For Valentine’s Day, we’re once again looking at the wide variety of onscreen relationships: movies about ill-fated couplings, toxic partners, and unconventional romances, to help offset the sticky-sweetness of the season. Follow along here.
Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952) is a film full of questions. Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) often asks them. In fact, Diane says, she so frequently peppers people with questions that her motives go undetected. The questions, though, only get her so far. After a botched attempt on her stepmother’s life brings ambulance driver Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum) into her life, she uses him to strike again, falling into partially unrequited love along the troubled way.
The Tremaynes live high up in Beverly Hills. Diane glides through their palatial estate worrying about her father (Herbert Marshall), a famous novelist faced with writer’s block since marrying a card-playing heiress (Barbara O’Neil). With the call of a siren, Diane lures Frank into their orbit, hiring him as the family’s private chauffeur with a promise to convince her stepmother to fund his dreams of starting a garage. The twenty-next-month Diane competes for Frank’s attention with Mary (Mona Freeman), a nurse who works for her money. Diane borrows car expertise from an unknowing Frank to make a second attempt on her stepmother’s life. But the plans take a horrible turn, bringing the pair together in ways neither could have imagined.
In an oft-cited 1954 essay published in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, Jacques Rivette, seven years away from making his own feature debut, referred to Angel Face as a “skeleton,” noting how its absence of a big production “reduces [Preminger’s] art to the essential.” This way of unpacking the filmographies of great directors was often deployed by the auteur-obsessed critics of the magazine. Like Angel Face, Rivette’s short essay abounds with questions, including a “hazardous” one he refuses to fully answer: “What is mise en scène?” He defines it as Angel Face: “If ever a film was the expression of the practice of mise en scène for its own sake, it is this.” And then a question: “What is cinema, if not the play of actor and actress, of hero and set, of word and face, of hand and object?”
Angel Face is one of the few films that actually lives up to such an idyllic, romantic view of the cinema. To describe it — its characters, its plot, its themes — is to cite much of what one would expect from a studio film noir of the period. Only when one experiences the collision of elements Rivette names does it emerge as what Dave Kehr called “one of the forgotten masterworks of film noir.”
The magnificence becomes most evident in the ways Preminger shoots Simmons. Production history shows how unlikely this pairing was to succeed. Howard Hughes hired Preminger in the hope that he would force Simmons to end her relationship with RKO. In one key scene, Simmons’s Diane goes into hysterics. Frank slaps her. She slaps back. Preminger, disliking Simmons’s acting, had the two play the scene again and again, causing Mitchum, according to his biographer, to go and slap the director himself across the face.
From the title to this famous occurrence, Simmons’s expressions are the formal and thematic focus of Angel Face. She schemes. She lusts. She feels real pain and loss. “What would you know about a girl like Mary?” Frank asks. “You don’t even think like her.” Captured in her face is the film’s dark ambiguity. Does she really love Frank? Or is he merely a means to the end? The answer depends on the day, the scene, and her mood. Dark thoughts play out across that face, revealing a capricious mind able to scheme but never fully triumphant.
Mitchum gives a characteristically cool performance. No actor was better playing a man hoping for a little luck, carrying regret and pushed along by the wind just enough to think that a better future may be near. His oxymoronic ambiguity comes from a kind of active passivity. Think of his very specific gait, broad shoulders, cigarette puffs — always moving forward, yes, but slow, at a speed all his own. He carries with him that everyman quality of the American worker, forced into a job he regrets taking as he waits for a break. When he sees Diane, it is unclear just how much of her darkness he sees. If so, does he tolerate it for a budding love? Or perhaps Frank sees in her the lottery ticket he has been waiting to find. The truth carries serious implications for their fateful romance.
Much of Angel Face takes place within the domestic space. Preminger’s camera movements turn the ostensibly cozy, comfortable space into one brimming with tension. The way the camera follows Diane recalls the achievement of Hitchcock’s in Rebecca, specifically the way he filmed Mrs. Danvers and the second Mrs. de Winter drifting through the halls of Manderley. Yet here Diane is both victim and tormenter, trying and ultimately failing to build the life she wants within the walls provided by the stepmother who, at least in Diane’s mind, steals her father’s words and attention.
Eventually, it is the estate itself, the landscape of Beverly Hills, that Diane uses to mold the world she envisions. Before the fateful moment, Diane looks down the cliff at the front of the estate, a steep, unlandscaped drop to the road below. She finds a pack of cigarettes, tosses them over the edge and watches them tumble. Gravity is the only certainty of Diane’s plan. That, and death.
“Angel Face” is available on Blu-ray from Warner Archives.
