Otto Preminger's Angel Face

Sunday, cigarette #1
Out the window, 3:15am

It's hard being a humble laborer in the vineyards of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, for one is beset on all sides by ideological temptations: objectivism, monarchism, anarcho-capitalism, etc.

While I cannot deny having done my time as a Randian - for only two weeks, I swear, and the scar is barely visible - I have never been tempted by Agrarianism for the simple reason that I like film noir. Man was not meant to live on concrete, Allen Tate wailed. Maybe, but men living where they're not supposed to makes good film.

What makes Angel Face better than average is that Robert Mitchum's character is so hopelessly out of his element. Gone is the noir world of Laura, where every man is hard-boiled and every woman is a dame. Into the decadent home of Diane Tremayne and her dissipated father walks Frank Jessup, a genuinely nice guy.

Unfortunately, even genuinely nice guys are fallen, and Frank is entangled in an affair with Diane just in time to get the suspicious deaths of her father and step-mother pinned on him. Diane is the real killer, of course, but if noir has taught us anything it's that fallen guys are also fall guys, and Frank is coerced into helping Diane get away with the crime.

All through the ordeal Mitchum looks like a man out of place. He may speak Diane's language ("Go ahead, hit me," she says. "No, I'll buy you dinner, then maybe I'll hit you."), but all Frank really seems to want to do is get away from these fast-talking rich girls and open his own auto repair shop. Which is why his complicity in a murder is so jarring.

Jean Simmons, despite looking very drowsy, makes a frightening enough murderess. Her face after Mitchum uses the back of his hand to bring her out of hysterics in the opening scene is especially satisfying, as she moves from real indignance at being slapped to the false indignance of a woman with murderous designs recognizing opportunity when it walks up and wallops her. But Mitchum does all of the film's heavy lifting, showing us that even a man with the good character to walk away from a half-a-million dollar inheritance just because the girl that comes attached is no damned good still has enough evil in him to help the girl get away with murder.