The proximate cause of highlighting this film noir classic, which I discuss in the video below, is the recent passing of its lead actress, Jean Simmons, who plays the title character, a psychopathic seductress who ensnares an upstanding citizen—an ambulance driver (Robert Mitchum)—in her deadly schemes. It may not be her showiest or fullest performance, nor the most exquisite (“Guys and Dolls”), but it’s perfectly integrated into the texture of the movie and an integral element of the methods of its director, Otto Preminger.
Hard to think of Preminger as an actor’s director; he is said to have casually mistreated them, as when he ordered take after take of a scene in which Mitchum had to slap Simmons, until Mitchum—as his biographer Lee Server writes—“either slapped Preminger across the face, with just the force the director had been asking for, or very nearly did the same.” Nonetheless, he routinely got great performances, ones that have an alluring, mysterious chill. Here, the ever-cool Mitchum radiates heat without warmth, and Simmons blends violent and erotic passions in a blank, abyssal gaze, an emotional black hole.
It’s worth mentioning Preminger’s spare visual sense, which is scarcely defined by the notion of economy (whether financial or narrative). He’s a dialectician, whose law background (one he gained under pressure from his father, a prosecutor) induced him to stage actions as rhetorical debates (look at the number of balanced two-shots he used, as well as his profusion of courtroom scenes)—but, like a lawyer, he sees through the logic to the furious passion, which shines through with a cold, wintery light, as through a courthouse window. “Angel Face” is a story of the swift, inevitable moral decline and downfall resulting from one false move. Preminger tells it with a connoisseur’s discerning eye, without sentiment or cynicism, and with a rueful wonder at the kind of grimly extravagant doings that real life is made of.
