THE ACTRESS 1953

I’m training my eye on The Actress: a film which marked the fifth and final collaboration between Spencer Tracy and director George Cukor. After teaming on Keeper of the Flame (1943), Edward My Son (1949), Adam’s Rib (1949), and Pat & Mike; Tracy and Cukor’s final collaborative hurrah was with the serio-comic domesticity of 1953’s The Actress.

From a screenplay by Ruth Gordon adapted from her autobiographical 1946 Broadway play Years Ago (which was itself based on her serialized memoirs Look in your Glass, published in several issues of The Atlantic Monthly in 1939); The Actress is set in 1913 Wollaston, Massachusetts, and chronicles, in episodic fashion, her teen years when first bitten by the acting bug. The featherlight project first caught the interest of two-time Oscar-winner Spencer Tracy—then the darling of MGM and well into the “professional father” years of his career (Father of the Bride, Father’s Little Dividend); accounting perhaps for this charming film feeling somewhat dominated by the character of the father. Making it more of a I Remember Papa sentimental memory play reverie than a contemplation on a young girl’s determination to embark on a life on the stage.

Jean Simmons as Ruth Gordon Jones

Spencer Tracy as Clinton Jones

Teresa Wright (given not a single closeup in the entire film) as Annie Jones

Anthony Perkins (making his film debut) as Fred Whitmarsh

When heretofore aimless 17-year-old Ruth Jones (Simmons) sees actress and former Ziegfeld Follies star Hazel Dawn on stage in “The Pink Lady,” she undergoes an epiphany: she MUST hereafter devote her life to becoming an actress.

Ruth freely shares her newfound ambition with her practical and empathetic mother (Wright), but due to his having a “disposition,” works hard to keep her aspirations a secret from her bearish father (Tracy), a former adventuring seaman currently bristling at the penurious state of his current life as a factory worker.

While Ruth's mother harbors the hope that she will settle down after graduation and marry Fred (Anthony Perkins), the handsome and genial Harvard student; Ruth's father, who paradoxically believes women should be independent and learn to earn their own keep, yet forbids his wife from lightening their financial load by taking in sewing, has set his sights on Ruth becoming a physical education teacher. 

Clinton participates in a YMCU fitness exhibition (married men's division)

Meanwhile, Ruth pursues her acting dream, albeit largely though daydreams and acting-out fantasies, until the day a well-placed fan letter to her idol Hazel Dawn occasions a much-coveted meeting with the Great Lady (offscreen) and a summons to Boston to meet with the director of the company. Ruth Gordon Jones’ dream of life as an actress is set! Or is it?

Since there is never any doubt that timorous Jean Simmons will grow up to be a Tony Award nominated stage actress, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar nominated screenwriter (with her husband Garson Kanin), and win an Academy Award for Rosemary’s Baby; the only dramatic conflict The Actress has to offer are comedic slice-of-life vignettes highlighting the domestic uproar in the Jones household born of Ruth’s decision to pursue a life in the wicked theater. 

Indeed, the film’s slightness of plot and episodic nature proved a near-insurmountable obstacle for MGM's marketing department (as with the studio's Meet Me in St. Louis, not much really happens in the way of plot). The film certainly features one of Spencer Tracy’s finest performances, but there's no getting past the fact he's not exactly the central character, despite posters and ads prominently featuring his likeness next to the film's title. 

Instead of studying, Ruth and her girlfriends engage in an impromptu
performance of Hazel Dawn's signature song "Beautiful Lady" 

Reflecting this dilemma is the fact that The Actress (a title few were happy with) entertained several working titles from pre-production through preview screenings, the blunt and misleading Father and the Actress proving too reminiscent of Tracy’s Father of the Bride series, but at least reflecting the film’s proper character emphasis.

Although Jean Simmons cites it as one of her favorite films and Spencer Tracy won a Golden Globe for his performance (and a BAFTA nomination), favorable critical reception couldn’t save The Actress from fizzling at the box-office. In the book You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: Interviews with Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era, Simmons recalls going to see the film at a theater in Westwood and being the only person in attendance.

