Fallen Angel

Paranoia strikes deep in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel

Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel, from 1945, is a moody noir that falls just short of greatness. Ostensibly a love triangle featuring Alice Faye, Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell, the film is actually a hexagon with intrigue and hidden voyeurs around each corner. Darnell's Stella is a waitress in a hash house in dead end Walton, California. She is typed as a slut playing the field for baubles and bubbly. Preminger emphasizes Darnell's legs with low angel shots each time she enters the diner and Darnell vamps effectively. Alice Faye thought that Darryl Zanuck, who was involved with Darnell at the time, tilted the film towards the younger actress' favor in the cutting room. After filming, Faye returned home to raise her two daughters with Phil Harris and did not act in a film again for nine years. Perhaps she heard the death knell of her stardom as many actresses in Hollywood do today when their casting shifts quickly from ingenue to hag.

Dana Andrews was at the peak of his stardom. At his best, with Preminger, Wyler, Fritz Lang and Jacques Tourneur, Andrews could produce notes of futility and fatalism beneath macho swagger. Andrews's Eric Stanton is deposited in Walton, somewhere between LA and San Francisco, because he lacks bus fare; noir partly sprang from the depression aura of economic helplessness. One of the many effective crane shots from this film heightens our feeling of isolation and desperation as he enters town. However, Marty Holland's source novel doesn't have a character as interesting as Waldo Lydecker and this attempt to recapture the success of Laura is not a complete triumph.

The love scenes between Faye and Andrews don't really come off. The painted backgrounds feel chintzy, but a better reason is that Preminger is not a romantic. He responds more to the bug lust of two scorpions like Stella and Eric. Faye does her best with an impossible part, a chaste heiress who plays church organ. She underplays her tremulousness nicely, but the picture is more concerned with vice than virtue. Preminger has a reputation for being an indifferent and hasty director of actors, but the leads are good here and the supporting cast is sturdy: Ann Revere, Charles Bickford, John Carradine, Bruce Cabot, Percy Kilbride.

What most redeems Fallen Angel is Preminger's handling of his camera. His stationary shots of the fictional Walton convey a sense of small town desolation and solitude that recall Edward Hopper's paintings. When he moves the camera, it is to show the emotional impact of events upon characters: a dolly into Andrews and Darnell dancing shows them whetting their sexual appetites and a crane shot of Andrews witnessing Faye's arrest heightens our sense of Eric's paranoia. Paranoia is a constant theme in Preminger's noirs. In Fallen Angel, it is shown to be an apt response to a troubled world.