him, though she admits that in the darkness at the door she almost didn’t know him.

As this strange, sad, poetic little scene unfolds, Elizabeth talks about memory and forgetting, loneliness and dreams, the quiet agony of a lifeless life. “Things change, don’t they?” she says with a bitter little twist of the mouth. “But time doesn’t change. It goes on and on and doesn’t change. I know. I’ve watched it. The nights, days, nights, days, they’re always the same. Dawns are always gray, and days can have different colors. But the nights are all black, and they’re empty.” In the end, Elizabeth reveals that she lied about knowing George, making believe that he was a long-lost friend or lover—little suspecting that he would believe her. Up to this point in the film, George has been a gruff, angry cipher, consumed by his own dilemma. But this pitiful woman awakes his sensitivity and kindness; confessing that he too is lonely, he embraces her for a moment in the fussy, gloomy mausoleum of a parlor. She gives him a lead in the mystery of the long-ago murder, but more importantly, it is here that he first finds a piece of himself.

Old Town, Lost Town

Bunker Hill was film noir’s favorite neighborhood. In the 1940s and ’50s, the once-exclusive area of downtown LA, with its rambling Victorian mansions, was attractively seedy and decaying, and supremely photogenic. The steep streets create natural Dutch angles, and the long stairways slice diagonally across the screen, vertiginous and crooked like something in a bad dream. Angels Flight, a whimsical funicular railway, is an instantly recognizable landmark. The houses have tall, narrow stoops with cagelike porch railings and flaking scrollwork, stained-glass transoms, and other emblems of scuffed and dingy grandeur. Most are cheap rooming houses, with sour, suspicious landladies and tenants whose faces and fortunes sag like the buildings. “Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town,” Raymond Chandler writes in his 1942 novel The High Window. Its tawdry charms lend flavor to Cry Danger (1951), Chicago Calling (1951), and The Turning Point (1952). In Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), Burt Lancaster returns to his mother’s Hill Street home, convinced he has finally gotten over his ex-wife, only to immediately tumble back into the gravitational pull of their bruising relationship. Bunker Hill is home to a tormented child murderer in Joseph Losey’s surprisingly good remake of M (1951), and, in John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), to a tormented clairvoyant whose ability to see the future makes him feel like “a reverse zombie, living in a world already dead, and I alone knowing it.”

Bunker Hill is a place with a past, a place to hide, and a place to seek answers to mysteries. No wonder people in film noir keep washing up there. In Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the shallow, cynical private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) lives in a sleekly modern bachelor pad overlooking the ceaseless river of traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. But Bunker Hill is where he goes, following the slenderest thread, on a quest for something he can only call “the great whatsit.” All he has is a clue in two words that a woman named Christina (Cloris Leachman) gave him just before she was murdered: “Remember me.” He traces her to an apartment at 325 Bunker Hill, which is filled with books and paintings, the radio tuned to a classical music station. On her bedside table he finds, and swipes, a collection of the sonnets of Christina Rossetti. His sojourn in the neighborhood is a series of darkly comic encounters between the brash, philistine Hammer and the relics of a cultured, civilized world. On nearby Flower Street, he gets another lead that takes him to an art gallery, where he breaks in by smashing a window. And when he toils up the endless concrete stairway to the Hillcrest Hotel on Temple Street, the sounds of grand opera pour from a cramped, laundry-festooned room where he squeezes information out of a frightened man by breaking his treasured Enrico Caruso record, nastily exclaiming, “Hey, that’s an heirloom!” before snapping it in half.

Consider Act of Violence (1948), in which a successful veteran living in a shiny California suburb finds his wartime past returned from the dead to accuse him. Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a contractor, living the postwar dream with a comfortable home, a wife and child. But when Parkson (Robert Ryan), a vengeful, limping stalker turns up on his doorstep, he doesn’t react like an innocent man. Instead of calling the police, he flees to Los Angeles, taking refuge in a builders’ convention full of drunken businessmen marching around with lampshades on their heads to the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” In a stairwell fenced in by shadows, he finally confesses to his wife that Parkson wants to kill him because, in a German POW camp, Enley betrayed an escape attempt by their comrades, who were massacred by the Nazis. Pursued by the furies, he runs out into the nocturnal city, through a maze of urban desolation, until he arrives at Angels Flight. Here, the tilted angles of Bunker Hill look like a distorted, expressionist nightmare through which Frank, the formerly upright citizen, staggers and stumbles, his guilt and terror doubling him over like violent cramps.

