Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon is essentially a women’s picture made in a film noir style. Made at Fox in 1947, this is also a superb example of Preminger’s film-making at its best. Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is a successful New York commercial artist. She is having an affair with a married man, high-flying lawyer Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews). Dan’s marriage is obviously an unhappy one - his wife Lucille (Ruth Warrick) would have been described in the 1940s as neurotic and she takes out her frustrations on their two daughters. She is also dating a troubled veteran, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). All the main characters are damaged in some way. Peter is still getting over the war and the death of his first wife. Dan is aware that he has been a bad husband and father. He longs for a satisfying relationship with a woman but lacks the courage to either rebuild his marriage or make a clean break. Daisy is lonely and longs for love. Lucille is bitter and jealous and resentful. All four characters need to make decisions about their lives. Daisy does make her choice, but then she seems to regret it. She remains torn between the two men, unable to let go of either. The tension builds as all four people start to unravel and there seems to be a real chance that violence or some other tragedy will be the result. Daisy, Dan and Peter are all well-rounded characters with their own strengths and their own flaw. Even Lucille, the most minor and least-developed of the four, is not entirely unsympathetic. Preminger was famous for his “objectivity” - his refusal to manipulate the audience into making judgments on the characters. He wants the audience to weigh up the evidence and then make their own judgment without being told what that judgment should be. Preminger trained as a lawyer and admired the US legal system and wanted his audience to be as impartial as a jury. It’s also an essential part of Preminger’s approach that his films contain very few simple villains. He preferred stories with complex characters who were a mixture of good and bad and he was careful to show both sides of his characters and to give them a fair hearing. He encouraged the actors to look at things from the point of view of the characters they were playing and to understand that the characters had their own reasons even for actions that might appear to others to be destructive. This is very obvious in Daisy Kenyon - this is a very even-handed film. Preminger is, as always, cool and controlled. This is a strange approach to melodrama but it works. This is melodrama played seriously. The characters are all out of control in their own lives which contrasts nicely with the controlled feel of the film. The viewer is never pushed into taking sides. When Preminger made genre films he never made the mistake of despising such films and in this case he treats the women’s melodrama with respect. We are never made to feel that these people’s lives or their problems are trivial. It’s a movie about love, marriage and families and Preminger understands that these are not trivial subjects. Preminger always took the problems of his women characters seriously. There are no token girlfriend characters in a Preminger movie. Crawford was a decade too old to play Daisy but was very keen and convinced Darryl F. Zanuck she could do it. Whether Preminger was happy about this is uncertain but he gets a fine performance from her, managing to tone down her excesses. Crawford is controlled and she’s excellent. Dana Andrews was always good in Preminger’s movies and he’s superb here. Actors have won Oscars for lesser performances. Henry Fonda is the big surprise - he’s terrific. Both Andrews and Fonda underplay their roles, which is exactly the right approach. The performances are unemotional, but the emotions are suggested subtly. Preminger always trusted the American movie audience to have the intelligence not to need to be spoon-fed and Andrews and Fonda (and Crawford to a great extent as well) give him the sorts of nuanced performances that he valued. Ruth Warrick on the other hand is all barely suppressed hysteria, but again the fact that she’s trying to keep a lid on the cauldron of her emotions adds to the emotional depth of the film. Suppressed emotions are always more disturbing than overt emotionalism. The DVD is typical of Fox’s film noir releases - a glorious print and packed with high-quality extras. Foster Hirsch’s commentary track is well worth the listen and there are two documentaries, one on the movie itself and one on Preminger’s career at 20th Century-Fox. This is what all DVD releases would be like if we lived in an ideal world and Fox are to be congratulated for treating a fine film with the respect it deserves. The DVD era has seen Preminger’s reputation not merely rehabilitated but growing by leaps and bounds. This is only just. This is a superbly crafted movie by a master film-maker. One of the best of all the hybrid women’s noirs of the 40s, and one of Joan Crawford’s best pictures.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

Otto Preminger’s movies of the 60s are a rather varied bunch. He was starting to take major risks and do offbeat movies and Bunny Lake Is Missing certainly qualifies as offbeat.

It was made in England in 1965, with Preminger as usual producing and directing and with a script by John and Penelope Mortimer. It was shot in Cinemascope and black-and-white, a slightly odd choice for a film by a major director in the mid-60s but it suits the oddball nature of the movie.

