BFI Film Noir Classics

"One false move and you're in over your head"

Mark Dixon in Where The Sidewalk Ends

Fallen Angel

After being kicked off a bus for travelling beyond his stop, failed press angent Eric Stanton (Andrews) wanders into the small town of Walton in California and immediately makes an impression on the local waitress Stella (Darnell). Despite the obvious chemistry between them, Stella refuses to fully accept his advances until he promises to marry her. However, Eric has another option in mind; June Mills (Faye), the wealthy daughter of a now deceased local dignitary who lives with her spiteful old maid sister Clara (Revere). So he devises a scheme whereby he will marry June, embezzle her money, leave her and return to marry Stella. But everything goes horribly wrong when Stella is found murdered.

Fallen Angel is a mean, dark little film which is a long way away from the passionate reverie of Otto Preminger’s previous film Laura, despite the best efforts of composer David Raksin and his insistent composition “Slowly”. Part of this has to do with the central character played by Dana Andrews who is much less appealing than Mark McPherson in Laura; a man with a shady past and motives which seem as contradictory and uncertain to him as they do to us. We don’t warm to Eric Stanton and Dana Andrews uses this distance to great effect in a performance which never asks for easy sympathy and instead relies on keeping our interest with its complexity. Preminger and Andrews brought something dangerous out in each other and their Noir films together are among their best work. Andrews is particularly well partnered with Linda Darnell, an actress of limited scope but capable of putting on a fine slow of slutty intensity when she got the chance. She apparently hated Preminger, despite working with him on several occasions, and her obvious distaste for both her director and his material seems to add to the aura of general unease which clings to her here. They strike real sparks and it’s unfortunate that we’re asked to believe that a more intense relationship exists between Andrews and Alice Faye because a similar connection just isn’t there. Alice Faye is generally adequate and even quite touching but she’s totally upstaged by both Darnell and the great Anne Revere who plays the embittered sister.

Otto Preminger claimed not to remember the film when he was interviewed in his old age but it's very clear that it demonstrates a huge development in his cinematic technique. Laura, for all its melodramatic brilliance, is a fairly static film with few exterior shots and limited camera movement. Fallen Angel is quite astonishingly fluid in comparison with long takes, lengthy tracking shots and imaginative use of repeated patterns to make connections between characters. The cinematography is gorgeous, particularly in the night sequences. The DP Joseph LaShelle, a Preminger regular, was an absolute wizard at monochrome sleaze - he also worked on The Apartment and Hangover Square - and his work here is very distinctive.

The meanness and cynicism of the film makes it seem remarkably contemporary, particularly in the scenes involving John Carradine’s sleazy medium Professor Madley and Charles Bickford’s deeply unpleasant former police officer Judd. Bickford is a great actor and he makes Judd a thoroughly believable “bad lieutenant” whose idea of an interrogation is a backroom torture session. This seems to be a world of conmen and corruption, the malaise of post-war America made flesh in a brilliantly photographed, stifling small town. What’s most intriguing is the suggestion that, whatever the upshot of the plot developments, no-one will particularly care in the wide world outside this town with its dingy diner and faded beachfront. In this respect, the often criticised low-key ending is just right. This isn’t grand opera, it’s just a few heels kicking each other about.

Whirlpool

When wealthy doctor's wife Ann Sutton (Tierney) is caught shoplifting, she is saved by the intervention of a hypno-therapist called David Corvo (Ferrer). He inveigles his way into her life and begins to treat her, without the knowledge of her husband (Conte). One night however, Corvo's troublesome mistress is found dead in her apartment and Ann is the only person on the scene who has the means and opportunity to do the deed.

Whirlpool is set amongst the rich and privileged members of Los Angeles society and has a glossy sheen which is unlike most other film noirs of the period but distinctly typical of Otto Preminger’s style during the 1940s. It has much the same luxuriant trappings as Laura and, naturally, Gene Tierney is another reminder of Preminger’s extraordinary first flirtation with the noir style. Equally reminiscent is the presence of a smooth, acerbic killer – Jose Ferrer this time, rather than Clifton Webb – whose good manners contrast so startlingly with their base motives. But the romantic obsession which cloaks Laura like a pall of smog is largely absent here and has been replaced by a far more probing and analytical tone which engages the viewer’s intellect while keeping the emotions distant. The plotting is a technical exercise which is clever enough but there are few surprises and the denouement is more a case of going through the motions than revealing anything we don’t already know. Luckily for the film, and us, the performances are sufficiently strong to keep us watching. Gene Tierney was rarely better than she is here and she is well matched with Richard Conte as her flustered – and, in plot terms, marginalised – husband. Jose Ferrer is exactly right as the caddish hypnotist and Charles Bickford adds another feather to his cap as a time-serving policeman haunted by his wife’s recent death.

