Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 1-July-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Angel Face (1952)

"Angel Face" is a silly name for this picture. It sounds saccharine although it's meant to be ironic, much like "Baby Face" in 1933. This dark thriller stars Jean Simmons as an heiress who lures an ambulance driver (Robert Mitchum) into her plan for killing her rich stepmother and living happily ever after. [Alternate title #1: The Siren] Simmons' luminous eyes do a pretty good job of suggesting madness as well as the ethereal. Her character, Diane Tremayne, jealously guards the love of her flaky artist father but begins to stalk the driver, Frank Jessup, after he responds to a call at her house and slaps her out of hysterics. She lands him by convincing her stepmother to hire him as a chauffeur and possibly finance his dream of a sports car repair shop. With a few head games Diane dispatches Frank's sterling girlfriend (Mona Freeman) and turns her attention to her stepmother's roadster, which develops a sudden fondness for going backwards very fast. [Alternate title #2: Reverse Psychology] Frank then finds himself on trial for murder and bound to Diane by the intertwined nature of their fates.

My initial analysis was that Mitchum plays his part too nonchalantly, but on second thought I decided Frank is just a placid character. This may be the moral of the movie, that an ordinary guy who accepts things that fall into his lap can drift onto the off-ramp towards danger. Frank doesn't stop thinking about his girlfriend or fall head over heels for Diane, he merely follows the path of better opportunity (racy romance + money trumps middle-class marriage). He offers a cynical view of a certain kind of man, but it's nothing compared to that of Diane's lawyer (Leon Ames). This soulless shark uses love as an instrument of deception and calls Diane a great catch with apparent sincerity even though he believes she committed murder. In the end the film's darkness stems less from the wacked-out woman with the angel face than from the men who don't recognize, consider, or care about the insanity her expression betrays. [Alternate title #3: Driving Miss Crazy] Diane does a lot of damage, but it's not entirely by accident.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.