Has there ever been a better time to be alive? I mean, Netflix movies beamed straight to the Tivo? Books on the Kindle? Twenty or thirty movie channels? All this entertainment right at our fingertips. Bread! Circuses! World's Dumbest Criminals! It's all there for you ... but if you want to enjoy it all, don't make Neil Postman's 1985 Amusing Ourselves To Death the first e-book you read. Please, Morpheus ... just plug me back in.
Of course, having to work 80 hours a week to pay for this much entertainment is a bit of a problem. I wish I could afford to hire somebody to watch all the TV I'm missing.
But I'd give it all up, all this access to old movies, new movies, HBO specials about the dildo industry, to live in the film world of the 1940s. Not the real, full color world of the 1940s, with its segregation, polio, etc., but the black and white world of film. Evil and corruption are everywhere, but at least they look like evil and corruption. And there's smoking. And hats. Cops in hats, gangsters in hats, nurses in hats.
This brings me to Fallen Angel, which I caught on Netflix recently ... available for instant download. It's a nice little movie ... it's not Double Indemnity, but it has a lot of that film's strengths: lots of attention to the visual aspects of storytelling, crisp dialogue, and fine acting, in particular from Dana Andrews, who successfully sells sympathetic sociopathy. We don't get a lot of backstory on this drifter who lands in town when his traveling money runs out, but he manages to imply it credibly. There's a lot of anger there, and Andrews lets it show through, but that's no surprise ... he's usually very good. The character makes decisions a lot of people wouldn't make, but you buy it.
And then there's Linda Darnell. Good God. She has to make us believe that a bunch of smart guys will do stupid things with the right incentive, and she succeeds, as well as Barbara Stanwyck ever did, and better than Lana Turner with John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Which is saying something. Not just the drifter, and not just the retired cop played by Charles Bickford, who ought to be in every movie ... even Pop, proprietor of Pop's Eats, is smitten. Darnell plays tough but vulnerable to perfection. We talk a lot about children growing up too fast today, but I gotta tellya, Linda Darnell makes twenty-two look a lot more--well, a lot more--than most of the twenty-two year old adolescents I deal with.
A reviewer on IMDB says Fallen Angel is better than Preminger's better-known film Laura, but I'm not willing to go that far. It's just a short step down, though, and some may prefer the more straightforward, chronologically linear narrative. Laura is in that class of genre-transcending films, while Fallen Angel is a great example of its genre ... a distinction that won't matter to some people and doesn't much matter to me.
A final note: John Carradine's turn as the medium, Professor Madley, is delightful ... Preacher Casy in a parallel universe.