This exceptional and beautifully shot L.A. film noir was inventively crafted by Otto Preminger, making it one of the director’s finest achievements.  Fascinating for its flawed relationships, unsympathetic characters, and shocking violence, ANGEL FACE stars a just-right Robert Mitchum as an ambulance driver with a blonde girlfriend (Mona Freeman) and the dream of opening his own garage for race cars.  Then he meets Jean Simmons, and before you can say “double indemnity” he’s a goner.  His yearning to feel free makes him vacillate between the well-planned life set before him and the thrills of being with the rich, strange, and beautiful Simmons.  In true noir fashion, the corruptible male is vulnerable to the machinations of a femme fatale.  She’s a manipulator; he’s a chump.  They’re both louses and they belong together.  Simmons makes Mitchum the family chauffeur, but, however selfishly, this is truly a two-sided love story. 

The marvelous Simmons is at her best here, this time playing a cool and delicate conniver.  Like Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945), she is obsessed with her father (Herbert Marshall) and amoral about murder, a kitten made of steel.  Simmons is remarkably assured and complex, so concentrated that her performance quickly becomes mesmerizing.  Unlike Tierney’s hyper-intense and somewhat campy performance, Simmons is disturbed and obsessive in a believable way, not coming off as a villainess though she surely is scary.  She also comes to feel guilt over her actions, even aches to confess.  This all leads to one of the more jaw-dropping climaxes in all of film noir.

As a slick lawyer, Leon Ames plays just about the same role he played in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946).  Though Mitchum is one of my favorite actors, this cynical and unusually credible noir belongs to Simmons.  (She likes him from the moment he slaps her.)  Hers is a masterly portrait of self-absorption.  Now 80, Simmons was one of the brightest lights of 1950s Hollywood, leaving behind a string of superb performances, including those in THE ACTRESS (1953), THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), and ELMER GANTRY (1960).  I’ve written about THE ACTRESS in my second book and about THE BIG COUNTRY in SCREEN SAVERS, and I hope someday to write at length about the psychologically turbulent ANGEL FACE.