Angel Face (1953)
Classic film has no shortage of mean girls, but Angel Face (1953) offers a particularly dangerous teenage femme fatale in its title character, played with unhinged intensity by English actress Jean Simmons. The plot of this riveting story of obsession and murder has a lot in common with Leave Her to Heaven (1945), including the irony of invoking angels and Heaven in a tale about lies, violence, and insanity. It’s a bleak, shocking narrative, especially in its ending, which is about as noir as the genre can get, but watching the temptation and fall of Robert Mitchum as the anti-hero proves as morbidly fascinating as driving past the smoking chaos of a car wreck on the highway. Director Otto Preminger, who had previously made Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), is on home turf with this material, and the supporting cast includes familiar favorites like Herbert Marshall, Leon Ames, and Jim Backus, but Mitchum and Simmons are definitely the main draws thanks to the deeply dysfunctional chemistry of their bad romance.
Mitchum stars as ambulance driver Frank Jessup, whose life becomes increasingly complicated when a late-night call brings him to the opulent home of the beautiful and very young Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons). Diane immediately makes a play for Frank, and he goes out with her despite having a steady girlfriend, Mary (Mona Freeman), who also works at the hospital. When Frank becomes the chauffeur for Diane’s wealthy stepmother, Catherine (Barbara O’Neil), and her novelist father, Charles (Herbert Marshall), he begins to realize that Diane harbors both a powerful attachment to her father and an equal hatred for the stepmother she sees as an interloper. Every time he tries to break things off with Diane, however, fate prevents him from getting away.
The dangerous woman is, of course, a staple of noir, but I find the reversed power imbalance in Angel Face intriguing, especially as embodied by Simmons and Mitchum. Most of our iconic femme fatale characters are adult women who radiate power and confidence, but Diane Tremayne is just a kid, still nursing her childhood hurts and resentments and remembering things that happened when she was ten. Diane is a tiny, delicate creature, not yet twenty but made to seem more cultured and mature by her posh English accent, even as she sometimes almost skips in excitement when she’s running off to pursue Frank. Her ruthlessness and capacity for violence are aspects of childishness, not sophistication, as she imagines a Cinderella narrative for herself with Catherine as the wicked stepmother. She’s more lucky than clever in many of her efforts, but her luck runs out with Mary, who immediately sees through her act of viciousness couched as friendly concern and wisely disentangles herself from whatever is going on with Frank and Diane. Mary understands that Frank, a fully grown man with plenty of life experience and a serious girlfriend to boot, ought to have the power to resist a spoiled, selfish teenager, and only a deep-rooted weakness of character can explain his casual infidelity. In their scenes together, Frank towers over Diane, and she uses her apparent helplessness to get close to him, but her grip proves a lot tighter than he imagines. Frank thinks he can hang onto Mary and indulge his attraction to Diane, and later he thinks he can drop Diane and have Mary take him back, but he badly misjudges both women and ultimately has to pay for it.
Diane is absolutely dangerous to herself and everyone around her, but the film refuses to make her a straightforward villain, and that complexity also makes this noir stand out. Despite her lies and manipulation of others, she’s not really a psychopath. Her devotion to her father is genuine, and she proves capable of feeling tremendous remorse once she realizes the consequences of her actions. We see real character development and regret in Diane, which we actually don’t see in Frank, and perhaps it’s his lack of emotional intelligence that makes him blind to Diane’s despair. Frank doesn’t seem to love either Mary or Diane, and he certainly doesn’t understand their feelings. He wants both of them without committing to either and doesn’t realize they might have very different reactions to his fecklessness. Despite his stupidity and insensitivity, Frank isn’t really a villain, either, just a dope who can’t comprehend his own shortcomings. The film presents its real villains as the lawyers, especially Leon Ames as Diane’s defense attorney, Fred Barrett. The trial sequence is utterly cynical, proving that the legal system is about spectacle, power, and wealth, certainly not truth, and Barrett doesn’t care if his clients are guilty as long as he wins the case. Jim Backus has some good moments as the district attorney trying to prove that Frank and Diane are guilty, but we, the audience, know that his argument is only half right, and no matter how the trial ends justice cannot be served. Diane’s conscience might be wreaking havoc, but Barrett has no conscience and therefore can’t imagine that someone might not want to get away with murder. In Angel Face, the real psychopaths are the attorneys, and their decisions seal the protagonists’ fates more than anything else because they know better, are repeatedly told the truth, and still choose lies that serve their own interests instead. The bleakest scenes are those where Diane tries to do the right thing and thereby perhaps save both Frank and herself but is rebuffed by the condescending Barrett, who, we can assume, will never feel a shred of guilt for the consequences of his actions. That’s noir at its darkest, perhaps because we recognize its realism.
For more of Robert Mitchum’s noir films, see Undercurrent (1946), Crossfire (1947), and Out of the Past (1947). Preminger and Mitchum worked together again on River of No Return (1954). Jean Simmons has memorable roles in Great Expectations (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and Laurence Olivier’s 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, where her portrayal of Ophelia earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. While Leon Ames is best remembered for playing fathers in films like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Little Women (1949), he also plays an attorney in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). For the meanest of noir’s mean girls, it’s hard to beat Ann Blythe as Veda in Mildred Pierce (1945), but Janis Wilson makes quite an impression with her brief time as young Martha in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), and few young women could be more dangerously unhinged than Martha Vickers’ version of Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep (1946).
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
