BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Robert J. Maxwell The guy providing the audio commentary, Eddie Muller, is always fun to listen to and he points out the subtle ways in which this romantic/murder/drama has been polished to a sheen, despite its low budget, by director Otto Preminger.Unless you listen to the commentary you might conclude, as I did, that it's a rather dark and uninteresting story that, in the 1930s, might have made a decent B movie starring Warren William and some uninteresting babe who misleads him and finally brings it all to a violent end.Mitchum sleeps through his part of the manipulated dope. Jean Simmons has always given me a problem. She was great as Ophelia and again in Lean's "David Copperfield," but I never thought of her as striking or even especially interesting. Not in the context of the cinema anyway. That takes nothing away from her real character. I watched a movie being shot in Echo Park and got to know her a bit and she had an exuberant cheerfulness that was catching.Let me insert, before I forget, that the immortal Bess Flowers has about ten seconds of screen time as a secretary and the reliable Eddie Muller lauds her career, as he should.As for the rest -- well, nobody hears much about "Angel Face". There's no reason to. It's an unremarkable drama of a man caught up in the paraphilia of a rich and deranged young woman.

Dalbert Pringle Directed by Otto Preminger, 1952's Angel Face is a nicely-paced Crime/Thriller about passion gone haywire.With the innocent face of an angel, and the deceptive heart of a devil, the young and alluring Diane Treymayne uses her many seductive charms to set up Frank Jessup, the handsome ambulance driver, as the fall guy when she secretly plots out the fool-proof murder of her wealthy stepmother in order to collect on the inheritance.In Angel Face it's all flimsy alibis, heartless betrayals, and thrilling courtroom drama, compounded by the fire of a femme fatale who's too dangerous to trust, but too tantalizing to resist.Set in and around Beverly Hills, Angel Face stars one of my fave movie tough-guys from the 1950s, Robert Mitchum.

Claudio Carvalho In California, the ambulance driver Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum) and his partner head to a mansion in Beverly Hills to assist the millionaire Mrs. Catherine Tremayne (Barbara O'Neil) that was poisoned with gas, but her doctor had already medicated her. When Frank is leaving the house, he meets Catherine's twenty year-old stepdaughter Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) that follows him in her Jaguar. After-hours, they go to a restaurant and Frank finds an excuse to his girlfriend Mary Wilton (Mona Freeman) to not visit her and he dates Diane and they go to a night-club. Diane has a crush on Frank and on the next morning, she meets Mary and tells to her what Frank and she did. Frank and Mary are saving money to open a garage since he is an efficient mechanic. Diane convinces Frank to be better paid working as a chauffeur for her family. Soon Frank learns that Diane hates her stepmother and he decides to quit his job. But Diane seduces him and he stay with the Tremayne family. When Mr. and Mrs. Tremayne have a fatal car accident, Diane and Frank become the prime suspect of the police and they go to court charged of murder. Now their only chance is the strategy of the efficient defense attorney Fred Barrett (Leon Ames)."Angel Face" is among the best film-noir I have seen, with a perfect female fatale, amoral story and dark conclusion. Jean Simmons is impressive, with Oedipus complex and her angel face that manipulates Frank and even her stepmother. The melancholic music score completes this great movie. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Alma em Pânico" ("Soul in Panic")

robert-temple-1 This is a rather tepid and disappointing film noir produced and directed by Otto Preminger. I believe the reason why it does not amount to much is that it was a Howard Hughes production. Presumably, he was obsessed by Jean Simmons at the time and just wanted to rush her into a 'vehicle' as part of his standard seduction process. More care was taken to get her breasts pointy than was taken over getting a decent script into shape: it needed several rewrites, but the breasts needed no more sharpening, that's for sure. As we all know, Hughes had a mammary fixation of megalomaniac proportions. At an earlier date, he had been so obsessed by Jane Russell's breasts that he personally designed a special cantilevered bra to make them protrude and point more. Here, Simmons was ordered to wear a sweater too small for her, which stretched over her breasts as tightly as cellophane covers meat in a supermarket, and beneath this she had been fitted with what can only be called a double pointer-mechanism of some kind. The result is two knife-like emanations from her chest. One suspects that if she had turned round too fast, she might have sliced Robert Mitchum in half. However, he is his usual rough and ready self, not taking her too seriously, ready to walk out on her at any time, and, well, being Mitchum. I thought I detected signs of boredom in Mitchum, as if he thought this film were a real drag. Getting pernickety notes from Howard Hughes every day must have driven a free spirit like Mitchum crazy, and he probably wanted to walk out on the production, not just on Simmons's crazy character. If anyone had taken the trouble to make the script work, this could possibly have been an effective noir. Ben Hecht was brought in to do something to pep it up, and he must have added some of the good lines such as Mitchum's hard-boiled line 'I've been slapped by plenty of gals before.' But spice in a bad dish does not necessarily save it. Too many reviewers are all excited just because Mitchum and Simmons are on screen, but that's not the issue. (I almost said that's not the points, but must get that image of Simmons's chest out of my mind, it's too disturbing.) Simmons is meant to play a girl of 19 (a part for which she was too old, as she was 23 and looked 25) who is mentally deranged. She does her best to do her 'spooky look', with the haunted eyes and the mad stare, the lingering over things ominously, and other tricks of the kind. But it is not enough. If she had been Meryl Streep this would have worked; after all, in THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN all Streep had to do was look at the camera in a certain way and we all knew what she was like from the very first scene. But Simmons was just a movie star, not a genius. So she needed more convincing scenes to get the idea across, and they had not been written for her. Preminger was not in top form, but he did one totally brilliant sequence towards the end of the film, where Simmons walks from room to room of the empty house, taking in the emptiness of each room one by one, in a kind of crescendo of despairing loneliness as she realizes that she is more alone than she ever imagined was possible. Each room makes her feel more alone than the last. This is all done without words, and Preminger takes a long time over it, not hesitating to eat up celluloid in order to get his effect, and it works spectacularly well. But this was something Preminger was able to do as a director without using the incompetent script, he just added it in on his own initiative. It was a master's touch, but not enough to save the film. At least Hughes did not make him cut the sequence, and it was left in the final cut. This film was such a lost opportunity, even though it contained so many clichés such as the demented girl playing sad music on a grand piano, the depressing mansion, the pompous rich stepmother (Barbara O'Neil), and the kept husband, stiffly played by Herbert Marshall, who has little to do so that his talents are wasted. One good job of acting is Mona Freeman as Mitchum's girl friend Mary. She plays such a typical fifties young woman, and there were so many, many thousands just like her at that time. She had been signed originally by Hughes, who must have cast her. She is apparently still alive aged 86, and good for her, though she last acted in 1972, so she must have gone straight. This film depends upon us being convinced that Simmons is not merely a 'crazy mixed-up kid' but a genuine psychotic killer. And that just doesn't come across, sorry.