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I got everything by talking fast in a world that goes for talking—and ended up with exactly nothing
And then some days you watch a noir and in the immortal words of Grunkle Stan, "Well, that happened." Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel (1945) is beautifully photographed, catchily scripted, contains some extremely talented people, and I'm not sure I believed a moment of it.
On the credit side, Dana Andrews makes a very good heel; I'm not sure I'd seen him play one before and it calls attractive, irresolute shadows out of his clean modeling. As the drifter-grifter who blows into a seaside whistle-stop between San Francisco and L.A. with dollar signs in his eyes but only one bill in his pocket, he has a beautiful voice, confiding and sonorous: the polish scratches off when he's rattled, as we'll find out soon enough. You see a lot of con men in noir, but you don't usually see con men who are so scramblingly bad at it. Whatever his undeniable talents for coaxing trust and cash out of the men and women who look deeply into his dark-lashed eyes, Eric Stanton is neither organized nor disciplined enough to run a long con—invited into a good, steady racket by elegantly phony psychic Professor Madley (John Carradine in an almost movie-stealing cameo), he turns it down for the much slimmer chance of hanging around Pop's Eats until he can make a serious play for Linda Darnell's Stella, the dark-haired siren of a waitress who has every man from the jukebox operator to Pop himself longing to get into her well-filled uniform. Sullen and luscious, she's easily mistaken for the town tramp, but makes it cut-glass clear to a lazily interested Eric that she's holding out for security: a house, a ring. He tries to make her reconsider with some smooth mauling under a boardwalk. She shoves him off, unimpressed: "That's okay for kids, but not for me. Not anymore." Thus he conceives the brilliant scheme of seducing a lonely, naive, moneyed spinster with intent to divorce her fast and bring her worldly goods to the bride-bed with Stella. Even before murder throws in a monkey wrench, news flash, this is a terrible idea.
Which takes us neatly over to the debit side of the picture, because Alice Faye is unfairly miscast as designated mark June Mills, the bookish, church-organ-playing sister of flinty leading citizen Clara (Anne Revere, leonine as ever but totally wasted). When I think of Faye, I think of performances like "No Love, No Nothing" in The Gang's All Here (1943), where she has torch-singing sexiness and humor to burn. I think of her for years on the radio, joking with Phil Harris. Angelically blonde as she may be, she's much too easy in her skin to be the kind of sweetly sheltered good girl who has never before even eaten a hot dog ("Paging Dr. Freud,"![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch chimed in, "your mother wants you") and the script doesn't help her out at all; there is just not much in the part and Faye is the wrong actress to make more of it, especially since we are required to believe that her innocence, her sincerity and gravity and goodness directly catalyze Andrews' romantic redemption. The love of the right woman, the rake's regress. Hand me either some Alka-Seltzer or a Courtney Milan. I don't object to romance in my noir, at all. The one in They Live by Night (1949) is heartbreaking and the one in Pushover (1954) is the best thing about the movie. But I object to unconvincing romance wherever I find it and Fallen Angel just dropped my disbelief on the floor. Faye and Andrews get one lovely set of scenes in the third act, holed up in a cheap motel in San Francisco after their unconsummated wedding night turns into a conspicuously absent alibi. Eric at the end of his rope is finally being honest with June, confessing to her what the audience spotted some time ago: he's a glib loser, belatedly spilling his guts to the wife he only married for her money, fingered for the murder of the woman he really wanted, a string of slick broken ventures behind him and nothing ahead but the same endlessly, emptily improvising hustle. "It all adds up to only one thing—a washout. That's what you're looking at, a complete washout at thirty." He says the words without self-pity or even much shame, just facing-up recognition. In return she recites him poetry, gift for gift: a piece of herself, her real, shy, daydreaming self that his pick-up artistry encouraged her to plaster over with a false, nervous worldliness, agreeing to marry a man after a week to prove that she wasn't afraid of life, sex, herself. It was a genuinely kind gesture when he came back up to the room with a paperback from the drugstore racks, "to help you pass the time." More in that line and the film might have persuaded me, but by the next scene—a frustratingly gorgeous fade from neon through a darkened window to a daylit reflection of the city—she's back to pasteboard virtue and he's converted and the resolution of the murder plot is neither terrible nor unforeseeable, but I don't think I should have felt most strongly about Percy Kilbride's spindly, heartbroken Pop.
The real problem with this movie is that I had more fun writing about it than watching it. It didn't even have the decency to completely suck. I don't fault it for not being Laura (1944), because Laura is one in a million and has Gene Tierney besides, but I did expect it to leave me with something more than regret that its exquisitely black-and-white surface had to be matched by a less exquisitely black-and-white plot. Alice Faye doesn't even to get to sing. At least it has Andrews, tardily realizing he went for his own fast talk most of all; at least it has Darnell, moody and not simplistic, a pragmatic bombshell with her own fierce principles ("I don't cheat on a date . . . I stick to a deal") and a restlessness more usually associated with small-town heroines. It should have had more John Carradine. This racket brought to you by my rising backers at Patreon.
