Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Sue Blankenship I won't give it away, but I didn't see that coming. In a way, I feel like I wasted two hours just to see that, but Jean Simmons' performance was worth it. Most of the time she played the good girl, but here, she is positively diabolical. Robert Mitchum gives a solid performance playing Robert Mitchum, although I thought that Frank was smarter than he ended up being. I don't know about California's rules regarding jury trials in 1953 or any other year, but I've never heard of a juror asking questions during a trial--seems like that would be grounds for a mistrial, but of course this is a movie.

kijii As the movie opens, an ambulance is responding to an accident--or an attempted murder, or a suicide—at the mansion of the wealthy Catherine Tremayne (Catherine O'Neil). One of the drivers is Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum). After a brief police investigation of her husband (Herbert Marshall) and stepdaughter Diane (Jean Simmons), the case is essentially closed as an accident. As Frank leaves the house, he meets Diane and briefly talks to her. She then follows him to a coffee shop and tries to win him over by various ploys. One ploy is to get her stepmother to invest a in garage with Frank—he is a former sports car driver and seems to love Diane's Jaguar!! Finally, she talks him into becoming the family chauffeur—even though they really don't need one. In sprite of her attempts to manipulate him, Frank is no fool: he sees right through her. One day, as Diane's stepmother starts to go to her bridge club, her father asks his wife for a ride into town. As the two drive away, the car sticks in reverse and plunges over a cliff killing the two instantly. Following this, Diane—who had been devoted to her father--is hospitalized for depression. Frank is tired and convicted of rigging the car. Thanks to their clever lawyer (Leon Ames), Frank is acquitted by marrying Diane. Once acquitted, the two are left alone with each other. Frank leaves Diane for his old girlfriend. When Diane is left alone, she wants to plead guilty to the double murder but can't legally do it.This movie has so many elements in common with The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) where Leon Ames also plays the clever lawyer—that it basically seems like a poor remake of it and it's even better predecessor, Ossessione (1943). Is Simmons is the femme fatal of this film noir, she gives a strange performance as a young sociopath who adores her father and hates her stepmother. The fact that her motives seem unclear for these feelings made the plot confusing and unconvincing If anything saves this movie at all, it is the cool and steady performance from Robert Mitchum.

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.

LeonLouisRicci Mood is everything here portrayed through close-ups and soft spoken melancholia. Neither of the main characters are given to elation and succumbed to a world tolerable but not enchanting. He is workmanlike with a blue-collar acceptance of status with a slight eye on the better life and She is a wealthy one existing in a world with restraints of circumstance. Mainly, her Father's new wife, that she feels is the wet on her Freudian security blanket. A mistaken identity with lethal consequences.Her troubled psyche is troubling for the impressionable Male snared in her web of willful wanderings around a playground fenced in by an inability to successfully supersede her place in the sheltered situation of Fatherly love and her Stepmother simply existing.The Director was never very expressionistic in his Film-Noirs, preferring to photograph in mostly pedestrian angles and lighting, rather than display any stylistic sensations with background. Kudos must be given to some of the dialog and innuendos that are daring and probably barely escaped the censor and are refreshingly real.His Noir's are mostly character driven and here he is in the driver's seat and with a sombre story and downbeat, atypical ending it makes this a Noir despite the commonplace exposition.