Fallen Angel (1945)

Peter's Nite

Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice:

The elder son of a well-heeled Jewish family, Preminger was born in Austria-Hungary in 1905 and raised in Vienna. He was an erudite, successful theater director by his 30th birthday, though a premonition of the looming Anschluss inspired his relocation to America. He went to work at 20th Century Fox in 1936, but a flare-up of his famous temper toward Hollywood über-producer Darryl Zanuck meant banishment to New York (Preminger was always partial to Gotham—at the height of his influence, he made his headquarters on 55th Street).
After directing for the stage and playing stock SS man, he returned to the studio's good graces with a hit in the classic noir Laura (1944); for the next eight years, the quintessential maverick was a model company man, the go-to guy for thrillers and odd jobs. His noirs are knotty with thwarted sex, characterized by patient characterizations, ellipses of solitude, and the precision- haloed nocturnal photography of Joseph La Shelle. The culmination of this period is 1952's Angel Face, a dyspeptic terror that open-ends onto the abyss. Film Forum's program, however, testifies to the little-acknowledged diversity of Preminger's Fox résumé, with rarely screened one-offs that include a Joan Crawford melodrama (Daisy Kenyon), a Restoration period piece (Forever Amber), and an Oscar Wilde adaptation (The Fan).
Autocrat Otto's great period came with the disintegration of the studio system, from which he emerged as his own industry, an independent producer-director. It's here that his rows with Joseph Breen's censorious Production Code Administration office began—Preminger was the first man of consequence who wouldn't jump through hoops for its Seal of Approval. Self-interest and genuine liberal convictions happily aligned; what was good for Otto's p.r. was almost always good for America, and he helped banish a system that hamstrung popular entertainment with its arcane prudery.
From the innocuous but taboo-busting utterance of "virgin" in his farce The Moon Is Blue (for shame!) through the dope-sick Man With the Golden Arm, Preminger uncovered verboten new territory with every new production and found fresh pricks to kick against when he wasn't sparring with Breen. Bucking convention, he shot two big-money all-black musicals in the '50s—Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess (leading lady Dorothy Dandridge was a longtime girlfriend)—and hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's Exodus, giving Trumbo his first screen credit since the studios let their people go.

Chris Fujiwara via Film International:

When, years after he made them, Otto Preminger was asked about Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), three of the four Preminger films that the British Film Institute has just released on DVD, he had, in substance, but one thing to say. On Fallen Angel: “I don’t remember the picture at all.” Whirlpool: “I cannot remember anything about this film.” Where the Sidewalk Ends: “I remember nothing about it.”
In his autobiography, Preminger likened his role as contract director (and producer-director) for 20th Century-Fox to the job of “a foreman in a sausage factory.” Apart from a few standard anecdotes (such as Spyros Skouras kneeling to the head of the Catholic Legion of Decency to plead for the lifting of the Legion’s condemnation of Forever Amber in 1947, or Joan Crawford requiring that the sets of Daisy Kenyon [1947] be ice-cold), Preminger always preferred, when recalling his career, to jump straight from Laura (1944), which established him as an important film director, to The Moon Is Blue (1953), with which he launched himself as an independent producer. Preminger drew a curtain over the intervening films, pretending that his involvement with them was merely that of an administrator or a technician. The films themselves belie this pretense. Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends are great films, and Preminger’s personal commitment to them is unquestionable.
These three films constitute, along with Laura, The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952), what has been considered Preminger’s contribution to “film noir.” It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as “films noirs” is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954), the subject of the fourth BFI DVD, as a musical; or In Harm’s Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger’s films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms.

In theme and style, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends—no less than Laura, their template in some respects—depart radically from the “film noir” pattern supposed to be exemplified by such films as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1946), Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). This pattern is characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings. In the four Preminger films, the only figure who remotely resembles a femme fatale, the waitress Stella (Linda Darnell) in Fallen Angel, is viewed realistically and sympathetically as someone who likes the attention of men but puts them on notice that her main goal is to land a husband; her femininity proves fatal only to herself, when one of her admirers turns homicidal. The four Preminger films share, moreover, the theme of a character’s struggle to free herself or himself from destructive behaviors and entanglements, and they all have endings in which the struggle appears to be resolved positively. (Even Angel Face, the sole Preminger film to conform, ostensibly, to the pattern I have outlined, remains demonstrably a work to which “noir” is irrelevant.) Preminger’s revising the end of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (in the 1955 film of the novel) so that the protagonist walks away free of his drug addiction and cleared of suspicion of murder is a vivid example of the director’s optimism.
Preminger’s handling of the therapeutic theme is, to be sure, frequently ambiguous, not least in Laura, in which he avoids presenting the rejection by Laura (Gene Tierney) of two inappropriate suitors in favor of the film’s policeman-hero, Mark (Dana Andrews), as a clear-cut bid for self-determination. Waldo (Clifton Webb) accuses Laura of being drawn to Mark because of his physique, and Waldo’s implication that she is still following an established self-destructive behavior pattern is allowed to stand unrefuted. Moreover, Mark’s obsession with the Laura he thought dead bodes ill for the future of his relationship with the living Laura: he has fallen in love with a portrait, not a woman (as Rita Hayworth put it, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me”).

