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Brilliant Otto Preminger tale of domestic decay. Like Jacques Tourneur’s Out Of The Past, also featuring Robert Mitchum, it sustains a note of intensity but not showiness, an almost gentle sense of everyday Americana contrasted with deft shifts into outright perversity, and then back into the humdrum.
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Like John M. Stahl’s perfervid Leave Her To Heaven (1945), but in virtually polar opposite terms, it deals with a female murderer who consumes those close to her: where Heaven is Wagnerian in its violently colourful stylisation, Angel Face feels more like a Chopin etude, stepping back and forth between dark and light with a dancer’s dexterity, only on carefully chosen occasions revelling in the perversity of scenes such as Jean Simmons’ killer-waif playing a sonorous piano whilst making her various murder attempts, or the choral song of women in a criminal-hospital ward cheering Simmons’ and Mitchum’s marriage. Preminger, as a director, largely favoured effect over finesse, but Angel Face is a tightly wound spring, building with some intriguing emphases that make it seem a quite modern film, with its thesis of a foul rot creeping into the affluent world.
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The first half is sodden with a quiet tension as Simmons’ casting against type works well, playing a rich pseudo-bohemian girl with a savage streak detached from her not-quite absent morality. A terrible, and astounding, act severs the film’s first act from last, and final retribution comes not from the law, which is written off as a joke, but from a kind of dreadful inability to move forward – No Exit in suburbia minus the corny lines. Most effectively, Preminger refuses to reduce his characters to caricatures to make easy points. The step-mother Simmons loathes (Barbara O’Neil) is no harridan; and Simmons is far from a psychopathic cipher representing dangerous youth, like, say, Ann Blyth in Mildred Pearce (1946), as the latter part of the film finds her floundering in a soul-eating torpor.
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Mitchum, who at this point in his career seemed most at home playing heroes with the moral fibre of cardboard underneath their hardened exteriors, hovers effectively in no man’s land, trying to follow his conscience but all too often allowing someone with more will than he has to drive him – he’s both a nice guy, a smart guy, but also a fundamentally weak man. It’s entirely appropriate that Simmons drives him off a cliff in the end, considering that he’s been letting her drive him towards a metaphorical precipice from the moment he met her, and willingly.
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