Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Seven Review: Fallen Angel

The problem I'm having with writing these last few reviews for Summer Under the Stars -- and the reason I still haven't finished them, even though it's now closer to this year's Summer Under the Stars lineup than last year's -- is because, with a few very notable exceptions, the films I watched for SUTS 2011 are not among my favorite I've seen on TCM, and the more distance I get from watching the films, the less inclined I am to write about them. The truth is that I watch a lot more classic movies than I write about on this blog, and most of them don't move me to review them, regardless of how I feel about them; I like writing about films when I truly have something to say, but more often than not I prefer watching them to criticizing them. If I do something for Summer Under the Stars 2012, which I probably will, then I likely won't do the reviews the way I did for the 2011 version, because while I liked making myself watch a movie for each featured actor rather than just watching a bunch of movies for one or two people, at this point, I'm basically just writing these reviews to get them done -- partially from fatigue, and partially because the last eight or so movies I watched for SUTS '11 were my least favorite from the whole festival (not necessarily the lowest-graded; just some of the ones I would be least likely to watch again).

Fallen Angel, a 1945 noir by Otto Preminger, fell right in the middle of those final eight films, and my problem with it was that despite it being well-made and skillfully directed, the studio politics behind the making of the film are more interesting to me than the film itself. I'm picky when it comes to noir -- it's a broader genre than people realize, and my favorites are often the short, simple classics like Act of Violence and Detour that follow one man's descent into the dark side of reality; I also like the "stereotypical" hard boiled-detective noirs like The Big Sleep, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Blue Dahlia. Ironically, although I like complex storytelling in other genres, especially comedy, my least favorite noirs tend to be the ones that interweave mystery, romance and drama into a more complicated plot. These are the biggies of the noir genre among many film critics, movies like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, of course, Fallen Angel. I think the problem is that these complicated films end up losing some of the more stylish aspects of noir filmmaking, leaving behind a story that I don't find particularly interesting, and what ends up standing out to me are the performances within the films -- Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity; John Garfield in Postman -- rather than the films themselves.

pic via here

Fallen Angel has two strikes against it, then, because in addition to being a broader noir, it also doesn't feature any performances that really got under my skin. The basic plot in Fallen Angel involves a drifter (Dana Andrews) who falls in love with a small-town waitress (Linda Darnell), and while I like Darnell, I didn't find her performance as electrifying as it's reputed to be, and I never really like Dana Andrews, except in The Best Years of Our Lives. The marquee name in Fallen Angel is actually Alice Faye, who plays the local spinster Andrews tries to fleece out of her money in order to woo Darnell, but this is where the backstage politics -- and, for me, the most interesting part of the film -- come in, because while Faye and Andrews were supposed to be Fallen Angel's leads, Preminger was so impressed by Darnell that he gave her extra scenes and cut a number of Faye's from the final edit. What resulted was a film that seems to be about Andrews and Darnell, with Faye in a supporting role... until suddenly it isn't, and Faye and Andrews are the stars, and the whole things shifts gears. That Preminger was able to shift directions mid-stream and still make a basically good film is a testament to his skill as a director, but Fallen Angel still feels a bit lopsided to me, and with no truly strong performances to prop it up (or see it all the way through), I also can't say that it changes my opinion on what kind of story makes for the best noir.

Grade: B