It starts out appearing to be a fairly straightforward police procedural about a missing child. It doesn’t take very long for the first subtle signs of oddness to appear and then it keeps getting stranger until finally it becomes quite bizarre.



Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) is a young American woman who has just arrived in London from the US. She’s enrolled her daughter Bunny in a nursery school. The school is a little disorganised on that day owing to the fact that the headmistress is away and Elvira (Anna Massey) has been left in charge and is just barely coping. Ann leaves Bunny in the charge of the school’s cook for a few minutes while she tries to locate her teacher, and then has to rush off to let the removalists into her new flat. When she returns to the school Bunny is nowhere to be found.

Ann is of course rather upset and immediately phones her husband Steven (Keir Dullea). At least we assume from the way they behave that he’s her husband but later we discover that he is actually her brother. The police are called and Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) takes charge of the investigation.



The curious thing is that nobody at the school can recall seeing Bunny at all. The school has no record of her enrolment. Nobody anywhere has seen her, and the audience hasn’t seen her either. Superintendent Newhouse is clearly puzzled by this case.

I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot, but there are many twists and turns to come and some of these twists are very strange indeed.



Preminger’s style of directing avoids gimmickry. He favoured long takes and liked to take the time to allow characters to develop and to gradually reveal their inner natures. This approach works extremely well here, forming a nice understated contrast to the steadily growing weirdness of the story. The movie is always visually impressive (as were all of Preminger’s movies) but without being intrusive or distracting.

Carol Lynley has had a very long career but never quite achieved the breakthrough to major stardom. Keir Dullea’s career followed a similar pattern. They’re both reasonably effective in this film. Laurence Olivier does not chew a single piece if scenery in this movie, an amazing feat of self-restraint. His subdued performance works well since it doesn’t distract us from the things we should be watching whilst still managing to make Newhouse a believable and interesting figure.



Adding his own touch of oddness to the proceedings is Noël Coward as Ann’s eccentric alcoholic and lecherous landlord. And even more oddness is provided by Martita Hunt as Ada Ford, one of the founders of the school and now retired and somewhat mad and still living at the school. Anna Massey is also excellent, as always. There’s also Finlay Currie as the proprietor of a very creepy doll’s hospital.

This is a movie that often threatens to run off the rails but Preminger manages to hold it all together even as the weirdness grows and grows. A fascinating off-kilter masterpiece and
highly recommended.



Columbia’s Region 2 DVD is barebones but looks stunning.

Fallen Angel (1945)

The success of Laura in 1944 established producer-director Otto Preminger’s Hollywood reputation. 20th Century-Fox had high hopes that Fallen Angel, made the following year, would repeat this success. Fallen Angel has never enjoyed the critical adulation of Laura but in its own way it’s just as interesting. Preminger used more or less the same crew as on the earlier film and also the same male lead, Dana Andrews (Andrews eventually made five films for Preminger).

This time Andrews is a drifter named Eric Stanton who is kicked off a bus when he doesn’t have the money to pay his fare. He was heading for San Francisco but now he’s stuck in a sleepy seaside town a hundred miles short of his destination, and penniless. Stanton had been a successful publicist before gambling and love gone wrong caused him to hit the skids. But he still has a talent for selling people and when he discovers that the celebrated psychic Professor Madley (John Carradine) is about to hit town he sees a chance to make enough money to get him to San Francisco. He’ll drum up plenty of publicity and they can split the profits.

But fate has decreed that Eric will not be leaving town after all. Fate, in the form of a woman. And what a woman. Eric is having a quiet cup of coffee in Pop’s Diner when Linda Darnell as Stella makes her spectacular entrance. She’s the kind of woman men notice. And men are instantly reduced to the status of helpless worshippers at the feet of this goddess of sex.

Every man in town wants Stella. But while Stella likes men well enough she’s not the kind of gal who jumps into bed with any good-looking guy who comes along. She makes it very clear that if a man wants to sleep with her he’d better be prepared to put a wedding ring on her finger. And until she has the ring he’s not even going to get to first base. And he’ll need more than just the dough for a ring - Stella wants a house and she wants nice things and she knows that with her looks she can get them.

Given that Eric’s entire fortune amounts to the princely sum of one dollar Stella is not inclined to take him too seriously as a suitor. But Eric convinces her that he knows how to lay his hands on money, big money, and if she will just wait a week or so he’ll be able go give her everything she dreams of.

