I watched a very good documentary on Television last evening featuring the career of Jean Simmons and this film cropped up – ‘Angel Face’ gave Jean Simmons one of her best roles

In Otto Preminger’s Angel Face, Robert Mitchum is an emergency medical technician, who responds to a call at a mansion high up a hill. There a wealthy woman (Barbara O’Neil) has almost asphyxiated from the gas in her unlit bedroom fireplace. Was it a suicide bid, or something more sinister? Her husband (Herbert Marshall), a burnt-out novelist she supports, can’t explain it. Neither can his daughter by a previous marriage (Jean Simmons).

Mitchum finds Simmons quite the dish, but she finds in him something more than a passing fancy. She jumps into her sleek sports car, follows the ambulance back down to the hospital and waylays Mitchum in a diner. Generous with his affections, Mitchum breaks a date with his steady girlfriend (Mona Freeman) in order to spend a perfectly `innocent’ evening of dining and dancing with Simmons.

But his medical experience hasn’t equipped him to deal with a dangerously scrambled psyche. Jean Simmons first invites Freeman to lunch so she can humiliate her by spilling all the details, cunningly tweaked up, of her `innocent’ rendezvous with Mitchum. Then she arranges for him to take on the job of family chauffeur, installing him in a garage apartment. And she persuades her stepmother to lend Mitchum the money to start up his own business as a car mechanic. Telling himself that he’s just looking out for Number One, Mitchum blithely lets her erase any boundaries between them.

The main players

Robert Mitchum – Frank Jessup
Jean Simmons – Diane Tremayne
Mona Freeman – Mary Wilton
Herbert Marshall – Charles Tremayne
Barbara O’Neil as Catherine Tremayne
Kenneth Tobey as Bill
Leon Ames as Fred Barrett

Warning signs appear, however, when she pounds on his bedroom door in the middle of the night with a crazy story about O’Neil hovering over her bed and playing with gas again; the earlier incident, she claims, was just a smokescreen. She tells him, too, that the stepmother reneged on his loan – in order to get back at her. Robert Mitchum ‘s wariness enrages Simmons and redoubles her delusional obstinacy.

When her father and stepmother perish in a spectacular freak accident (their car plummeted in reverse down the steep ravine abutting the driveway), the heiress Simmons finds herself charged with murder. As does Mitchum – he had the expertise to sabotage the vehicle. Wily attorney Leon Ames (in a small but succulent part) sees the defendants’ marriage as the path to acquittal. Which leaves Mitchum with a Hobson’s choice – risking either the gas chamber or the psychotic wrath of a woman he never loved….

Though Preminger can deploy twists of plot with the best of them, he had a subtler knack of keeping his audience off-balance, never quite sure in which direction the story might develop. So for a while we share the perplexity of Mitchum, so laid back that he doesn’t grasp that he’s playing with a five-alarm blaze until it’s too late; opportunistic but lazy, he’s the perfect stooge.

Simmons may have been working within her limitations in her low-voltage, passive-aggressive performance, but she fits the character, who operates in a world inhabited only by herself. She’s not a duplicitous vixen scheming to get what she wants; what she wants is the only reality she knows. Preminger recognises this, and gives her one of the film’s quietest, most scary scenes: During one of Mitchum’s flights from her, she snoops as if sleepwalking through his rooms, finally curling up in his easy chair, his sport coat draped around her shoulders against the dawn chill. It’s an eerie calm before the final storm.

The film is ultimately a wicked study in obsession – the kind of obsession that has no boundaries – the kind of obsession between a man and a woman – the kind of obsession that is so self-serving. And, interestingly, it is largely one-sided – since Frank may enjoy the delights of Diane, but also knows deep down that she should be put back on the shelf. Diane’s obsession is so real that you do basically know that Mitchum’s Frank Jessup doesn’t really stand a chance.

Jean Simmons was a revelation here. She’s a good actress

.I would have not have thought that she could have played opposite Mitchum’s cool, relaxed persona and have made it work, but she did.

This film is dark to the extreme and is as fresh, as vital, and as pertinent as though it were made just yesterday.

Verdict

This picture is filled with high intensity. All coming from Jean Simmon’s magnificent performance. Each lingering shot of her face reveals another level of unhinged cracks.

Robert Mitchum is his usual cool self, wandering from one scene to another popping a cigarette into his mouth. Even though he has a lovely girlfriend waiting for him he seems so attracted to this un-hinged girl

Otto Preminger manages to fit a hell of a lot in. There’s even time for some court room drama.

.It is at times haunting, has a flash of the outlandish and that feeling, that we are heading down a doom-laden path? Thus is a must-see film