Angel Face (1952)
Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons in Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952)
In a traditional western the law comes to save the day, bring civilization and ethical life, end savagery. Angel Face (1952) is the film noir that most clearly, and murderously, reacts against all that. Here is a society – post-war America – which has prospered under the rule of law, the state, and other institutions of modern society. It has won two world wars, developed economically and technologically to achieve a degree of wealth until then unparalleled. And yet savagery returns–– with an angel face...
Once again, following the conventions of film noir, instead of playing a civilizing role as in the western, women become the driving force towards the end of morals. Deadly is the female, indeed. Neither law nor a gunfighter can stop them.
The gunfighter type is all but gone, substituted by a typical down-on-his-luck working-class man, played with resilience by Robert Mitchum, hopelessly enticed into his (fallen) angel’s schemes. Angel Face, played diabolically by Jean Simmons, is impossible to resist: the first time Mitchum sees her he hypnotically walks towards her as she plays an eerie tune on the piano alone in the wee hours. Trouble never seemed more evident nor more sublime. “Walk away!”, we think; but we don’t want him to.
As for the law… It becomes a farce, a sophistical machination, a rhetorical exercise of persuasion and chicanery in order for the wealthy to inherit their wealth (and pay their goons) no matter what they've done: including patricide. If the jury acquits you, that's it. No remorse or sudden crisis of conscience can undo that and bring punishment to the criminal.
Nothing can placate a rotten spirit: if Angel Face won the world, but lost her soul, pacing up and down an empty mansion, unable to sleep off patricide, and now seeks desperately to lose that world and win back her soul— it won't do: penitence is not on the table anymore. They'll think she's crazy and commit her, says her prudent lawyer. She can't be punished, no matter what she confesses— "it's called double jeopardy".
She has to own up to her crimes and accept the cynicism in which she thrived. In Angel Face we have a noir version of Ivan Karamazov going to trial. And the verdict is: not guilty. The law does not rescue anything anymore, not even the guilty who seek repentance. The savagery and chaos of lawlessness are once more unleashed, not being opposite to law, as in the West, but getting a push from it now: murder most foul legally validated.
Ethics, law, religion, social norms: nothing stands in the way of murderous cynicism, which can only be annulled by repeating, and thereby cleansing, itself.