How is Eric going to get his hands on this bankroll? That’s where June Mills (Alice Faye) comes in. June and her sister Clara have a great deal of money. June is a very respectable woman. She plays the organ in the local church, she doesn’t smoke or drink, and her experience of men is non-existent. She’s just what Eric is looking for - a repressed wealthy spinster. He will turn on his very considerable charm and the rest will be easy.

But of course it isn’t so easy. Sweeping June off her feet is no problem, and getting her to the altar also presents no difficulties, but before Eric has a chance to put the rest of his plan into operation he finds himself a murder suspect. A dead woman, a very shaky alibi, a suspicious cop who dislikes him, it all adds up to a sticky situation for Eric. The fact that he arrived in town as a penniless drifter isn’t likely to help his case either.

This is, like all of Preminger’s noirs, a complex movie that gets more complex the more you think about it. All of Preminger’s noirs repay repeated viewings. In this case we have three lead characters none of whom are simple villains, victims or heroes.

Even where we seem to have a straightforward contrast between darkness and light it turns out that what we really have are shades of grey. At first glance the dark-haired sexy bad girl (Stella) and the blonde virginal good girl (June) seem like a very old Hollywood cliché. But Preminger presents this cliché in an ironic manner. Is Stella really a bad girl? She won’t have sex with a man until he marries her, she won’t go out with married men. And she never lies to men. She tells them the score right from the start. She might be somewhat mercenary, but that could just as easily be seen as being sensible. Stella knows that money is no guarantee of a happy marriage, but she has no doubt that it sure does help. It’s difficult to disagree with her. Stella has a face and a body that make men do crazy things, but if a moth gets burned by a candle is that the candle’s fault?

Even more interesting is the way June is presented. As Eddie Muller points out in his commentary track, Preminger and his cinematographer Joseph LaShelle always show us June bathed in light, rather like a saint. Again Preminger’s intentions are undoubtedly at least partly ironic. If Stella’s problem is too much sexuality, June’s problem is that her sexuality is unhealthily underdeveloped. If Stella could use some of June’s virtue there’s no question that June could use some of Stella’s wickedness. And June comes to realise this.

Eric is a multi-layered character as well. He’s cynical and ruthless on the surface but underneath he’s really basically a decent man who has lost his way. Dana Andrews always gave fine performances for Preminger and this is no exception.

Alice Faye was bitterly disappointed in this film and there are many who see her as the weak link in the acting department. She probably should have read the script more carefully - playing the good girl is always a thankless task and when you’re playing opposite a bad girl who is a decade younger than you and as smoking hot as Linda Darnell you’re bound to get overshadowed. In fact her performance works well within the context of the film but of course it wasn’t going to do much for her career. She didn’t make another film for sixteen years. Linda Darnell is pure sex but she also proves herself to be a capable actress. It’s just that she’s so sexy it’s difficult to concentrate on her acting.

Preminger is in top form, giving full rein to his fondness for long takes and for elaborate tracking shots. These techniques are never intrusive. Preminger’s genius was to be stylish without calling attention to the fact. The Region 1 DVD includes an entertaining commentary track by Eddie Muller and Dana Andrews’ daughter. As is the case with other Fox Film Noir DVD release the picture quality is superb. An underrated movie and definitely one to buy. This is a movie you’ll want to watch more than once.

Saint Joan (1957)

An Otto Preminger movie based on a George Bernard Shaw play and boasting a screenplay by Graham Greene has to be interesting, although the danger perhaps is that with three such considerable egos contributing to the mix the results could be a little confused. In fact Saint Joan is a powerful and memorable piece of cinema.

It’s hardly necessary to give a rundown of the plot except to say that the focus of the movie is more on Joan’s trial than on her military successes, and on the sense of disillusionment and betrayal that she suffered when she found the French court turning against her and discovered that she had gone from being the heroine of the hour to being an inconvenience.

The movie does not end, as you might expect, with Joan’s execution. It ends as it begins, with a dream of the elderly King Charles VII, a dream in which the various players in the tragedy including Joan herself discuss the events in which they were involved. It gives the movie a cynical and anti-heroic tone, even veering towards black comedy rather than tragedy.

The movie adopts a sceptical attitude towards the events it describes, and especially towards the miraculous elements of Joan’s achievements. Without exception the miracles and apparently supernatural aspects are given rational explanations. Joan recognises the Dauphin at once even though she has never seen him before and even though someone else has been seated on the throne in order to mislead her, but this is attributed to her intelligence and perceptiveness rather than to any other-worldly guidance.