I first came across The Actress about five years ago when it was screened on cable. I had never even heard of the film before, but found myself instantly charmed by its simple structure and how charmingly it captured the feeling of an old-fashioned mores and attitudes. In its gentle humor and nicely-drawn characters, it reminded me a great deal of the aforementioned Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), as well as The Happy Time (1952) and The Matchmaker (1957)—the latter being the play for which Ruth Gordon won her sole Tony Award nomination; the film adaptation affording Anthony Perkins another opportunity to mine, in a similar role, a likable boyish appeal charm.

For all the talent in evidence both in front of and behind the camera (personal favorite Teresa Wright is a tad underutilized, but wonderful as always), it's still Spencer Tracy who emerges as the film's most valuable player. The effortless naturalism he brings  to the role, the kind which earned him the reputation as “the actor’s actor,” serves to ground his blustering but principled character (and with it, Cukor's entire frothy enterprise) in a realism that is as engagingly funny as it is affecting. 

Clinton's most treasured possession is the spyglass he purchased during his time as a sailor

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The lack of a propulsive plotline seems to have been a major point of preproduction contention when it came to bringing The Actress to the screen, but for me, the small scale and intimate presentation of this character-driven comedy feels wholly appropriate to the subject matter. The simple, even drab surroundings and humdrum family concerns of budgeting, homework, school dances, pay bonuses, and housecats attracted to Boston ferns provides a fitting contrast, offsetting the grandiose, larger-than-life theatricality of Ruth and her dreams. 

Ruth's dreamy dissatisfaction with the confining contentment of the
life her parents have chosen for themselves is the source of a lot of household tension

The small-scale of the family’s domestic dramas and the workaday concerns of a small-town life are grist to Ruth’s desire for a better, more exciting life. When I watch Meet Me In St. Louis, the loving home depicted is one so enchanting, I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to stray from it. But the home life depicted in The Actress, while every bit as loving, also contains an air of confinement and shared dissatisfaction. Clinton bemoans the overarching oppression of poverty and speaks of his past as a sailor as though it were the happiest time in his life. Annie, as much a housewife out of choice (love) as convention, is happy in her life, but her expressed longing for a velvet dress and suppressed desire to help with the family's fiances by plying her skill as a seamstress suggest there exist broader interests for her character than those of just home and family. 

It's to the film's credit that The Actress doesn't criticize those who find happiness in a quiet life of simple pleasures, nor does it make Ruth into a figure of derision because her dreams far so far beyond the scope of what we are shown to be her minimal talent. Rather, The Actress is structured as a coming-of-age story with Ruth’s desire for something more out of life is depicted as just one manifestation of the natural, keenly-felt human quest for independence and personal fulfillment.

Watching Hazel Dawn Perform, Ruth Sees a Vision of All That Life Can Be
Any person who's ever sought a life in the creative arts has likely experienced that one moment
when all that is beautiful in the world seems to beckon with a voice meant only for them

PERFORMANCES

If you’re going to mount a film more character-based than plot-driven, it helps to cast actors capable of creating indelible, fleshed-out personas out of sometimes slim material. The Actress distinguishes itself in its casting, even down to the smallest bits.

Former child actor Jackie Coogan (better known as "Uncle Fester" on The Addams Family TV series) is hilarious as an over-amused spectator at the YMCU fitness exhibition. Ruth is appropriately mortified.

The juvenile appeal of Tony Perkins is clear in this, his first film role. What’s also clear is that after seeing his performance here, then his livelier take on same in The Matchmaker five years later; Hitchcock’s use of him in Psycho was positively inspired.

The likability of the actors cast goes far in mitigating the fact that several roles, Anthony Perkins' moony suitor Fred Whitmarsh, for example, are a tad underdeveloped

If Tony Perkins’ trajectory from boy-next-door to everyone’s favorite psychopath seems swift, it’s nothing compared to Oscar winner Teresa Wright’s swift journey from fresh-faced ingenue in 1941’s The Little Foxes to long-suffering mom. Wright was only 11 years older than Jean Simmons when cast in The Actress (34 to Jean’s 23) and would play Simmons’ mother again in 1969s The Happy Ending. Late in her career when a reporter asked Wright why she stopped making movies, she replied: “I guess Jean Simmons no longer needs a mother.” 