However, the film is fascinating for the feminist undercurrent which runs through it. If Preminger’s previous noirs have edged towards a very stereotyped view of women, Whirlpool presents us with a central female character who engages our complete sympathy. Ann Sutton, usually and revealingly referred to as Mrs William Sutton, is a woman trapped inside four walls constructed by various kinds of male oppression. Having escaped the first trap of an oppressive father, she has found herself caught inside a second one; a marriage based on a lie with which she has played along, acting the part of the dutiful wife while her inner self is screaming to escape. Then she finds herself dominated by a smooth and ruthless psychopath who uses his hypnosis skills to implicate her in a murder. Finally, turning to the police for help, she is forced to rely on yet another father figure to get her out of the mess into which she’s been flung. The ending, superficially happy, suggests that the future will be more of the same and this ambiguous note haunts us long after the mechanics of the plot have been forgotten.

Where The Sidewalk Ends

Detective Mark Dixon (Andrews) has a chip on his shoulder about thugs and has gained a reputation as a hard nut. When an out-of-town gambler is killed in the presence of a local mobster Scalise (Merrill), Dixon is convinced that he knows that Scalise was the killer. But in his investigations, he inadvertantly kills a chief witness and gradually enmeshes himself in a web of lies to hide his involvement even though this results in the innocent father of another witness, Morgan (Tierney) being taken into custody.

Beginning with a close-up shot of a gutter, Where The Sidewalk Ends spends ninety minutes demonstrating that the human race is wallowing in that same gutter and is about to disappear down into the depths of the sewer. Technically speaking, it's a police procedural but it's actually more of a character study which focuses on Mark Dixon, the kind of policeman who makes you wish you'd stuck with the bad guys. Dana Andrews gives his very best performance in this difficult role, finding enormous eloquence in a series of haunted, despairing close-ups as Dixon gets himself deeper and deeper into the shit. Preminger once said that "A cop is basically a criminal", feeling that they became cops in order to legally satisfy an appetite for violence, and Dixon is the embodiment of that theory. Obsessed with revenging himself on his father's memory - his father was a gangster - Dixon's sociopathy is extreme even for this era of film noir. He can't find redemption anywhere and his only saving graces are his honesty to himself, his clear vision - he alone among the characters, with the exception of the gangster Scalise, knows who killed Paine - and his lunatic bravado.

Dana Andrews bestrides the film like the proverbial Colossus but it's not a one-man show. Gene Tierney is once again excellent as the model turned good-time girl who attaches herself to Dixon in the hope that he can prove her father innocent and Tom Tully is very touching as her dad. There are also strong showings from Gary Merrill as the deeply unpleasant Scalise and Karl Malden, in an early role, as the Mr Clean brought in to improve the image of the Police department.

Otto Preminger and Joseph LaShelle reach a peak of their collaboration in Where The Sidewalk Ends, producing a monochrome vision of hell which is comparable in bitter clarity to that of Night and the City. The fluidity of the camera makes it an exciting, fast moving film to watch - the movement is constant right from the start - and the crane shots are especially notable in the scenes at Paine's apartment block. Preminger's use of long takes and tracking shots is richly confident, pointing forward to his great work in the late 1950s and 1960s with talky but visually fluent films such as Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent. In terms of his noir vision, Preminger's world in this film lacks all the romanticism of his earlier works. Where The Sidewalk Ends is grim, nasty and riveting with an ending so fatalistic and downbeat that it points forward to the noir revival of the 1970s. Equally interesting in terms of the censorship battles which Preminger fought in the 1950s is the way that this movie pushes the envelope on vivid and brutal violence and contains oblique hints of drug addiction and homosexuality.

Night And The City

For a full discussion of this exceptional film directed by Jules Dassin, please read Clydefro's DVD Times review. His analysis of the film seems to me to be right on the money and he also includes a comparison between the BFI disc - identical to the one included in this collection - and the Region 1 Criterion release.

The Discs

Each of these DVDs has been released before separately and the pros and cons of each of the Preminger discs are much the same. Each offers excellent contrast, making the most of the superb black and white imagery and there's a reasonable level of sharpness - although Fallen Angel is notably softer than the others. However, there is a considerable amount of print damage evident throughout all three films and it becomes particularly intrusive in Where The Sidewalk Ends which is full of scratches and white popping. Still, all of the films are eminently watchable. The Night and the City transfer is much superior, presumably thanks to superior source materials, and the grunginess of the film is so beautifully transferred that it seems to seep off the screen.

The mono soundtracks on each film vary from the pristine in the case of the Dassin film to the uncomfortably hissy in the case of Fallen Angel. The other two films are reasonably good with dialogue coming across well but a constant underscore of slight crackle.

In terms of extras, the only substantial bonus materials are contained on the Night and the City DVD, replicating those on the individual release. We get an informative commentary track from Paul Duncan, a comparison of the UK and USA versions of the film and a superb interview with Jules Dassin. The other films have brief biographical notes and, with the exception of Whirlpool, the original trailers. As usual with the BFI, the packaging contains a booklet featuring very interesting critical essays on each film. I would have appreciated more detail on the Preminger films in the form of commentary tracks such as those on the R1 Fox discs.

Newcomers to film noir should find themselves well rewarded by this collection which contains two excellent examples of the style and a couple of solid-gold classics. On the whole, very good value for money.