An almost forgettable slow burn of a noir. Were it not for the haunted performance of the titular Jean Simmons. A conniving rich girl sets her sights on an innocuous ambulance worker who makes a house call to her home for the accidental gas poisoning of her step mother. With a combination of a slightly mousey spinster homebody and a worldy precocious attitude she makes her way through the film with an innocence that is quite captivating. All the while planning and scheming to not only finish the job she started with her step mother but also make the ever wandering Ambulance driver played by Mitchell fall in love with her. With her money and innocence and means to catapult him to a higher status. It’s a 85 minute film that does move at a leisurely pace. On only the first viewing I can’t tell if the film makers have painted Jean Simmons in a light that registers her as a femme fatale or innocent to make the audience question the suspicions that befall the players. The forward thinking of Mitchum’s character to be wary enough of her wiles is interesting to a point. But seems wasted by the decisions he ultimately makes. The quiet yearning of Simmons performance is justification enough to give this a watch. 5.5/10 stars. May 29 2023
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.