As Far As I'm Concerned, Teresa Wright Can Do No Wrong
I wouldn't call her underappreciated, for her reputation as an actress is one respected and revered. But Teresa Wright doesn't get nearly the attention and play in classic film circles as she deserves. She brought a contemporary, genuine quality to every role she undertook. In The Actress she is has marvelous moments where she is both funny and heartbreakingly sincere. Still, her impressive talents feel somewhat wasted in the role of caring mom, and as good as Simmons is (and she's very good) I can't help imagining how Wright would have been in Simmons' role just a few years earlier.

Without recalling the idiosyncratic Ruth Gordon in any way at all, Jean Simmons is really splendid embodying the character of a stage-struck teenage girl. Called upon to show vivacity, naiveté, rebelliousness, and ultimately, determination and maturity; if her performance suffers at all (test audiences at the time took a decided dislike to her) I’d say it’s perhaps because she captures the sulky self-absorption of adolescence all too well. Gordon the memorialist isn’t exactly easy on her younger self, depicting her self-centered behavior and willful single-mindedness in sometimes harshly unsentimental ways. But I like that the character has an arc of growth in the film. And if perhaps she starts out as something of a dreamy-eyed brat, she grows into a mature woman of some empathy and understanding of what parents sacrifice in raising spirited and independent-minded offspring.

Ruth suffers her first taste of rejection 

Because he’s never been tops on my “favorite actors” list, I tend to harbor the impression of Spencer Tracy as one of those solid, dependable, studio system actors who could always be relied upon to deliver a skilled, professional performance in any film assigned. It’s only when I actually watch one of his films that I’m reminded what a valuable and rare quality that is.

It could be argued that nothing Tracy does as Clinton Jones is anything he hasn’t done before, after all, by this time in his career he’d made well over 50 films. But what’s remarkable about Tracy is that he was a star with a character actor's gift for inhabiting a part so completely: the behavior, movements, and vocal inflections all seem to exist exclusively for whatever character he was portraying in a particular film.

In The Actress, his character is largely identified by an irascible demeanor and an authoritarian gruffness, but to watch Tracy stay in character while delivering a monologue that's part searing tirade against the cruel aunts who brought him up/part lamenting requiem for his mother who committed suicide when he was two years old--well, it's to watch a little bit of acting genius.

Ruth gives an impromptu performance in hopes to convince her parents
 of the soundness of her decision to go upon the stage

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Much like my experience with the film adaptation of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, I came to The Actress with low expectations and found myself not only surprised by what a wonderful film it is is, but completely captivated by its warm humor and charm.
The film's vignette structure may play a bit of havoc with Ruth and Fred's relationship (we never understand whether it's as serious as Fred takes it to be or as casual as Ruth makes it out to be), but it nicely suits the photo album/scrapbook setup of the title sequence. The script is witty, the performances uniformly fine.

Ruth's reaction to seeing Hazel Dawn (Kay Williams) on the stage is not unlike my response to seeing the critically lambasted 1980 musical Xanadu (of all things). Although I was attending film school at he time and had set my sights on becoming a filmmaker, something about that roller-skating muse musical so inspired me that I quit school, devoted all my time to studying jazz and ballet, and eventually made dance my career for the last 30-plus years.   

Illogical, irresponsible, and highly improbable, yet it was a dream that came true.

Effort and hard work are indispensable, but having a dream is where it all begins

I think there is much in The Actress that speaks to anyone who seeks to strike out on their own, armed with little more than impossible dreams and a (by appearances) baseless belief in self.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

BLACK NARCISSUS 1947

No I won’t be a nun

No I cannot be a nun

For I am so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.

