Angel Face

The joy of this rather depressing movie is watching a couple of superb actors parry an thrust. Jean Simmons with those deep dark eyes plays the daughter of a rich woman and her sycophant failed author husband. She is a daddy's girl and resents her stepmother. It is obvious she has tried to kill the lady and make it look like suicide. She is presenting this lady as off kilter when she is actually quite kind to said stepdaughter. Enter Robert Mitchum. He is a cad who thinks only of himself. In a great performance he allows himself to be taken in by her, despite his suspicions, and when she commits murder, he is dragged in. She says she loves him but needs information on car functions (he is a master mechanic). The problem for her is that when her stepmother is killed, her father hooked a ride and also was killed. I won't tell what happens but it's a bumpy ride (no pun intended). I got a kick out of this one.

Angel Face was a recommended film according to several noir chronicles, so I figured when it rolled around on TMC I could tape it and erase if it failed to satisfy. Despite initial difficulty getting involved in the plot, before I knew it I was absorbed by Jean Simmon's keynote performance. The myriad small moments of suspense along the way in no way prepare the viewer for the shocking moment which closed this cautionary tale. Definitely recommended viewing.

Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons give great performances in this deliberate but interesting drama about a beautiful woman who is not what she seems. The ending will surprise and shock you. I saw this film in 1953 as a young boy and can remember it like it was yesterday. It has a way of sticking with you. Leon Ames,Herbert Marshall, Barbara O'Neil, and Jim Backus (voice of Mr. Magoo) round out a nice cast.

A sense of unavoidable doom hangs over this film from the start, when an ambulance, its siren blaring, races to a mansion whose owner has almost been asphyxiated by gas--whether by accident or design is not clear. Jean Simmons is mesmerizing as the haunted and haunting Diane, who lives luxuriously in postwar L.A. , but whose wartime-London childhood has irreparably scarred her. (Robert Mitchum' s hapless Frank would have done well to remember that in Roman mythology Diana was the huntress.) This film has one of the most melancholy scenes of any film near its end when Diane wanders disconsolately through a deserted mansion. She enters and leaves rooms where she had once been happy, and Dimitri Tiomkin's music painfully underscores the character's desolation. That loneliness is later echoed in the final image: a cab driver drives up to the empty house and honks his horn in vain for passengers who will never appear.

Otto Preminger takes the noir/ femme fatale genre a step beyond in his usual pessimism. This world of shady mansions, sad piano-playing and lonely boulevards perpetually driven, suits well Jean Simmons's calm insanity and Mitchum's stoic acceptance of his tragic destiny. Mitchum uses the same discontent tone to order a beer and to refuse to be part of a murder. He smokes, empty-minded, staring out of the window, too tired to get his way out of the schemes of his employers. He may take the most important decision of his life, but after the cigarette's over he'll be doing the total opposite. On the other hand one has the feeling that the film wouldn't worked as well with one more conventional noir leading lady, like Lana Turner. Simmons' charming and weak aspect makes her character irresistible. To top it all there's a masterful score by Dimitri Tiomkin and the most surprising of endings.

"Angel Face", according to one film journal, has become a cult film with a strong repeat-viewer base ... a bit like the children at a scary movie who cover their eyes but continue to peek through fingers just the same. I'm an "AF" fan, too. One of the film's most powerful aspects is the utterly chilling soundtrack score with its turbulent minor-key piano. To my mind, Dimitri Tiomkin never composed a more appropriate theme than this. And during the lonely nighttime scene when Jean Simmons' character revisits the windswept driveway where her parents had met their horrific death, when the wordless chorus swells into Tiomkin's theme, see if you don't agree that this is one of cinema's most memorable moments. Highly recommended to all except young children and sensitive adults for its surprising and shocking imagery.