Not sure how I feel about that ending, and the film is lacking that extra something that the best noirs have, but it's still a pretty well made film.Mitchum's character is a little subdued, which I think works really well.

Pretty good noir, even if mostly predictable

#791

Great ending.

Of course, in this kind of story, the principals are doomed from the moment they meet. Mitchum is good as a man who knows for the most part, what's going on, but is unable to do anything about it. Jean Simmons is better as the woman who has him on a leash.

Doom and gloom abound from Preminger. Angel Face is well-shot, well-acted and has a great score. Mitchum feels sort of wasted here, playing the lovesick dope to Jean Simmons' femme fatale. Simmons' turn as Diane is chilling and her sociopathy cements her as one of the high water marks for deadly women in cinema during the era.

Mitchum's great, although the story itself is nothing interesting.

Though not on par with Premingers great noirs (Laura, Where the Sidewalk Ends), Angel Face is still very good, with decent performances from both Mitchum and Simmons who plays a memorable femme fatale.

It seems more cynical than other Preminger films. His direction here is much more subtle, and the whole movie is incredibly foreboding and ominous. Jean Simmons plays one of the most three-dimensional, memorable femme fatales ever, and while Mitchum is cool, he's a bit of a sucker in this one. Not that his performance isn't great.

The story is fairly interesting (I like how it focuses on the plot's aftermath just as much as its development), but the characters aren't very captivating. Mitchum plays a fairly blah antihero, at times sly but mostly pretty bored and detached (and ultimately very dumb); Simmons is a more sympathetic femme fatale than in most noirs, but ultimately as dull and dumb as Mitchum. It's entertaining, but I was expecting more from Mitchum and Preminger.

977

I wasn't too thrilled with this at first. It was a solid but lackluster noir, and in a lot of ways not very noir at all. Mitchum's performance was definitely the highlight, everything else about it was just slightly above average. But holy shit, the ending. You think it's going to lead up to a rather dull, possibly even disappointing, conclusion and then WHAM. The last minute of this movie is pure genius, and just enough to elevate it above the mediocre score I would have given it otherwise.