                                                                                    19^th century British Music Hall song

It’s impossible for me to imagine what affect Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's astonishing film Black Narcissus would have had on me had I been aware of it back when I was still a kid in Catholic school. Back when I still found solace in religious dogma, when elaborate church ritual held me in a sense of wonder, and when nuns were still these mysterious, almost mythic, beings. But on the occasion of seeing this breathtaking, sensually overwhelming film for the very first time just last month (!), my adult self was captivated by how lyrically evocative this dramatization of the age-old conflict of sensual passion vs. pious repression turned out to be (decades before Ken Russell’s The Devils).
Coming to this now-classic movie with considerable maturity, a hefty dose of Catholic disillusion, yet little to no foreknowledge of even the film's storyline and theme, I was left awestruck by the operatic scope of its opulent visuals and delighted by the brashness of its over-emphatic emotionalism.

British director Michael Powell (Peeping Tom - 1960) and longtime collaborator Eric Pressburger apply a rapturously lush gloss and striking visual distinction to his Oscar-nominated 1947 screen adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel. There seems to be something overheated and audacious about the entire enterprise, which, like the harem-house turned convent perched atop the Himalayan mountainscape that serves as the film’s primary locale and chief metaphor, allows Black Narcissus to recklessly skirt along the edges of high melodrama, camp overstatement, and visual poetry. If it was Powell & Pressburger's goal to submerge the audience in a barrage of sensual excess parallel to that experienced by the white-clad nuns in the film—to indeed create a film as visually heady as the fragrance of the Black Narcissus flower—then they succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation.

Deborah Kerr as Sister Clodagh

Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth

David Farrar as Mr. Dean

Jean Simmons as  Kanchi

Sabu as Dilip Rai, The Young General

Flora Robson as Sister Philippa

Five Anglican nuns in British-occupied India are sent by their somewhat dubious Mother Superior (Nancy Roberts) to establish a mission school and dispensary in a remote area high in the Kanchenjunga Mountains. The designated site, donated to the convent by a philanthropic peacock of a General named Toda Rai (Esmond Knight) in the interest of serving his subjects in nearby Darjeeling, is a desolate edifice perched dizzyingly atop a mountain shelf and known as The Palace of Mopu. The deserted palace, which overlooks a vast mountainscape the locals call “The Bare Goddess,” was previously known as “The House of Women” and stood as a harem residence for the General’s father to house his many concubines.

May Hallat as Angu Aya

Angu Aya, the estate’s longtime caretaker, is correct in citing that the arrival of the nuns preserves the palace’s status as a house of women, the difference in the main being that these particular women “…won’t be any fun.” 

Sister Clodagh (Kerr), a young nun of rather severe and inflexible nature with a killer side-eye, is assigned as head of the convent which is to be rechristened “The House of Saint Faith.” She’s given reluctant, cynical assist from the General’s agent, Mr. Dean (Farrar), an Englishman gone conspicuously “native” yet still capable of wielding colonist superciliousness like a champ. 

The nuns’ external struggles in adapting to the people of the village—whose exotic “otherness” they find challenging; and coping with the elements—the incessantly blowing winds, too pure water, and rarefied air produce negative health effects; are compounded (if not dwarfed) by the intensity of their inner conflicts. Mopu’s color-saturated vistas and perfumed splendors of flora and fauna conspire to distract the nuns from their sense of practical and spiritual purpose, inflaming hidden passions and bringing about the recollection of the very things a life of devout asceticism was intended to blot out.

As Mr. Dean observes: "There's something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated." 

Sister Ruth is a little thirsty 

The natural elements of Mopu are at perpetual odds with the nuns’ emotional self-regulation and the control they attempt to exert over themselves, the land, and its people; resulting in the environment itself proving to have a progressively detrimental and disruptive effect on the convent as a whole. This conflict plays out in the escalating infatuation the already agitated and unstable Sister Ruth (Byron) develops on Mr. Dean. Too, in the distracting effect the introduction of the flamboyantly-attired Young General (Sabu) has on the all-girls school, specifically Hindu hotbox Kanchi (Simmons), an orphan girl who’s as serene in her sexuality as the nuns are restrained in theirs. 

The Prince and the Beggar-maid
The intoxicating perfume the Young General wears gives the film its name 

As repressed passions and jealousies intensify, Black Narcissus’s fevered melodramatic structure by turns takes on the shape of: a love story, a humanity vs. ecology war film, an imperialist allegory, and an ecclesiastical horror movie. Sometimes all at once.

