Angel Face

Toward the end of Otto Preminger’s Angel Face, the young Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) walks wistfully through the empty mansion she’s about to close up, reflecting upon the death and destruction she’s caused, piano music and distant choral voices escorting her through the halls and doorways like scheming angels. It’s an unusually melodramatic scene for noir but this is an unusually melodramatic example of the cycle, even though very few characters will make it out alive. A devious child of wealth, Diane takes a liking to ambulance driver and auto mechanic Frank Jessup (a well cast Robert Mitchum) who dreams of starting his own garage business. She tempts Frank away from his current girlfriend Mary (Mona Freeman) and secures him a job as chauffeur on her family’s estate, but Frank soon suspects she wants more than his companionship: she wants his help in eliminating the human obstacles to her sole ownership of the estate, namely her father Charles (Herbert Marshall) and stepmother Catherine (Barbara O’Neill). Angel Face is well-written and well-acted, but some may find Preminger’s direction here less stylized or imaginative than his earlier noirs. There’s a quietude and humility to the film, but this serves to make the moments of sudden action — not one, but two vertical car crashes — so much more shocking, and more fun to watch.