Which is not to say that Joan’s achievements are belittled. As one character so aptly puts it, if she can turn the Dauphin into a king it will be a miracle of impressive proportions! And as the cynical archbishop of Rheims points out, a miracle is anything that can give people faith, whether it be a natural event or not.

Preminger had a reputation for taking a neutral stance towards his characters, avoiding any attempt to emotionally manipulate his audience into taking either a favourable or unfavourable view of them. This approach is seen to perfection in Saint Joan.

Even the least sympathetic characters are three-dimensional, and any evil that they do is done for reasons that seem perfectly acceptable to them. The Earl of Warwick and John de Stogumber adopt very dubious means to bring about Joan’s death, but they do so for reasons of state. Warwick feels no personal animosity towards her; he merely feels that her death is a political necessity. And he’s a likeable and engaging personality.

The Dauphin is cowardly, manipulative, selfish and sly. But he’s very human. Like everyone else who plays a part in Joan’s downfall his actions are motivated by human weaknesses rather than by malice or evil.

Preminger assembled an impressive cast for this production. Some of his casting decisions were extremely bold but they worked. Richard Widmark would not have an obvious choice to play the Dauphin, later to become King Charles VII, but his shifty, twitchy, jumpy performance is absolutely perfect. John Gielgud is all reptilian charm as the Earl of Warwick. Felix Aylmer, always one of my favourite British character actors, gives what is possibly a career-best performance as the Chief Inquisitor. He feels great pity for Joan, he wants to give her every chance to avoid the stake, but at the same time he takes his duty to stamp out heresy very seriously and believes that the dangers of heresy are so great that one must be very reluctant to show mercy. He’s a complex and conflicted character, a man doing an unpleasant job that he believes to be absolutely necessary.

Harry Andrews, Richard Todd and Anton Walbrook also give fine performances in supporting roles.

And then of course there’s Jean Seberg as Joan. Preminger was very excited by his new acting discovery and it’s easy to see why. She’s tough, determined, naïve, headstrong and exasperating. This is a Joan who to a certain extent brings about her own downfall. Having tasted the heady wine of power and adulation she finds she cannot give them up, and this leads her on to destruction. She admits from the beginning that the voices she hears in her head are probably the products of her own mind, but then perhaps only madness can ever give a person the supreme self-confidence to achieve heroic deeds.

Preminger keeps the feel of the movie rather stagey, as he had done earlier in The Man with the Golden Arm. He clearly wanted to avoid an epic treatment, and chose not to shoot the film in Technicolor or Cinemascope as would have been expected in a movie of that era dealing with such heroic subject matter. The movie was a commercial failure at the time. Movie audiences in 1957 were not ready for such a cynical view of heroism.

A great film by a great director, and an absolute must-see.

Laura (1944)

While there is some doubt as to whether Laura really belongs in the film noir category, there can be very little debate as to its qualities as a film. It is quite simply one of the best American movies of the 40s. After Rouben Mamoulian’s imitial efforts failed to satisfy Daryl F. Zanuck producer Otto Preminger was asked to take over as director. It was an inspired move. Most of Preminger’s movies that have been labelled as film noir are more explorations of tangled and dangerous relationships than pure film noir.

Since this is a murder mystery one can’t say too much about the plot. Laura Hunt, a woman whose success in the world of advertising has brought her glamour and wealth, has been murdered. There are plenty of plausible suspects. There’s Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), the acid-tongued columnist who was responsible for Laura’s rise from obscurity to fame. There’s Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a rather feckless and untrustworthy but undeniably charming gigolo, to whom Laura was engaged. And there’s Ann Treadwell. Shelby had been her boy toy, until Laura came along. Detective Mark McPherson’s task is difficult enough, but becomes even more difficult when he takes one look at Laura’s portrait in her apartment and falls hopelessly in love with her.

To me Laura is a movie about love. More specifically, it’s about unhealthy and doomed love, and the delusions and self-delusions that accompany it. There are many love relationships in this film, and all are unhealthy and all are based on delusions. Laura is so far out of Mark’s league that it’s absurd for him even to think about it. Laura is not the sort of woman who is going to marry a cop. Waldo Lydecker’s love for Laura is equally hopeless. As he himself points out, Laura likes her men to be muscular and handsome. And while Laura remains fond of Waldo, she no longer needs him. She is wealthy, successful and self-reliant. Ann’s love for Shelby is similarly hopeless. He’s not going to settle for a woman with money once he realises he can have a woman with youth and beauty as well as money. Laura’s love for Shelby is based on the delusion that he’s something more than a mere gigolo, but in fact that really is all that Shelby amounts to.

