Coffee Spew

Otto Focus

Simmons & Mitchum in "Angel Face"
Simmons & Mitchum in Angel Face (1953).

As regards classic 1940s and 50s film noir, David Denby said it best in his recent New Yorker profile of director Otto Preminger:

So many pictures now are bloated with unnecessary spectacle and backstory that the economy and decisiveness of the noirs—violent, saturnine, dark-city crime narratives driven by strongly motivated characters—seems more miraculous than ever.

Preminger’s best-known noir is Laura (1944), but cognoscenti and coffee spewers alike prefer Angel Face (1953), starring Jean Simmons as femme fatale and Robert Mitchum as unsuspecting chump. Should you watch Angel Face on DVD, don’t miss the commentary by Eddie Muller.

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Responses

  1. John

    Bob, I love the context you provide for seeing these two films, and particularly enjoyed your critique of Cloverfield (a movie I will now go out of my way to avoid). I think Richard Roper said that even regular people with video recorders know how to hold them steady today. John

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  2. Bob W.

    Thanks, John. I just read Anthony Lane’s review of Cloverfield in the New Yorker that Talia dropped off. He’s right that once you strip away the camcorder nonsense it’s essentially just a cliché-ridden Godzilla knockoff. As I mentioned, I thought the only fresh element was using the inadvertent bleed-through of erased video footage as flashbacks. The movie’s worth a rental, at best.

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  3. john

    Bob, looks like you changed the template. I like this one much better. Some of these old computers (mine) really need things simple to work at all. This does.

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