Fallen Angel
We enjoy art about the everyday more than we think we do, or more than we allow ourselves; or, we have to be shocked into remembering how much we enjoy it. A little stimulus – in the form of almost anything, a gunshot, a mink stole, a wink – will engage us, and once engaged we will happily watch the grass grow, the leaves turn, traffic lights, crowds.
Fallen Angel has a crenellated plot that takes five or six right turns, and thus a broken-backed momentum – it might have been done more elegantly with chapter headings. It begins with a nice bit of low-stakes con-artistry, a man on a bus trying to pass himself off as asleep so that he can overshoot his stop. Mock-wakened by the driver, he asks how much it is to San Francisco. It’s too much. He gets off, finding himself in a small seaside town. How many journeys have we seen interrupted like this? Someone is on their way to somewhere big, but first they must make time in somewhere small; and their outsized qualities, which might have gotten lost in the city’s anonymizing shuffle, here have room to breath and become truly distinctive. Likewise, the small town’s sedentary charms, turned transient to someone only passing through, take on new freshness and urgency.
The con man is Eric Stanton, played by Dana Stanton as an alley cat, all dour purr and ranginess. The town is Walton, played by Orange, CA. It has at least one leafy lane and at least one grand house; at least one diner (Pop’s Eats) and one church; and at least one dark and dingy apartment building, whose exterior staircase leads up into a deep black void. We are given Walton very much in scenes; as in a videogame travel between locales is seamless and hidden. As a result the town is not particularly coherent, nor is it meant to be. It’s a complex place, there’s a lot going on, as travelers we can’t hope to take it all in.
Stranded and broke, Eric lands on his feet, and after a little light conning (a nifty short film in itself) is ready to move on, or would be ready if he hadn’t fallen in love. The object of his fierce, sudden, rough affection is Stella (Linda Darnell). Something of a fetish object for the town’s male inhabitants, Stella waitresses at Pops and then, after closing, goes on dates. She is looking for stability and money – she needs someone to marry her, to make a good marriage; to understand her we have to really grasp how precarious her life is. She has nothing of her own to fall back on (she lives up in that deep dark void at the top of the apartment complex stairs), and as somehow low-class, disreputable, no perfectly respectable man will engage her. She has to navigate among inappropriate types - priapic oldsters, underworld elements, and worst of all men who present as acceptable but who only want to exploit her, without offering the minimal good life she longs for. Eric is initially of this latter type; he takes her to a dancehall – where their first kiss is filmed in a clinching close-up – then to the moonlit beach, where he takes off his jacket and lays it on the sand for her to presumably recline upon. It goes nowhere. She thoroughly doubts him. It’s only after this rejection (of course it’s only after this rejection) that he falls for her, and then the problem remains that he has no money. All he can offer her is what she has now, plus him.
There is another woman in town, the fair, rich, and innocent June Mills (Alice Faye). June and Eric have a connection, and so he develops a plan – marry June, get her money, and with the money marry Stella. You see the flaw, right?
June is a problem character, for many reviewers an insoluble problem. Faye, a huge bankable star at the time, had handpicked her to play; but apparently the studio decided that they wanted to push Linda Darnell – thus Faye’s scenes were cut back and Darnell’s increased. Faye was outraged and quit acting, for the most part, after. She’s lost from our collective mainstream memory, but she was one of the biggest stars to ever quit the business while the business was still good. In any case, the cut scenes may have eliminated some nuance, because what we see of June is – or can be taken as, I will argue the point in a bit – a howling portrait of unjustifiable innocence. With only minimal effort on Eric’s part she falls for him. She marries him, and on their wedding night he sneaks out to tell Stella to just wait, he’ll get the cash and an annulment, just give him time.
The next morning however Stella turns up dead, and we are treated to a strangely abbreviated whodunnit. Not Eric, but the police finger him, and he and the trusting June flee to the city to hide out, ending up in a cheap hotel. There they try to hash out who they are to each other, and what to do next. These hotel scenes have a slowed, awkward, malingering feel; the film, which has positioned June as a spinster, now gingerly considers what it might be to view her as erotic. And here is where I will argue for June as a character, and for Faye’s portrayal of her. If we think of June as conventional in her romantic desires, then the trust she puts in Eric is, yes, dumb. But it is also possible to read her as having a more complex emotionality and sexuality, as being someone interested in probing certain verboten corners of her character, and who might perhaps want to develop her palate for a whole variety of experiences. This ennobles her, and frames her pursuit of Eric as being not naïve, but rather unusually motivated. She takes her place alongside Osgood Fielding III as a lover whose passion extends past what could be portrayed at the time, and in some ways what could be portrayed period. They are deep, internal, ingrown lovers. Faye, on her end, sells it: her confessions of love come with touches of irony, as if she’s watching and admiring herself, taking pleasure in what others see as abjection. And by contrast when she does express the desiring component of her love, her incredibly rich voice – all cream and thick honey – throbs out with perfect sincerity.
The aesthetic of the film is typical Preminger, everything clear and visually concise, even as the film itself is extremely unhurried. The noir plotting delivers the necessary stimulus to unlock our regard for small things, and he displays them without emphasis – that is, the way we want them to be displayed, when we are being honest and self-knowing. There is the ornate, kingly cash register that sits on the counter at Pop’s (a joint that is humble in every other regard, so that we wonder at the register and at what it means, and to who); the pleasing way Eric knocks over an ashtray when he reaches for the phone from his hotel bed; the mechanics of accessing a safety deposit box in post-war San Francisco. When it is time to wrap everything up, Preminger – a man who was all power and will and self-regard, a notorious bully – leaves us with a final shot that is resolutely modest, a few buildings and between them a gap showing the night sky.