There are other self-delusions at work in Laura. Waldo Lydecker is clearly gay, so at first sight his desire to marry Laura seems rather improbable. This was the problem I had with this movie the first time I saw it, but now it seems more comprehensible. Waldo believes that Laura is his own creation, so it’s really a form of narcissistic love. And in the world of the 1940s it would certainly be advantageous for someone like Waldo to acquire a wife, to reduce his vulnerability to gossip about his sexuality. He is also clearly very sensitive about his physical inadequacies, so a young and beautiful wife would be exceptionally gratifying to his ego. And Laura is intelligent and cultured, so she would make a congenial companion. My assumption is that Waldo has other deluded himself into believing that Laura would accept a sexless marriage, or he’s convinced himself that he can overcome his natural inclinations to a sufficient degree to satisfy her sexually.

Laura is one of those movies that demonstrates that it was possible to make an intelligent grownup whilst still remaining technically within the confines of the Production Code. It has to be admitted that Laura does stretch the Code somewhat, but it is an Otto Preminger film and baiting the Production Code Administration was one of Otto’s favourite pastimes. It’s the mark of a great murder mystery (and one that transcends the limitations of the genre) that having seen the film before and knowing about the plot twists doesn’t diminish one’s enjoyment in the least, and that was my experience with Laura. If anything I liked it more the second time around. Dana Andrews gives one of his best performances as the detective, and although Gene Tierney apparently wasn’t happy with her own performance I think she was judging herself too harshly. I think she’s perfect, but then I’m an unashamed Gene Tierney fan. A truly great movie.

Whirlpool (1949)

Otto Preminger’s 1949 film Whirlpool is one of those movies that stretch the definition of film noir, although that hasn’t stopped Fox promoting it as such.

Successful psychoanalyst Dr William Sutton and his wife Ann have it all. They have all the material trappings of success, they have status, they have respectability. They’re poster children for the American Dream. Preminger shows us, at first, just the tiniest cloud to their happiness. It’s impossible to imagine it could seriously threaten them. They’re so perfect and so beautiful. They have such a beautiful home.

But Ann has secrets, secrets from her childhood, and they put her in the power of David Corvo, a quack hypnotist, and she finds herself accused of murder.

Whirlpool is a product of 1940s Hollywood’s infatuation with psychiatry and hypnosis and other mysteries of the mind. It requires the audience to believe things about hypnosis that no modern audience is likely to be able to do, but then contemporary movies like Spellbound stretched credibility to the limit as well.

Jose Ferrer does well to make an implausible character, Korvo, seem reasonably plausible. It’s a delightfully oily performance. Richard Conte is solid as Dr Sutton, who eventually has to face up to the fact that he wasn’t as ideal a husband as he thought.

Gene Tierney is Mrs Sutton. She’s often accused of being an indifferent actress but she often had to play characters, in movies like Leave Her to Heaven and Whirlpool, who demonstrated what modern psychiatry likes to call Flat Affect. She seems slightly disconnected and distant but that’s how the character she is playing is supposed to be like and her performance is actually quite effective (leaving aside the fact hat a modern audience isn’t going to swallow the film’s psychiatric explanations for her behaviour. For me her performance is perfect for the type of film and the type of role.

The movie is a fascinating example of the psychiatric thriller that was so popular at the time, and Preminger gives us an interesting and entertaining movie.

This one is also available on DVD from Fox’s Film Noir series, although personally I don’t think there’s anything even remotely film noir about it. It doesn’t matter - it’s a great movie anyway.

Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)

Otto Preminger is rapidly becoming my favourite film noir director, and his 1950 production Where the Sidewalk Ends is yet another Preminger masterpiece.

Mark Dixon is a cop who is much too fast with his fists, and as the film opens he’s in trouble with his superiors once again. As the movie progresses we discover something about the demons that are driving this man. Following up a murder in a gambling joint Dixon resorts to violence once too often, and his world starts to fall apart (although in fact he is already well on the road to disaster before this). Now he has a body on his hands, and the father of the girl he’s just met (and is falling in love with) is the prime suspect. His boss (Karl Malden as a very keen and very upright chief of detectives) is keen to nail dear old dad for this crime, and Dixon has to find a way to divert suspicion elsewhere.

