Fallen Angel (1945)
Directed by Otto Preminger

Film Review

A year on from their successful collaboration on Laura (1944), actor Dana Andrews and director Otto Preminger team up to deliver another top notch film noir, this time a compelling tale of thwarted desire and murderous intrigue constructed as an ingenious whodunit.  The absurdity of the plot is the main factor preventing Fallen Angel from being one of the great classics of its genre, but thanks to its taut screenplay, faultless direction and mesmeric performances from two of the peerless stalwarts of American film noir - Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell - it can hardly fail to engage and entertain.

The hard-boiled Andrews and super-sultry Darnell have such presence in the film - the former visibly lusting after the latter like a wild animal on heat (and who can blame him?) - that the third star in the equation, Alice Faye, barely gets a look-in.  The cruel irony is that this was the film which had been intended to launch Faye on a new career as a dramatic actress, after she had triumphed for the past decade as one of Twentieth Century Fox's leading stars in the musical genre.  Faye turns in an admirable performance and, had she not been all but eclipsed by the more sensual and visually exciting Darnell, this could have been the new start she had been promised.  Instead it was to be the film that put her off acting altogether, and she retired from movie making immediately afterwards, staying away from the big screen until her belated return in José Ferrer's State Fair (1962).  What upset Faye most was Preminger's decision to axe a beach scene in which she sang the number "Slowly" to Andrews.

One of the main strengths of Fallen Angel is that almost every character in it turns out to be very different from what we expect (and this applies as much to the supporting characters as it does to the leads).  Things never play out quite as we expect them to, and instead we are kept guessing right until the final reel, in the best tradition of the whodunit format.  Darnell's femme fatale starts out as bad as they come, a dark-haired siren who devours a different man every evening, but somehow she redeems herself before she is brutally snatched out of the frame.  Andrews begins as the cynical, tough-talking drifter but is saved - implausibly - by the love of a good woman (Faye), who herself turns out to be far more colourful and adventurous than we might first suspect.  It is by constantly cheating our expectations that the film maintains our interest in what is otherwise a pretty conventional narrative, and Joseph LaShelle's wonderfully moody cinematography helps to sustain the unsettling aura of ambiguity that pervades the film.  Fallen Angel is one of Otto Preminger's most enticing films, one that appears to stick to the rules of film noir but which in fact delves much more deeply into the complexity and perversity of human nature.

Film Synopsis

Unable to pay the bus fare to complete his journey to San Francisco, down-at-heel press agent Eric Stanton ends up in a small coastal town with barely enough money to pay for his next meal.  In a low grade diner he encounters a sultry waitress, Stella, and immediately falls under her spell.  Having raised a few dollars by promoting a dubious séance act for the charlatan Professor Madley, Stanton begs Stella to leave town and start a new life with him, but she refuses.  She insists that she will only leave with him if he agrees to marry her and can provide her with a home.  To this end, Stanton begins charming June Mills, an heiress with a modest personal fortune.  Stanton's plan is to marry June and then quickly divorce her, having helped himself to all her money.  The scheme is derailed when, on the evening of the day he marries June, Stella is murdered.  Realising that he is the obvious suspect, Stanford leaves town with his new wife, but the local cop Mark Judd pursues him, determined to bring him to book...