My oft-stated fondness for Le Cinema Baroque (where nothing exceeds like excess) instantly brands Black Narcissus a lifelong favorite; but I’m equally fond of any film which attempts to explore that curious need we humans have to suppress that which is most natural in us, and to so often do so by hiding behind religious dogma.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Having grown up attending Catholic schools, I have to say that the pomp and circumstance of church ritual superbly primed me for the extravagant visual onslaught that is Black Narcissus. It’s a thing of beauty the way Jack Cardiff’s (Death on the Nile) Oscar-winning, deeply-saturated, old-school Technicolor cinematography so sublimely conveys the vastly shifting moods and sensations at the center of Black Narcissus; a strikingly stylized look at sexual repression and madness amongst a group of passion-seized nuns.

There are moments when the screen bursts with the jubilant colorfulness of a musical (these hills are alive and virtually crawling with nuns, but here Julie Andrews would be in way over her head); other times, the film is gripped by the melancholy high-contrast shadows of German Expressionism and film noir (reinforced tremendously by the sweep of Brian Easdale’s goosebump-inducing musical score). 

Sister Philippa worries that the exotic beauty of  the mountain
distracts her from her sense of religious purpose

Perhaps because the nuns I encountered during grade school bore so little resemblance to the serene, well-meaning nuns portrayed by Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn on The Late Show (mine were strictly of the stern, prison warden variety), I derived an inordinate amount of pleasure from Black Narcissus’ then-controversial depiction of nuns as beings susceptible (perhaps more than most) to the character flaws of pride and ego, basic human desires, and crisis of faith.

In fact, the demystification of the whole nun mystique is one of my favorite things about the film. The scenes depicting Sister Clodagh lost in memory of her earlier life as a girl in Ireland are poignant and very moving. I can’t often relate to the idea of nuns “hearing the call” of religious service, but in this instance (and as played so winsomely by Deborah Kerr), it touches me to contemplate how a young woman’s heart can be so broken and pride so wounded that she would seek to bury her pain behind the emotional shelter of a cloistered existence. Hoping to lose her memory of herself in a life of devout service.

Sister Clodagh was once no stranger to vanity and allure of jewels and self-adornment

PERFORMANCES

Very much late to the party in regard to my recognition of this film, but much like my late-in-life appreciation of Joan Crawford, I’ve really turned a major corner when it comes to Deborah Kerr, who is fast becoming one of my favorite classic film actresses. I had the grave misfortune of having my earliest exposure to the actress in some of what must arguably be her worst films: Marriage on the Rocks (1965) and Prudence & the Pill (1968). I’m no big fan of The King and I, either, so for the larger part of my life, Kerr fell into that limbo of actresses whose work I largely avoided.

It took the enthusiastic recommendation of a reader of this blog to get me to check out Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), a film that really turned the tide for me in my assessment of Deborah Kerr. Her performance in that film is tremendous. Seriously one of the very finest examples of screen acting I’ve ever seen. Ever. She is absolutely brilliant, and on the strength of that movie alone I’ve come to reevaluate the work of this woefully underappreciated actress (by me, certainly, but her outstanding work in The Innocents got nary a nod from The Academy).  

There’s not a moment when Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh is on the screen that she doesn’t command. The dramatic arc of her character is sharply and heartbreakingly delineated, and Kerr's is precisely the kind of performance of which I’m most fond; the inner life of a character is read easily through the eyes. You can actually see what her character is thinking, just as you can plainly read the emotions subtly playing across Kerr's face. I’ve said it before, but playing repressed, emotionally inhibited characters must be as challenging for an actor as comedy; for with no big, showy displays of technique, an actor must credibly fashion a dimensional, complex character of sympathy and depth.

Kerr, while embodying the “stiff-necked, obstinate” characteristics attributed to her character, also shows Sister Clodagh to be a woman who is also imperious, sensitive, funny, wise, over-proud, kind, petty, overwhelmed, and in the end…so very human. For me, nothing I have so far seen of Deborah Kerr’s work can touch her performance in The Innocents, but her movingly unforgettable and finely-realized Sister Clodagh is right up there in being one of my favorites.

