Alex da Silva Dana Andrews (Eric) drifts into a small town and hits the café/bar that is run by Percy Kilbride (Pop). He has no money but quickly scams his way into promoting a charlatan spiritualist act that communicates with the dead headed by John Carradine (Madley). On being offered a permanent position with this travelling act, he decides instead to hang around the small town to hook up with the waitress who works for Percy. It's Linda Darnell (Stella) and she is "loose" if you get my drift. She likes to go on dates. Well, Andrews is smitten and things don't go well for him once he kick-starts a plan to get Darnell for himself.The cast are good in this film. Andrews is an easy lead to follow even though he is of dubious character and Darnell is excellent as the woman who captivates him. Detective Charles Bickford (Mark) is also good as the man who investigates the murder. Yes, we get a murder and it's a shame about the victim. Alice Faye (June) is the goody-two shoes who falls in love with Andrews. That part of the film is not at all believable until you start to question her. Is she the 'fallen angel' of the title who is going to take some sort of revenge and murder Andrews? Let's hope so, otherwise she's a weak link. Carradine also deserves a mention – his role is small but will leave you wanting more.

kols Grew up with 30s/40s films but somehow missed this one and delighted to have tripped over it on FMC tonight.Despite the 6 stars, highly recommended.Those six stars? Because the movie is split into light and darkness with Darnell as the dark bad girl and Faye as the good light girl. The dark scenes are classic and as good as anything I've ever seen in a Noir; the sparks between Andrews and Darnell are as raw and sexual as you can get short of porn, would have loved to have seen Andrews hands disappear bellow the frame with Darnell mewing her arousal as the heavy breathing dissolves into the imagination and hotter sex than porn could ever deliver.The light scenes are well done and well acted but just don't belong - it's like a totally different movie, a well-done small town Andy Hardy kind of thing.Initially I blamed Faye - great actress, great comedian but no hint of darkness, just the consummate girl-next-door. And that is what she is in the light scenes. But then she had a couple of dark scenes and, while the sparks were different, they were there.So it wasn't Faye and, after reading cfryx's review, I can see what likely happened. Instead of counterpointing Darnell and Faye, Zanuck intervened, highlighted Darnell at Faye's expense, and turned what might have been a 9 star classic into a very interesting but extremely flawed 6. Producers, directors and especially studio heads should be neutered as a condition of employment.

robert-temple-1 This is truly a memorable film noir of the immediate post-War period, directed by the grand master, Otto Preminger. The star of the film is the 22 year-old Linda Darnell, as a hard-boiled, free-ranging girl on the make. She has only to raise her eyebrow to make men slobber, she knows it, and she is determined to use it to get 'a home and a ring'. Just as now, there was a problem with men not wanting to commit, so this leads to the noirish complications of this dark tale of passion. The change in Linda Darnell since her debut in films only six years earlier is astonishing. In her first film, HOTEL FOR WOMEN (1939, see my review, which six years later is still the only review of this film on IMDb), Darnell was a wide-eyed innocent and as fresh as a new loaf of bread just out of the oven. But, then, she was at that time only sixteen! It is a great tragedy that this talented actress died at the early age of 41 in a house fire, in 1965, ironically while watching herself on television (surely one of the most bizarre deaths of a movie star ever recorded). Dana Andrews is the languid male lead in this film, but here he is meaner-spirited than usual, showing by his callous and calculating nature that the feelings of others don't come into it. Natch, he falls for the irresistible dame and does unspeakable things in his desperation to have Darnell for himself. But there are other men who have their own ideas. Darnell works in Pop's Diner as a sultry waitress who sometimes shows up for work, sometimes not. Pop is played by Percy Kilbride (1888-1964), an excellent older character actor who is infatuated with Darnell, as everybody else is too, of course. I was somewhat thrown by one discrepancy in this film, however. A big deal is made of Andrews paying five cents for a cup of coffee in Pop's Diner at the beginning of the film, but throughout the film we continually see on the wall a sign saying that a cup of coffee costs ten cents. Come on, continuity!! When people get numbers wrong, I get jumpy. Charles Bickford plays a very cool cucumber, a local police chief who is always in Pop's Diner drinking that ambiguously-priced coffee. He eyes Andrews suspiciously throughout the film, who also spends rather a lot of time at the same diner counter, ogling the same Darnell, and drinking the same coffee. This later turns out to be important, though early in the story it is very down-played by the cunning Preminger. The script has some taut lines, such as Andrews saying 'Don't smile. Your face looks better without it.' But there are not as many wisecracks as one would like, and there is little time for any humour. Alice Faye plays a local 'good gal' who is from a rich family. She is very fetching, and one wonders why only Darnell gets all the attention. She does not sing in this film, although she does play the organ in church ('I was improvising,' she says to Andrews, who thinks she was playing some famous composer). Faye's older sister is well played by Anne Revere, who in this role might as well be called Anne Severe. (IMDb informs me that she was a direct descendant of Paul Revere, the hero of the American Revolution, so I had better show a bit more respect!) Severe is trying to save her little sister from falling into the clutches of Andrews, who wants to marry her for her money while being insanely infatuated by Darnell. Does this remind you of a film noir? Yes! And it goes on from there, getting more and more twisted up in knots of passion, fate, desperation, obsession, lust, you name it. The lighting is superb, so atmospheric, with all those striped effects even when there are no Venetian blinds anywhere to justify them, brooding darkness, but with spots in all the right places, just perfect for the genre. Preminger's direction is flawless. This is one of those velvety-smooth noir classics, there's no doubt about that. And the Fox Noir Series DVD release is made from a perfectly preserved negative, not an old print, so the quality of the images is as crisp as if the film were made only last week.

