Sat 23 Jan 2021
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: ANGEL FACE (1953).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[5] Comments
ANGEL FACE. RKO, 1953. Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, Herbert Marshall and Kenneth Tobey. Written by Frank Nugent, Oscar Millard and Frank Erskine. Directed by Otto Preminger.
One of those movies like Woman on the Beach that puts me at a loss. It’s compelling, dull, forceful, meandering, ordinary and dreamlike all at the same time. I couldn’t call it a really successful film, but once I start watching it I have to finish.
The plot has Robert Mitchum involved with a potential murderess, as in Out of the Past, but without that film’s lush romanticism. Everyone in Angel Face is worried about conventional things like jobs and living expenses, which mitigates against the interest of the whole thing but adds considerably to the realism. The story moves at a snail’s pace as working-stiff Mitchum tries to figure out whether or not he loves wealthy neurotic Jean Simmons, while she tries to get around to murdering her stepmother.
So things just sort of drift along until we suddenly realize, about the same time Mitchum does, that he has somehow moved too far away from his workaday life to return to it, and that his old friends don’t want him back anyway. About this time, the story shifts into Heavy Melodrama from which, like its hero, it tries to draw back but never quite gets there.
The ending, with another working stiff calling to a man who will never answer, somehow sums the whole thing up with a poetic terseness that lingers in the mind…. as I say, not an easy film to like, but one that stays with you.
January 23rd, 2021 at 5:28 pm
Being a longtime Robert Mitchum fan, this is a movie I’ve always been meaning to watch, but for some reason or another, none good, I never have. I see Warner Archives has it out on DVD. No time like the present!
January 23rd, 2021 at 6:30 pm
This flick shook me to my ankles when I happened to catch it randomly on late-night local TV one morning around 1 am.
Jean Simmons owns the flick. Might be her most commanding performance ever. She exudes menace when called upon. Amply demonstrated here.
Mitchum does his usual Mitch thing …and the flick cruises along …with all due suspense until …WHAM! An-n-n-nd …double WHAM! One of the most killer finales ever.
It’s one of the classic crime flick shockers. Nice to see it remembered here, and written about with the love it deserves.
January 23rd, 2021 at 10:12 pm
This is the film where Otto Preminger’s tendency to sadism backfired on him.
There is a scene where Mitchum has to slap Simmons, and Mitchum was not happy about it. He just wasn’t hitting her hard enough to satisfy Preminger, who was clearly playing his actors to his amusement so Simmons finally told Mitchum just to haul off and slug her so they could get it over with.
He did and Preminger called the take at which point Mitchum walked over to Preminger, hauled off and slugged him and walked off set noting “That’s what it felt like.”
As everyone said a difficult film, not really one I like all that much and yet impossible not to look at and curiously haunting when it is done.
January 24th, 2021 at 7:35 am
Preminger sure does have a strange streak of fetishism running through so many of his works.
February 2nd, 2021 at 4:57 pm
My memory of this film is pretty spotty but you do stir some memories. Calls for another look.