Kathleen Byron is mesmerizing as the neurotic and passion-inflamed Sister Ruth. As the unfettered sexual Id to Sister Clodagh's circumspect Ego, Byron's physical resemblance to Deborah Kerr informs the film's themes dramatizing the environment's ability to affect the dual natures of the nuns.
The naked ferocity of Byron's emotionalism suits Black Narcissus' grandiloquent visual style. Plus, once she really starts to lose it, she's absolutely terrifying!

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I cite Black Narcissus as one of the most sumptuously beautiful films ever made, betraying nary a single note of overstatement. In its current digitally restored form, it’s truly something to behold. Breathtaking doesn’t even cover it.

But to a large extent, the effectiveness of the film’s visual style (production designer Alfred Junge won the film’s only other Oscar) is that it isn’t pretty for the sake of being pretty; its extravagant look is in direct service to the plot.

I was struck by how, in much the same way the vistas distract the nuns from their work, Black Narcissus’s Technicolor gorgeousness helped to shroud the film’s indulgence in racial stereotypes and soften the narrative’s colonialist fantasy elements (the Western infantilization and fetishizing of the exotic “other”).

Eddie Whaley Jr as Joseph Anthony
The nuns are forced to rely on the interpreting skills of a youngster
in order to communicate with the "childlike" natives

One of the more astounding things about Black Narcissus is that, while set in India, it was filmed entirely in England. Sabu is the only cast member of actual Indian descent, meanwhile, brownface and quaint cultural stereotyping abounds. The film was released the very year India won its freedom from British imperialist rule, a historical fact that goes a long way toward making the film’s, shall I say, archaic attitude towards the childlike “natives” feel more like an indictment rather than an endorsement.

As the convent’s plans to westernize the people of Mopu collapses under the inability of the nuns to either understand or adapt to the land they inhabit, it’s not difficult to project a subtheme of anti-imperialism running below Black Narcissus’ surface. 

A critic keenly noted that the peaked cowls of the nuns' gleaming white habits
echo the steep mountain peaks overlooking The House of St. Faith

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

While I'll always wonder what my younger, far more impressionable, film-besotted self would have made of Black Narcissus, I'm glad my first exposure to this film wasn't in grainy black and white on a tiny TV set with commercial interruptions; nor was it by way of a scratchy, faded copy at a revival theater. It's fortuitous that when I finally got around to seeing Black Narcissus, it was by way of a pristine, full-length, digitally restored version.

I'm aware that I'm still very much caught up in the first-blush daze of new discovery (I've only seen Black Narcissus twice); but even so, I don't hesitate in labeling it a genuine masterpiece. Not perfect, which art has no obligation to be, anyway, but an authentic work of stylized aesthetic beauty.  I know in my heart that this particular cinema gemstone would have fueled a million dreams and fantasies for me as a boy, but I guess we all discover the right things at the right time.

BONUS MATERIAL

I recommend checking out Painting with Light (2007) - A fascinating documentary on the making of Black Narcissus featuring interviews with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and actress Kathleen Byron.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2016

ANGEL FACE 1953

As a child, the only film directors whose names and faces I recognized were Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. Hitchcock: for the obvious reasons (Honestly, was there ever such a talented, yet at the same time, tirelessly self-promoting, self-mythologizing director? One had to wonder when he found time to plot out all those famously intricate shots while still having the energy to chase Tippi Hedren around the set); and Otto Preminger: for his frequent colorful and quotable appearances on television talk shows like Merv Griffin, but especially for his portrayal of supervillain Mr. Freeze, on the Batman TV series.

Based on the quality (or, more accurately, the lack) of his latter-career output (Hurry Sundown, Skidoo, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Such Good Friends), for the longest time, I considered Otto Preminger more an eccentric TV personality than a serious director. It wasn't until my late-in-life exposure to some of his earlier films on TCM that I came to appreciate the diversity of this filmmaker’s output and the strides many of his films made in the battle against censorship. 