Dixon is also obsessed with his pursuit of gangland boss Tommy Scalise, which not only complicates things but is also a sign of his increasing loss of control over both events and his own feelings.

This may be a movie that actually works better today than it would have done in 1950. We’re possibly more aware of, and more sensitive to, the abuse of power by those in authority than a 1950 audience would have been. Although we feel some sympathy for Mark Dixon, we also can’t avoid being horrified by his behaviour and by his over-fondness for violence.

Dana Andrews does a superb job as Dixon, a man so confused by his own emotions that he no longer has any real insight into his situation or his own actions. Gene Tierney is innocence personified as the daughter whose father is unjustly accused of murder. They key scene in the movie is the moment when she finally realises that her father’s innocence is not going to automatically protect him, and that her faith in the system is sadly misplaced.

The cynicism of this movie, and its portrayal of a cop who is both dishonest and in fact little more than a thug, are typical of Preminger’s willingness to push the boundaries of the Production Code as far as he could.

Gene Tierney always gave fine performances for Preminger, and this movie is no exception.

Superlative acting by Dana Andrews coupled with some great writing by Ben Hecht and the sure touch of director Preminger adds up to a great example of classic film noir.

It’s available on DVD in Fox’s Film Noir series.

Angel Face (1952)

While it isn’t Otto Preminger’s best-known exercise in film noir, Angel Face may be his best. In 1952 Howard Hughes was apparently so intent on forcing Jean Simmons to make one more movie for him that he was prepared to give Preminger complete artistic control if he could guarantee to shoot it in 18 days, which was all that remained of her contract after a rather acrimonious legal battle between the star and Hughes. Preminger jumped at the chance. The result is a movie that is both a superb example of noir, and a slightly unconventional one.

Robert Mitchum is ambulance driver Frank Jessup, who is called out to the home of a writer, whose wife has almost died from the effects of a gas tap being let on. Was it an accident? The wife doesn’t think so. In the course of this call-out he meets the writer’s daughter Diane (Jean Simmons), whose reactions to these events are odd to say the least. Jessup has a girlfriend, Mary, but Diane pursues him and he finds himself fascinated by this beautiful but puzzling young woman.

It seems like a classic noir setup, with Mary as the good girl and Diane as the femme fatale, but Preminger (who was able to have the script rewritten to his own requirements) doesn’t give us anything quite so straightforward.

Angel Face is particularly interesting because it’s a fairly rare example of a classic period film noir made by a director who was in the position (thanks to the eccentricities of Howard Hughes) of being able to impose his own vision on the movie, of being able to be a true auteur. Preminger is famous for his “detachment” and “objectivity” – his reputation for allowing the audience to come to its own judgment about the characters in his films, rather than having those judgments made for them by the film-maker.

What I notice about his films (and it’s useful to compare Angel Face with his non-noir Bonjour Tristesse, made a few years later and dealing with a similar situation) is that his characters do things for reasons that seem to them to be good and sufficient reasons. They may do things that could be seen as wrong, or they might do things that turn out to have evil consequences, but in their minds these actions are not merely justified, they may even seem necessary.

In both Angel Face and Bonjour Tristesse we see characters performing actions that they see as being essential for their own protection or for the protection of someone they love. They may be wrong, but that’s how they see things. This is something that becomes more evident in Preminger’s movies during the 50s as he gained increasing artistic freedom. In some of his earlier noirs, such as Whirlpool, there are clear-cut villains who are aware of doing wrong. There are no clear-cut villains in both Angel Face. If you look at the behaviour of the one character who could be construed as villainous, her actions can be seen as reasonable and moral if you accept that her understanding of the situation, although deluded, is sincerely held and that it is real to her. She acts in some senses as a classic noir femme fatale, but then just when you expect her to do something that a femme fatale would do, she does the opposite.

Women take centre stage in Preminger’s movies. While many noir films portray women in a very unsympathetic light, this cannot be said of Preminger’s movies. The women in his movies are complex and are certainly not plaster saints, but they’re nothing like the scheming spider-women of noirs such as Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street.

In 1964 Jean-Luc Godard named Angel Face as one of the ten greatest American movies of the sound era. He may well have been right. It’s certainly a superb movie, and I highly recommend it to both noir fans and non-noir fans.