Sedona, Arizona: Angel and the Badman (1947) Locations

This weekend I've been working on organizing photos from our recent road trip!

I'll be dividing the photos into roughly a dozen posts covering various topics; the majority will be related to movie locations.

I'm going to start off with a look at the Sedona, Arizona locations for one of my favorite films, ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (1947).

We began our day in Flagstaff, Arizona, where our son graduated from Northern Arizona University a few years ago. Sedona is roughly a 45-minute drive from Flagstaff.

Flagstaff, which is at an elevation of 7,000 feet, is filled with pine trees...

...and as you drop to Sedona's 4300-foot elevation, the terrain becomes a mix of trees with interesting rock formations, such as this one.

Our first stop in Sedona was at the Sedona Heritage Museum.

My husband had previously made contact with one of the docents, and she kindly marked up a city map with various film-related locations of interest which was a huge help to us during our stay in Sedona.

She also gave us a tour of this telegraph office building, which is seen in ANGEL AND THE BADMAN. It's currently located outside the museum.

This Western street set at the foot of Sedona's Coffee Pot Rock was first constructed for ANGEL AND THE BADMAN, then was used for many additional Westerns -- STATION WEST (1948) was just one -- and came down after 3:10 TO YUMA (1957).

The telegraph office building can be seen toward the left of the "screen cap" above, slightly to the right of Coffee Pot Rock. There's another great photo of it as it looked on the street set at the Arizona Memory Project.

This plaque explains the building's history. It dates from the 1890s and has been moved multiple times, first to the movie street set and eventually to the Sedona Heritage Museum.

Besides being a movie location in its own right, it currently houses displays about Sedona's Western film history.

Details on the building can easily be matched up with this screen shot from ANGEL AND THE BADMAN. This is the scene early in the film where Penny (Gail Russell) and her father (John Halloran) deliver Quirt (John Wayne) to the telegraph office.

Later in the film Laredo (Bruce Cabot) and his henchmen walk in the front door, seen here.

An ANGEL AND THE BADMAN display inside the telegraph office building:

Below are displays on Sedona's film history. The "Sedona West" sign refers to a housing tract which is now located at the former Western street set site. Many of the streets in the area are named for movies which were filmed there; the street signs seen here reflect a few of the names. We later took extensive photographs of the street signs in that area, which will be the topic of another post.

Another view of the telegraph office interior:

The building also houses a diorama of the original town set:

John Wayne walked down the street set near the end of the movie, with Coffee Pot Rock towering behind him.

Here's how the exact same area, now a housing development, looks today:

Another view of Coffee Pot Rock:

Elsewhere in Sedona you can easily locate Courthouse Butte...

...and nearby Bell Rock:

Here are Wayne and Russell with Courthouse Butte and Bell Rock in the background:

I'll share more about the Bell Rock area in a later post.

This color photograph of Gail Russell on the set is nice as it ties in with my own color photos, demonstrating that in some ways not much has changed in the area in the ensuing decades.

Related Posts: A Visit to Valhalla Cemetery; A Visit to Pacific View Memorial Park; Classic Movie Hub: John Wayne Favorites.

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