Although I still only enjoy but a handful of the films Preminger directed in his nearly 50-year career, among my favorites is Angel Face. A film, if Hollywood legends are to be believed, green-lighted by RKO studio head Howard Hughes specifically to make life miserable for soon-to-depart contract actress and recent Hughes object-of-obsession, Jean Simmons. (Check out IMDB’s Trivia section for details, or better still, the commentary track on the DVD.)  

Jean Simmons as Diane Tremayne

Robert Mitchum as Frank Jessup

The plot of Angel Face is your typical '50s femme fatale film noir to the point of déjà vu. Yet, one enlivened considerably by a particularly unsympathetic turn by genre stalwart Robert Mitchum, and the pleasingly against-type assaying of the role of an alluring psychopath by the beautiful, but to me, usually ineffectual, Jean Simmons.

Ambulance driver Frank Jessup (Mitchum) falls for dark-eyed socialite/siren, Diane Tremayne (LOVE that name!) when called to her estate to look into a suspicious case of gas inhalation suffered by Diane’s wealthy stepmother. With surprisingly little effort on her part, the distraught but grateful heiress insinuates herself into the life of Frank and standby girlfriend Mary (Mona Freeman), successfully opening up a chasm between the couple she’s more than willing to step into. In record time, and without alerting the suspicions of the shrewd but somewhat opportunistic Frank, Diane not only gets the laid-back lothario to detail for her the particulars of his love life and professional aspirations (a former race car driver, Frank dreams of opening a garage of his own), but unsubtly unburdens herself to him her own woeful tale of how she and her beloved father (Herbert Marshall) have fallen under the despotic sway of her bridge-club-addicted, purse-strings clutching, wealthy evil stepmother, Catherine (Barbara O’Neil).

Family Plot
Ever-leery moneybags Catherine Tremayne (Barbara O'Neil), listens guardedly as Diane (Jean Simmons) transparently campaigns to have hunky ambulance driver Frank Jessup taken on as a personal chauffeur. Meanwhile, emasculated novelist and full-time lapdog Charles Tremayne (Herbert Marshall) just hopes he's not doing anything to draw his wife's ire...like breathing.

Faster than you can say Double Indemnity and before that hearkened-after postman has had a chance to ring even once, Frank and Diane find themselves suspects in a nasty case of double homicide. Was it really an accident? Were they in on it together? Did you ever doubt it for a minute? To fans of the genre, the who, what, where, and whys of the plot won’t come as much of a surprise. What really makes Preminger’s steamy goulash of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain so much black-hearted fun are its characters. The dark alleys of obsession and fixation Angel Face takes you through are murky with hidden agendas, neurotic pathologies, and the kind of moral cynicism that made noir films such a narrative oasis in the desert of suburban conformity that was Hollywood in the postwar years.

"Do you love me at all? I must know."
"Well, I suppose it's a kind of love. But with a girl like you, how can a man be sure?"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I've always had a thing for film noir. I love all the intrigue, double-crosses, plot twists, and 11th-hour surprise reveals characteristic of the genre, but what has always appealed to me most is the genre's core of nastiness. It always seemed like such a brazen challenge to the Production Code-mandated moral conventions of the day.

In today’s climate of moral relativity, we have iniquity devoid of stakes. Barring an overriding imperative of decency, the kind of bad behavior exemplified by Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, Lindsay Lohan, and the whole reality show “betray each other to win” mentality, exists within a misanthropic vacuum. That's why I have no patience with contemporary films which revel in the display of bad people behaving badly (cue, Quentin Tarantino); there's no measurable "good" behavior in these films for contrast.
Conversely, film noir works as the yin to the yang of America's idealized self-perception during the '40s and '50s. A time when movies, TV, and advertising all promoted a standard, middle-class image of conformity typified by those “social guidance films” shown in schools back then. 

The Ladies Who Lunch
Diane not-so-innocently sets up a lunch date with Frank's girlfriend, Mary (Mona Freeman), to let her know that Frank was not at all where he said he was the previous night.