On the credit side, Dana Andrews makes a very good heel; I'm not sure I'd seen him play one before and it calls attractive, irresolute shadows out of his clean modeling. As the drifter-grifter who blows into a seaside whistle-stop between San Francisco and L.A. with dollar signs in his eyes but only one bill in his pocket, he has a beautiful voice, confiding and sonorous: the polish scratches off when he's rattled, as we'll find out soon enough. You see a lot of con men in noir, but you don't usually see con men who are so scramblingly bad at it. Whatever his undeniable talents for coaxing trust and cash out of the men and women who look deeply into his dark-lashed eyes, Eric Stanton is neither organized nor disciplined enough to run a long con—invited into a good, steady racket by elegantly phony psychic Professor Madley (John Carradine in an almost movie-stealing cameo), he turns it down for the much slimmer chance of hanging around Pop's Eats until he can make a serious play for Linda Darnell's Stella, the dark-haired siren of a waitress who has every man from the jukebox operator to Pop himself longing to get into her well-filled uniform. Sullen and luscious, she's easily mistaken for the town tramp, but makes it cut-glass clear to a lazily interested Eric that she's holding out for security: a house, a ring. He tries to make her reconsider with some smooth mauling under a boardwalk. She shoves him off, unimpressed: "That's okay for kids, but not for me. Not anymore." Thus he conceives the brilliant scheme of seducing a lonely, naive, moneyed spinster with intent to divorce her fast and bring her worldly goods to the bride-bed with Stella. Even before murder throws in a monkey wrench, news flash, this is a terrible idea.
Which takes us neatly over to the debit side of the picture, because Alice Faye is unfairly miscast as designated mark June Mills, the bookish, church-organ-playing sister of flinty leading citizen Clara (Anne Revere, leonine as ever but totally wasted). When I think of Faye, I think of performances like "No Love, No Nothing" in The Gang's All Here (1943), where she has torch-singing sexiness and humor to burn. I think of her for years on the radio, joking with Phil Harris. Angelically blonde as she may be, she's much too easy in her skin to be the kind of sweetly sheltered good girl who has never before even eaten a hot dog ("Paging Dr. Freud,"
spatch chimed in, "your mother wants you") and the script doesn't help her out at all; there is just not much in the part and Faye is the wrong actress to make more of it, especially since we are required to believe that her innocence, her sincerity and gravity and goodness directly catalyze Andrews' romantic redemption. The love of the right woman, the rake's regress. Hand me either some Alka-Seltzer or a Courtney Milan. I don't object to romance in my noir, at all. The one in They Live by Night (1949) is heartbreaking and the one in Pushover (1954) is the best thing about the movie. But I object to unconvincing romance wherever I find it and Fallen Angel just dropped my disbelief on the floor. Faye and Andrews get one lovely set of scenes in the third act, holed up in a cheap motel in San Francisco after their unconsummated wedding night turns into a conspicuously absent alibi. Eric at the end of his rope is finally being honest with June, confessing to her what the audience spotted some time ago: he's a glib loser, belatedly spilling his guts to the wife he only married for her money, fingered for the murder of the woman he really wanted, a string of slick broken ventures behind him and nothing ahead but the same endlessly, emptily improvising hustle. "It all adds up to only one thing—a washout. That's what you're looking at, a complete washout at thirty." He says the words without self-pity or even much shame, just facing-up recognition. In return she recites him poetry, gift for gift: a piece of herself, her real, shy, daydreaming self that his pick-up artistry encouraged her to plaster over with a false, nervous worldliness, agreeing to marry a man after a week to prove that she wasn't afraid of life, sex, herself. It was a genuinely kind gesture when he came back up to the room with a paperback from the drugstore racks, "to help you pass the time." More in that line and the film might have persuaded me, but by the next scene—a frustratingly gorgeous fade from neon through a darkened window to a daylit reflection of the city—she's back to pasteboard virtue and he's converted and the resolution of the murder plot is neither terrible nor unforeseeable, but I don't think I should have felt most strongly about Percy Kilbride's spindly, heartbroken Pop.The real problem with this movie is that I had more fun writing about it than watching it. It didn't even have the decency to completely suck. I don't fault it for not being Laura (1944), because Laura is one in a million and has Gene Tierney besides, but I did expect it to leave me with something more than regret that its exquisitely black-and-white surface had to be matched by a less exquisitely black-and-white plot. Alice Faye doesn't even to get to sing. At least it has Andrews, tardily realizing he went for his own fast talk most of all; at least it has Darnell, moody and not simplistic, a pragmatic bombshell with her own fierce principles ("I don't cheat on a date . . . I stick to a deal") and a restlessness more usually associated with small-town heroines. It should have had more John Carradine. This racket brought to you by my rising backers at Patreon.
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See, I would watch that version! (Or read it.) I bet it gives Alice Faye a torch song, too.
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I have a love/hate relationship with Dana Andrews, though this may be because the first film I saw him in was Hot Rods to Hell.
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It's one of the movies where I feel there is a much better, more complicated, more satisfying story curled up somewhere inside it or a half-step off to one side and I just wish they had made that one.
I have a love/hate relationship with Dana Andrews, though this may be because the first film I saw him in was Hot Rods to Hell.
Okay, what?
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Oh, my God. That looks fantastically not good. Does it at least live down to its trailer?
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I'd have to say that it does.
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That was hilarious--thanks for that!
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The real problem with this movie is that I had more fun writing about it than watching it. And I had fun reading about it! But I won't be watching it anytime soon, I don't think.
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I think that is a respectable life decision. I didn't take brain damage from this movie, and I might even go see it if a nice print played nearby, but that's not actually the same as recommending it.