In Fallen Angel, on the other hand, if the triumph of the down-and-out hero, Eric (Dana Andrews), over his past appears conclusive, this is largely because of the force of the mise-en-scene and acting in the hotel-room scene in which he concedes bitterly that his life of hustling and scheming has left him “with exactly nothing.” This recognition, and the redemptive presence of June (Alice Faye), to whom he articulates it, prepare us for the plot resolution in which Eric takes charge of his destiny by gathering (offscreen) the evidence that clears himself of Stella’s murder and points to the retired policeman Judd (Charles Bickford) as the killer. The verisimilitude of this resolution may be questioned, but its emotional movement is convincing.

From internal and external evidence, it’s clear that the makers of Fallen Angel and Whirlpool made a conscious attempt to reproduce certain aspects of Laura. Signs of this effort are to be found in the records relating to the production histories of the films. On an early draft of the script of Fallen Angel, 20th Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck penciled the notation: “Everything great up to last act­—needs hypo like Laura.” In script conferences for Whirlpool, Zanuck repeatedly urged Preminger and screenwriter Ben Hecht to draw on Laura for inspiration, noting that the villainous Korvo should be “just as interesting as Clifton Webb was in Laura,” remarking that Whirlpool “can have much of the quality and strangeness of Laura,” and proposing changes to the ending (that were adopted in part) that would put the heroine in jeopardy, after the manner of the last sequence of Laura.

Fallen Angel brings back, along with the male star of Laura, its cinematographer, Joseph La Shelle (who would also shoot Where the Sidewalk Ends); the trailer for the film, included as an extra on the BFI’s DVD, even contains the blurb: “The creator of Laura does it again!” Fallen Angel and Whirlpool are both scored, as was Laura, by David Raksin, and Fallen Angel associates its theme song, Raksin’s “Slowly,” with a female character (Stella), just as Laura had been identified with the famous theme of Laura. At one moment in Fallen Angel, Raksin again uses the musical special effect, a kind of tape manipulation that he called the “Len-o-tone,” which had contributed so memorably to the central scene in Laura of Mark falling asleep in the armchair in Laura’s apartment.

Alice Faye via Wikipedia:

Color film flattered Faye enormously, and she shone in the splashy musical features that were a Fox trademark in the 1940s. She frequently played a performer, often one moving up in society, allowing for situations that ranged from the poignant to the comic. Films such as Weekend in Havana and That Night in Rio (atypically, as a Brazilian aristocrat) made good use of Faye's husky singing voice, solid comic timing, and flair for carrying off the era's starry-eyed romantic storylines. 1943's The Gang's All Here is perhaps the epitome of these films, with lavish production values and a range of supporting players (including the memorable Carmen Miranda in the indescribable "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" number) that camouflage the film's trivial plot and leisurely pacing.

Faye's career continued until 1944 when she was cast in Fallen Angel. whose title became only too telling, as circumstances turned out. Designed ostensibly as Faye's vehicle, the film all but became her celluloid epitaph when Zanuck, trying to build his new protege Linda Darnell, ordered many Faye scenes cut and Darnell emphasized. When Faye saw a screening of the final product, she drove away from the Fox studio refusing to return, feeling she had been undercut deliberately by Zanuck.

Zanuck hit back, it is said, by having Faye blackballed for breach of contract, effectively ending her film career. Released in 1945, Fallen Angel was Faye's last film as a major Hollywood star[1].

But seventeen years after the Fallen Angel debacle, Faye went before the cameras again, in 1962's State Fair. While Faye received good reviews, the film was not a great success, and she made only infrequent cameo appearances in films thereafter.

Linda Darnell via All Movie Guide:

Daughter of a Texas postal clerk, actress Linda Darnell trained to be a dancer, and came to Hollywood's attention as a photographer's model. Though only 15, Darnell looked quite mature and seductive in her first motion picture, Hotel For Women (1937), and before she was twenty she found herself the leading lady of such 20th Century-Fox male heartthrobs as Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. Weary of thankless good-girl roles, Darnell scored a personal triumph when loaned out to United Artists for September Storm (1944), in which she played a "Scarlett O'Hara" type Russian vixen. Thereafter, 20th Century-Fox assigned the actress meatier, more substantial parts, culminating in the much-sought-after leading role in 1947's Forever Amber. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz followed up this triumph by giving Darnell two of her best parts--Paul Douglas' "wrong side of the tracks" wife in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Richard Widmark's racist girlfriend in No Way Out (1950) (though befitting her star status, Darnell "reformed" at the end of both films). When her Fox contract ended in 1952, Darnell found herself cast adrift in Hollywood, the good roles fewer and farther between; by the mid-1960s, she was appearing as a nightclub singer, touring in summer theatre, and accepting supporting roles on television. Tragically, Darnell died in 1965 of severe burns suffered in a house fire. Ironically, Darnell had a lifelong fear of dying in flames, speaking publicly of her phobia after appearing in a "burned at the stake" sequence in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam.