I've been watching a bit of Preminger lately, mostly due to a retrospective that ran at the Music Box Theatre. The screenings were once-a-week matinée shows on weekends; the first of which I saw was a gem from 1950, Where the Sidewalk Ends, starring Dana Andrews as a jaggedy-edged cop covering up a murder he didn't mean to commit. Preminger cuts to the chase. From the start of the credit sequence we're already into the action, punctuated by the film's characters interacting directly with the title cards as they walk over the big, chalked letters on the sidewalk beneath them. City sounds abound: car horns honking, people chattering, it's an overall bustling buzz that hints more at a reality than style. Though that gritty reality is in and of itself a style.
Sgt. Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is a disturbed by something internally (is it the war? at this late date I can't recall if his character is war veteran), which he takes out rather aggressively on the rough-necks he picks up. He's warned by his superiors (one Lt. Thomas, played by Karl Malden) to cool it or he'll be suspended or demoted, or maybe worse; so when he pushes his last suspect, a war hero, a bit too hard, he knows his goose is cooked; he covers up the murder, and on down his cover-up spirals that eventually involves an innocent cabbie, the father of Dix's love interest, Morgan, played by the stunning Gene Tierney.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Fallen Angel (1945) graced my DVD player the next day and brought more of the same Preminger grittiness, though this time with a female lead who is much less graceful and pretty than Gene Tierney: Stella (Linda Darnell), the femme fatale who hooks con artist Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) and inevitably trips him up in a no-win love affair. Stanton sweeps into town and courts the more wholesome hometown girl, June Mills (Alice Faye) who is heir to a small fortune following her parents' deaths, and which is not-so-coincidentally her most attractive feature to the swindling Stanton. Darnell, who is the town's prostitute (though never overtly referred to as such in the film), is such a transient soul--both physically when she runs away and returns time after time, and emotionally, in her loosely defined love with Stanton--is Eric Stanton's center of gravity. But when she falls out of his life, he loses track of it himself. He's caught in a love triangle with a woman's money (and with a woman who loves him unconditionally) and with the woman who has stolen his heart, the cruel and corrupt Stella. Add in with the mix a murder for which Stanton is being framed, and what you have, once again, is a post-war, post-traumatic stress picture that disseminates Stanton's self-confidence in one quick blink.
Eric Stanton is a drinker in the movie (yet another escape from his unbearable being), and after learning recently that Dana Andrews was an alcoholic, I can't think of a more perfect actor to maintain the portrait of Stanton's male fragility. There's a double-layer to the character in Fallen Angel, kind of a transparency of Andrews's self that brings that extra edge of roughness to the film, and moreover, adds that harshness of reality that seems to sum up the signature of Preminger.
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