FALLEN ANGEL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 367, 5 July 1946, Page 32

FALLEN ANGEL

(20th Century-Fox)

HE bus pulls up in the night at a small town on the Pacific coast; one of the Passengers, with only a dollar

in his pocket, not enough to take him all the way to San Francisco, reluctantly drags himself and his bag out, wanders glumly off, through the ramshackle streets by the waterfront, turns into Pop’s Place for a cup of coffee and a hamburger, and finds the few late customers discussing, in a manner which suggests a certain degree of personal interest in the girl, the three-day disappearance of the waitress. The girl herself slumps in soon after, wearing a new ‘bracelet and an air of sulky disillusionment (she’s the easily accessible type, out insists on a wedding-ring and security). Her arrival sets the minds of the regular customers at rest, but not that of the newcomer.... In this cleverly casual way, Director Otto Preminger involves us in what proMises to be a very good low-life melodrama. The promise isn’t quite kept, because this wasn’t one of the rare occasions when the director was able to resist

the pull of the box-office; somehow he had to contrive a romantic ending in a situation where a romantic ending was logically and artistically impossible. Yet the atmosphere-building at the beginning, and indeed until about halfway through, is excellently done. The situations and the characters develop as a natural growth; they aren’t presented to us ready-made from the studio stockpile, though we do begin before very long to notice that the story is taking a conventional shape; good overcoming evil in the fashion convenient for the box-office but fatal for realism. Meanwhile, all sorts of interesting and sometimes irrelevant people wander on and off the screen, mostly through the swingdoors at Pop’s hash-house, They include Charles Bickford, the elderly retired detective; Bruce Cabot, who here suggests more menace than he delivers; John Carradine, the cheerful charlatan who sells spiritualism for what he can get from the gullible. And there are others whom you meet in picture after picture, behind shabby hotel reception-counters, in the street, lounging at a_ bar: bit-players whose familiar faces. you Rana, Mi A Mi Mi Mi hi hi i i i i i i

St Sn ee he ir gy Be we pI eee eRe, Be. ite om a sie o can’t put a name to but whose presence in the cast often makes all the difference between a good entertainment and just another picture. The players in Fallen Angel whom we can identify aren’t there just for the sake of decoration, either. They all do a fairly considerable job of acting: Dana Andrews as the young man who got off the bus, with a grudge against the world, living by his wits, infatuated by the waitress at first glance, and willing for the sake-of his infatuation to engage in a confidence-trick of the shabbiest kind: Linda Darnell as the waitress, cheap, flashy, but fatally attractive; Alice Faye as the good girl, with several thousand dollars in the bank and boredom in her heart, who is swept out of her smalltown stagnation into the deep waters of jeception and murder by the young man’s glib approach. ; The others are old hands at this kind of seamy thriller, but it is, I believe, Alice Faye’s first serious attempt at a strongly dramatic role. She doesn’t do badly, when one considers how heavily the script is weighted against her, requiring that she bring about the regeneration of a contemptible young man iin just over half-an-hour of screen-time. If the director had had the courage or the necessary (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) _ influence in the studio, Fallen Angel might have been almost as good a picture as Double Indemnity; but though his attempt at the end to cover up the intrinsically sordid nature of the story with a hasty coat of romantic whitewash fails as all such slapdash repair jobs must, the whole edifice is not by any means utterly spoilt.