Angel Face

1952. RKO. Director: Otto Preminger. Cast: Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. Screened at Cinematheque Ontario on June 2, 2004

A seemingly regular Hollywood fare, this film is actually rather strange. A noir looks more like a Mexican soap opera: intensity is replaced by fragmentation. With all its soaring Rachmaninovian score, it curiously lacks tragic feeling or even sentimentality. Despite the overdressed apparels of Hollywood routines, it's very un-Hollywood. The fact is that it may well be a German expressionist and symbolist film, attempting social criticism and psychoanalysis in multi-genre installation. Its nihilism and inevitable moral-ambiguity is visible. The psychology is null but the actors do deliver. Robert Mitchum is charming and well-rounded. Jean Simmons, despite her wooden performance, is mysteriously attractive. In every aspect it revealingly contracts a powerful British movie made several years later with a similar subject: Room at the Top.

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