Sunday | November 15, 2015 5:00 pm

Angel Face

Screening on Film

Directed by Otto Preminger.
With Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, Mona Freeman.
US, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 91 min.

Equally a fairy tale and a film noir, Otto Preminger’s Angel Face finds world-weary ambulance driver Robert Mitchum falling dangerously for Jean Simmons’ raven-haired princess high on a hill in a Beverly Hills castle. The young woman’s treacherous designs are clear to everyone, including Mitchum, who nevertheless seems powerless to break the spell. Herbert Marshall, as the exiled, wounded patriarch, is a figure of Old World aristocracy that Austrian exile Preminger seems to both cherish and caustically dismiss.