Finally, in a dreary little joint near closing time, he meets a weathered barfly named Pat (Mary Astor), a woman at home in the grungy margins of Skid Row. Her philosophy is more pragmatic than Rossetti’s admonition to forget and smile. “So you’re unhappy,” she shrugs. “Relax. No law says you gotta be happy. Look at me—I’m not happy, but I get my kicks.” She tries to help by introducing Frank to a hit man who urges him to get rid of Parkson the easy way, plunging him further into self-loathing. There are no flashbacks in this film about a man fleeing his past, but as he runs through the tiled glare of Hill Street Tunnel, Frank hears the phantom cries of his fellow soldiers as they were gunned down, the voices of the dead echoing under Bunker Hill.

One More Night: The Last Days of Bunker Hill

Older parts of cities are repositories of memory; the names of streets, the architecture of buildings, traces such as signs and disused infrastructure all preserve layers of the past. In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Edward Dimendberg writes of the old Bunker Hill that appears in so many noir films made during the postwar suburban boom, “It is as if the neighborhood assumes the role of the repressed historical unconscious of Los Angeles in juxtaposition to its recently constructed suburban present.” For the twenty-first-century viewer watching these movies, Bunker Hill appears doubly haunted, by its gracious past and by its imminent demise; it is, as the clairvoyant says in Night Has a Thousand Eyes, “a world already dead.” Almost everything you see on-screen is now gone, wiped away as if it had never been. (The tunnels under the hill remain and have continued to appear in movies and car commercials.) Beginning around 1960, the neighborhood was razed in the name of “urban renewal,” ultimately replaced by bland high-rises, parking lots, and cultural institutions. Angels Flight, preserved as a tourist attraction but moved from its original site, now shuttles up and down a dusty, naked hillside. In 1956, a film student named Kent Mackenzie made a short documentary about the planned “slum clearance,” shooting the abraded, mundane beauty of the streets that were slated for demolition.

The film is set over a single night, following Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), her husband Homer (Homer Nish), and Homer’s friend Tommy (Tommy Reynolds). It opens with Yvonne doing her shopping in the cavernous, swarming Grand Central Market at the foot of Bunker Hill, then trudging up to the dilapidated wood-frame house where they live, filled with jobless young men lounging around reading comic books. The post-dubbed dialogue, an aimless chatter that repeats like a stuck record, periodically dies away to let us hear the characters’ interior monologues. Yvonne, who is pregnant, gazes longingly at displays in shop windows and dreams of a nice home and a couple of kids. But Homer and Tommy have no interest in straightening out; they spend their nights carousing in packed, noisy bars along Main Street, trying to pick up girls or make a little “bread” in poker games, then careening through the Second Street Tunnel in a hazy, flickering, shrieking blur. Homer and his friends sit in cars, swigging whiskey out of paper sacks, their faces half eaten away by the darkness, just watching the neon, the brawls, and the cops arresting men like them. Tommy, a charismatic, life-of-the-party type who has an unpleasantly grabby way with women, talks like Pat in Act of Violence about living for “kicks.” This is the men’s rebellion against white America; regular people envy him, Tommy argues, because they don’t have the courage to live freely as he does. But then he casually remarks that if he goes to jail, that’s OK. “I can do time. Time is just time to me. I’m doing it outside, so I can do it inside.”

The Exiles opens with a montage of Edward S. Curtis’s portraits of Native Americans in traditional regalia, but the modern men and women in the film never talk about their lives or identities in political or historical terms. There is an unspoken wound of loss and dislocation beneath the reckless joys and lonely vigils of this night. In one scene Homer, leaning against the smudged window of a liquor store, reads a letter from his parents back on the reservation, and we glimpse the world he left behind, children playing and elders resting in the sparse shade of a desert landscape. The night ends with a gathering on “Hill X,” a bare slope overlooking the glittering plain of Los Angeles. Here, away from surveillance or interference, the exiles play drums and sing tribal songs, connecting—for the only time in the film—with their heritage. In the gray, litter-strewn dawn they return to the city and stumble up Bunker Hill, to sleep and then do it all again. There is always another song on the jukebox, another beer, another cigarette, another bar, another night.

The look of The Exiles (mainly shot on “short ends,” leftover bits of film that Mackenzie and his cinematographers scavenged from their day jobs) is raw and tender and tactile; the night shooting by available light produces smeary, hazy whites and shadows bleeding like ink-stains. The old Bunker Hill exists now only in the spectral traces of photography, and in words set down on paper. In 1950, the writer John Fante published in the Los Angeles Times a rapturous ode to Bunker Hill, recalling his dreamy days there as a penniless youth, and crying out in pain at the news that the place he loved will be torn down, and with it the relics of his own days and nights. “Where shall I go to find their souvenirs?” The answer is the movies. The darkness and corruption have indeed left a vestige, in scenes that turn the old, lost, shabby town into a memory palace.

Special thanks to John Bengtson.

Ghost Town: Nights on Bunker Hill

Old Town, Lost Town

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