Watching a conman grift himself into a corner is always fun. In 1945’s Fallen Angel Otto Preminger gives us just that while Dana Andrews delivers another of the flat-faced, almost featureless performances he was so good at.
He plays the shyster arriving in a small town with barely a cent in his pocket, who sets about trying to work his charms on a town full of hayseeds. Stop number one, another pair of grifters who run a clairvoyant act. But even before he gets stuck into Professor Madley (John Carradine, cadaverous features well deployed) and his assistant Joe (Olin Howard), Eric (Andrews) has had the misfortune of running into Stella (Linda Darnell), the bad girl all the men in town have the hots for. And, in an instant, Eric is smitten too.
Eric has something the other guys don’t have. A silver tongue. So, he gets further with Stella in no time at all than Pop (Percy Kilbride), the old guy who employs her at his diner, or Mark Judd (Charles Bickford), who moonily watches her work while he consumes cups of coffee he doesn’t need, or Dave Atkins (Bruce Cabot), the local swell who usually gets all the girls.
Stella, however, isn’t the pushover she once was. Tired of being the town bike, she now wants a ring on her finger and a home to raise a family. Eric, unused to being tossed about by emotion, sets out to get those things for her by taking rich local June Mills (Alice Faye) to the cleaners.
But en route to marrying the church-going, organ-playing June, romanced in record time, something goes wrong. Though he still wants to be the bad guy, something has awakened in Eric, the beginnings of a conscience maybe. In a case of twisted psychology, what was sparked into existence by Stella looks like it’s going benefit June.
Or is it? Bizarre consequence steps in again, with a spoilerish development that gets Eric off a plot hook, in much the same way that getting the June to the altar in about three days flat saved messy but plausible plot development.
Great cast. Andrews as minimal as it is possible to get as a man in hot water but never letting on. Darnell hot and breathy as the bad girl and Alice Faye increasingly impressive as the naive and pious smalltown woman who’s smarter, quicker to learn and more prepared to adapt than Eric gives her credit for.
If the psychology doesn’t hold up, the dialogue does. It’s fast and mean and often quite amusing in its rat-a-tat insistence. Harry Kleiner would also write The Street with No Name and, much later, Bullitt, but he’s on great form here in his first screenplay.
Preminger has a gorgeously fluid style, as usual, and his DP this time out is Joseph LaShelle, one of the greats (Laura and The Apartment are also his). You could watch this film simply for its slick camera movements and feats of near-impossible focus-pulling as the camera swings in towards the actors and away while everything remains sharp.
Wikipedia and the IMDb trivia tells us that Alice Faye was furious when she saw the movie and never worked for Fox again, because key scenes of hers were cut and Darnell’s role was bumped up. Maybe. But what we get of her is very good, especially as she moves from ingenue to something more worldly. Maybe, her performance suggests, Eric has met his match in a woman who can outgrift a grifter, though she doesn’t know what one is.
Who’s the fallen angel? Stella, most obviously. But Eric too. June possibly most of all, because she had furthest to drop.
Redemption is dangled in Fallen Angel. And offered ironically. To get it is not to get what you want, but something else instead, including, possibly, death.
Fallen Angel – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
