Popular reviews

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  Review by mandijo ★★★★ 6

  I love that Robert Mitchum stood up to Otto Preminger and slapped him when Preminger kept demanding take after take of Mitchum slapping Jean Simmons. He was her knight. Love him! 💘

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★½ 15

  No genre so excels at again and again earning use of the phrase “dump their ass” than classic-era noir. 

  Otto Preminger’s “Angel Face” arrived out of the shadows a little too late to fit comfortably into the post war gender empowerment dysphoria experienced by homecoming GIs. Femme fatales are too quintessential to noir to ever make them dépasse. But, Jean Simmons’ scheming heiress feels unearned in the malice with which she was written. 

  Although she is scripted with complete conniving — it almost causes a reverse reaction, where a viewer has sympathy to Simmons, the actress, for getting saddled with embodying a character so entirely without pity. 

  Adding in the historical context about Simmons’ poor treatment by Preminger on set, and…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★ 11

  “Never be the innocent bystander; that’s the guy that always gets hurt.”

  Despite possessing a healthy reserve of cynicism and the love of devoted beauty Mary Wilton (Mona Freeman), aspiring auto-shop proprietor Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum) cannot unsnarl himself from the clutches of homicidal enchantress Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons as a dead ringer for Rooney Mara in Carol). 

  Written by Frank Nugent and D.B. Wyndham from a story by Charles Erskine, the actual plot is only somewhat less reductive than my nutshell description (which I’ll leave vague in the service of avoiding spoilers for once). But while Otto Preminger’s Angel Face may not have the most credible (or creative) scenario, it more than makes up for its lack of ingenuity with…

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  Review by Cormac 👑 ★★★ 8

  Face of an angel, with hooves hidden somewhere underneath. The gates to Hell are paved with the souls of he, who saw the signs. And decided to dance with the Devil regardless.

  By all standards of noir normalcy, this thing is understated as all hell (like, almost definitely to a fault? I can’t even really comprehend what our two opposing flames see in each other at any given point) but, of note at least entirely for what we can learn about the archetypal femme fetale from this portrayal of Jean Simmons’ Diane. Man-eater somehow reads as the understatement of the century when she appears to devour the attention of Frank (a classically unbothered Robert Mitchum, sleepwalking through scene to scene…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★ 4

  Angel Face is an outstanding film noir directed by Otto Preminger, not to mention an absorbing examination of infatuation. It stars Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum, both of who provide impressively understated performances, with Simmons portraying the nefarious female with frightening believability. The dependable film noir themes of fatalism, fixation and passion associate themselves to the narrative right up to the bitter end, and it certainly owes a level of indebtedness to Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. This is one of Preminger’s most preeminent movies.

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  Review by Cahiers Du Cinéma

  Jacques Rivette: 'The Essential'

  ('L'Essentiel', Cahiers du Cinema 32, February 1954)

  The cardinal virtue of this film [Angel Face], like The Moon is Blue, which follows it chronologically, is that it frees us from certain preconceptions about its director. Our increasing familiarity with the clever ambiguity of his themes and the extraordinary fluidity and subtlety of his camera movements would soon have brought us to the point where we would be unable to see beyond them and would run the risk of reducing the great talent of Otto Preminger to what are, it should be said, modest dimensions. First of all let us be grateful for these two films for proving to us, by their lack of pretension, the starkness…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 6

  Robert Mitchum, famed calypso performer, with his unconventionally good looks and his rugged charm, his rich man's Rock Hudson schtick, and his working class presence, steals every scene he's in. In this movie, in The Night of the Hunter (where he faced far more formidable competition), in every film I've seen him in, and, of course, on the calypso stage. He's one of those people that draws the focus in on himself simply by being, like Paul Newman or Harry Belafonte. So on the strength of his presence alone, this film is enjoyable.

  There are people, like the Netflix sleeve, which will hype the psychological interplay and some others who will throw around words like "Freudian," and they're all right,…

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  Review by D Rock ★★★

  Strangely soulless late noir that has all the pieces of a classic femme fatale-ropes-in-dumb-patsy tale, except maybe a beating heart?

  I don't know if that comes from the reportedly difficult on-set relationship both Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons had with director Otto Preminger. I mean it's not like she's that stiff or anything; nor is Mitchum any more phlegmatic than usual. But if we're supposed to relate deeply to either of their characters, it didn't really work, for me anyways.

  There's actually quite a bit to dislike about each of their characters. Frank Jessup's a cad who lies serially to his girlfriend (granted, Mona Freeman as Mary is about as vanilla ice cream as they come) and seems undisturbed by…

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  Review by Daryl ★★★½

  Angel Face is a solid and an enjoyable film-noir with Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons both giving strong performances. An engaging narrative, with a bleak tone and tension filled direction from Otto Preminger. The location settings worked and felt familiar, and the courtroom scenes were well done. The ending is a little predictable, but still felt quite shocking.

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  Review by sarah ★★★½

  To my surprise, Jean Simmons is so well suited for the Amy Dunne-esque type of character. I have an obsession with characters like that, especially when they’re played by talented Old Hollywood actresses. This film isn’t as narratively strong as Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder or Laura, but it still plays up to so many of the tropes I love in a good film noir.

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  Review by noir1946 ★★★★

  “I’ve been slapped by dames before.”

  Otto’s Bunny Lake Is Missing is flawed somewhat because we can sense something off about the Keir Dullea character from the very beginning. In Angel Face, Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) seems just about perfect from the beginning, but we slowly learn she is consumed by jealousy of her stepmother (Barbara O’Neil) who controls her weak father (Herbert Marshall). After meeting virile medic Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum), she becomes jealous of his girlfriend (Mona Freeman). But what’s fascinating is that neither Simmons nor Otto do anything to make Diane seem disturbed or even especially neurotic. As underplayed by Simmons, Diane is simply a lonely young woman who happens to be especially needy.

  Screenwriters Oscar Millard…

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  Review by Gentry ★★★ 1

  “I drove a tank until they shot me out of it.”

  Daddy issues, film noir style. Diane’s (Jean Simmons) mother was caught in an English air raid. Her beloved father remarried a controlling, manipulative (and wealthy) American. Seeing her father, a once popular writer, abandon all drive—turned into an obsequious, emasculated shell of his former self—sets a switch off in her brain. 

  Ambulance driver Frank (Robert Mitchum) is pining so hard to get back behind the wheel of a sports car he’ll quit his job, drop his steady girlfriend, and move in with this random rich family to act as their chauffeur. The promise of a partner to help him open his own garage is hung in front of his…