funkyfry Otto Preminger and star Dana Andrews made this film a year after their highly acclaimed "Laura", with leading ladies Linda Darnell and Alice Faye (top billed above Darnell and Andrews). As with "Laura", this is a mystery film and fits solidly into the genre of mystery, and not suspense as many have claimed. This is just the first of many misunderstandings in my opinion about the film that stem from genre concerns.Although in a sense it's intriguing, the first thing that limits this film is the seemingly random and even arguably contrived nature of the main character's actions. Eric (Andrews) arrives in town short of bus fare to San Francisco, and manages to involve himself with a sham-mystic (John Carradine) and a pair of young ladies with a small inherited fortune (Faye and Anne Revere as her jealous sister), all as a sidelight to falling in love with sultry barmaid Stella (Darnell). He promises Stella that he can get enough money to marry her and buy her a house, seemingly by marrying June (Faye) and stealing her money from the safe deposit box in SF.Given this scenario, it's extremely hard for the film-makers to twist our sympathies so that they eventually favor all 3 of the principals. First of all, we're supposed to believe that June has some deep, truly meaningful emotional commitment to Eric even though they've only known each other for a week and Eric was busted trying to steal her money and could possibly be a killer. It's the old standard "women's picture" trope about the faithful wife, draw to a truly ridiculous extreme that would make most modern viewers cringe.Then we have Eric, a truly weird guy. Dana Andrews was not the best actor to play this character; he is too much of a static presence to play such a dynamic speaker and personality. It calls for the kind of grace and glib that Tyrone Power showed in "Nightmare Alley" or Glenn Ford in "3:10 to Yuma." It's a little bit hard to believe that Dana Andrews of all people has some kind of preternatural charm.But then there's Darnell, cast as a good girl who bears every distinguishing mark and trait of a very bad girl. She's very sexy in this movie and the dance-hall scenes and beach scenes are perhaps some of the steamiest of the 1940s. However I was surprised so many reviewers here singled her out as a bad girl or a "femme fatale." They must be viewing the film through the context of the so-called "film noir" genre as opposed to the mystery genre which this film is actually a part of. If you take time to really re-construct the story, she is a complete innocent (which, in turn, justifies Eric's "obsession" with her as simply a romantic emotion). It's clear she has a prior relationship of some kind with the sadistic detective Judd (Charles Bickford", who we find out at the conclusion was the killer, motivated by jealousy over Eric and another suitor (Bruce Cabot). Instead of a woman motivated to manipulate all 3 men for money, it becomes easy to see that she was so terrified by Judd's behavior that she made a desperate plea to both Eric and Cabot's character in the hopes that they could rescue her from the psycho-stalker police officer. How so many people can still see her as a "femme fatale" after all the facts are on the table is sort of beyond me, but I suppose it's part of the convoluted and unreal nature of this narrative to begin with.The film is far from a total success but just as far from a total bore. The scenes with Darnell and Andrews are delicious, and the weird asexual stalemate between Faye and Andrews is almost as interesting although somewhat too sincere. There's a wince-inducing scene where they lounge on the beach (Andrews: "Every night could be like this: on the beach, eating hot dogs....") and then the strange aftermath of Stella's death with June's disturbing reaction (she insists she knows he can't be the killer, although she's only known him for a week during which he tried to steal her life's savings). Preminger's excellent direction makes this rather predictable and improbable murder a very enjoyable viewing experience.