The Film Noir of the Week is Fallen Angel -- the 1945 film directed by Otto Preminger. The cast includes Dana Andrews (Boomerang! (1947) and Laura (1944), Charles Bickford Brute Force (1947), Linda Darnell Hangover Square (1945), Anne Revere Secret Beyond the Door... (1948) and John Carradine Female Jungle (1954), Bluebeard (1944) The film begins with a car speeding down the road with the credits zipping by as super-imposed street signs. The camera pulls back and it’s revealed that it’s a bus. Dana Andrews gets pulled off the bus because he doesn’t have enough cash to get to San Francisco. (he’s about 150 miles short). He walks over to Pop’s Eats (now a noir icon with those great “BEER” signs out front) and he runs into a group of men looking for the waitress Stella. Apparently every man in town has a crush on her. So begins a twisted tale of Eric Stanton – a former New York press agent down on his luck so much that now he's a drifter (and he'll soon be a con man). After Stella returns (the sexy Linda Darnell) to the diner (to the relief of Pops and others) Stanton cons his way into an empty hotel room to sleep. Its professor Madley (the great John Carradine) and his assistant’s room and Stanton talks his way into helping them get their show publicized. Madley is a traveling soothsayer grifter. When Stanton hooks up with Madley and his spook act he meets Clara and June Mills (…

Then love alone can make the fallen angel rise. Fallen Angel is directed by Otto Preminger, with cinematography by Joseph LaShelle, who also worked with Preminger on the film Laura the year before. The film stars Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell & Charles Bickford. Seen as something of a lesser entry in film noir and on Preminger's CV (he claimed to not even remembering the film when quizzed about it once!), the piece is famous for being the last film Faye made as a major Hollywood actress. Disappointed at how studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck and Preminger cut her role out of the picture (they were all about Darnell), Faye left the studio the day after a preview screening, and did not make another film for 16 years. The plot sees Andrews as press agent Eric Stanton, who down on his luck gets turfed off the bus some 150 miles from San Francisco and finds that he is in the small coastal town of Walton. Here he meets sultry waitress Stella (Darnell) and frumpy recluse June (Faye). The former he is very attracted too, so is everybody else it seems, the latter has just come into a lot of inheritance money, something else that catches Eric's eye. Pretty soon his life will be surrounded by love, infatuation, jealousy and worst of all - murder. More a mystery whodunit than an overtly dark venture into the realm of film noir, Fallen Angel is still a tidy and atmospheric movie. One…

Dana Andrews is "Eric Stanton", broke, bumming his way around the country, charming, fibbing and embellishing his way to food and lodgings where he can. He is chucked off a Greyhound bus (by a driver who looked remarkably like Ward Bond) in a sleepy coastal town, where he heads to a local diner to plan how best to continue his journey on to San Francisco. His plans change suddenly, however, when he meets the rather venal waitress "Stella" (Linda Darnell) even though she is pretty lukewarm to his subtleties. This little town seems to attract charlatans as also he encounters "Madley" (John Carradine) and the pair hatch a plan to procure a considerable sum of money from a couple of wealthy young sisters, the younger of whom "June" (Alice Faye) succumbs to his strategy and marries him. All looks set fair until "Stella" (remember her?) turns up - dead - and the other sister "Clara" (Anne Revere) who has a bit of history when it comes to being fleeced by con-artists is now bent on ensuring that "Eric" is a focus for the murder investigation. The plot is just a touch convoluted; the murder investigation almost irrelevant, but Otto Preminger builds the tension efficiently as the cocky young man finds these locals he assumed were easy prey turn out to be somewhat more canny - and vindictive. I wasn't hugely impressed with the ending, but the performances - especially from Andrews and Re…

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