The nihilism of film noir stood as a thrilling alternative to all those inevitable happy endings in movies from the 1940s & '50s. It is almost exhilarating to see movies in which people operate out of flagrant self-interest and behave in ways totally unconcerned with bettering society or helping their fellow man. Another nice difference is that so many of the women of film noir are so independent-minded. They're dangerous, sexually aggressive, and exert power over their lives. These extreme cultural contrasts are what give film noir its kick. Without the subtextual context of a repressed culture for the lead characters to rebel against, film noir would be like a great many of the movies and TV programs of today: just a bunch of unsympathetic people meeting bad ends.

Otto Preminger would revisit the theme of a close father/daughter relationship threatened by
 a stepmother in 1958s Bonjour Tristesse  

PERFORMANCES

Prior to seeing Angel Face, I’d read so many accounts of how unhappy Jean Simmons was during the making of the film that I leapt to the assumption that her portrayal of a wicked vamp was one of those against-type embarrassments like Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun (Simmons' embarrassment would come many decades later, as Helen Lawson in the 1981 TV version of Valley of the Dolls). I couldn't have been more wrong. Although I've only seen Simmons in a handful of films (she’s particularly appealing and her versatility shines in 1953s The Actress), her Angel Face femme fatale is one of her strongest, most persuasive screen performances. 

As the always-plotting Diana, Jean Simmons' somewhat remote, coy appeal is used to great effect in Angel Face 

Of course, Simmons’ performance is greatly enhanced by the chemistry she shares with co-star, Robert Mitchum. A sleepy-eyed hunk o’ burnin' love a person doesn't need Method Acting to believably express a sexual obsession over. Mitchum may not be an actor with a particularly broad range, but within that range, there’s not another leading man who can touch him. In the films I consider to be his best: Angel Face, Out of the Past, His Kind of Woman, Cape Fear, and The Night of the Hunter, Mitchum's slouching brand of masculine charisma has always revealed a hint of vulnerable malleability. Either that or outright sexual menace. In either instance, he dominates the screen with a natural ease that makes him a charismatic, fascinating actor to watch.

Fave character actor Leon Ames plays defense attorney Fred Barrett. A reversal of his chores in 1946s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Fans of film noir generally agree that much of the genre’s predominately male perspective is fueled by a fear of women. Perhaps that’s what makes them so entertaining. It's like the male id unleashed...a woman with any kind of power perceived only as a threat to manhood. Indeed, unlike the self-sacrificing heroines of the popular “women’s films” of the day, the women of film noir tend to call all the shots and are as likely to kill a man as kiss him. Angel Face consistently juxtaposes Frank's loutish neglect of his girlfriend Mary, with his being manipulated and led around by the nose by the scheming Diane. At a time when women held very little social power and were inevitably relegated to supporting, serving, and supplicating, film noir provided one of the few arenas where women were allowed to show some moxie and guts. Alas, because the vast majority of these films were written and directed by males, women with power were also almost always made to pay for their gender transgressions, with "natural order" usually restored by fadeout.

なぜあなたは死んでドロップしない!
Roughly translated, Tremayne household maid Chiyo (Max Takasugi) tells her put-upon husband, Ito (Frank Kamagai) to "Drop dead!"

The world of Angel Face is one where the natural order is corrupted by domineering women (Diane, Catherine, and Chiyo) and emasculated men (Frank, Charles, and Ito, the household butler who laments, "The only trouble with America...it spoils the women!").

Revealing herself to be a far more self-possessed and level-headed character than initially perceived, Mary, having had enough of Frank's seesawing emotions, opts for the solid and loving Bill (Kenneth Tobey), a man who doesn't make her compete for his affections.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
If I were to pick my absolute favorite Otto Preminger movie, it would have to be Bonjour Tristesse (1958), that film is just a dream. But for pure noir bliss, I rate Angel Face above even the superior Laura (1944), which in spite of its excellence, has always seemed a tad too cool and never really has done much for me. Angel Face has the feel of a cheap pulp novel brought to life, complete with its economy of narrative and straight-to-the-point characterizations. While falling short of being a true classic of the genre, it stands as an example of the genre at its best. A fast and dark thrill ride through the Hollywood Hills...but I'd skip the short-cuts if I were you.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013