Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

plans, June still shows her love for him. The plot gets even more twisted when Stella is
found murdered and Stanton emerges as the leading suspect. Again, this film underlines
both Preminger’s supremely cinematic extended-take style and the world of his characters.
Whilst Laura marked a significant directional turn for film noir, which began taking
steps outside the original shadowy confines of street wise detectives, and ruthless femmes
fatales who would stop at nothing to get their way, Fallen Angel, along with other noir
films of late forties, seem to insist on increasingly pervasive elements, namely moral
ambiguity and victimisation. The film certainly boasts some very fine Joseph LaShelle
cinematography, duplicating the now familiar noir angles and shadows, but its more
conscious and analytical use of noir “shadowy tropes proves both a continuation and a
deepening of Preminger’s use of moral ambiguity as a tool of human insight” (Croce
2006). In his article, Croce mentions that:
As always with Preminger, no character can be summed up in a single word, their
introduction offering shorthand traits (Andrews’s moodiness, Darnell’s dark
whorishness, Faye’s blond nobility) which will be contradicted during the course of
the film. (...) Preminger’s refusal to draw easy conclusions - his pragmatic curiosity
for people – is reflected in his remarkable visual fluidity, the surveying camera
constantly moving, shifting duelling points-of-view in order to give them equal
weight. (ibid)
The type of description referred to above is sufficiently underlined by the class
distinction that Fallen Angel exposes. Emphasising the good girl - bad girl syndrome
employed in numerous mystery noir films analysed so far (Murder, My Sweet; Out of the
Past; etc), Preminger’s Fallen Angel insists even more on the seamy underbelly of
provincial life and on this particularly seedy aspect of post-World War II America. Finally,
while many would argue that the film lacks the heady combination of desperation,
impending doom and paranoia found in the classic noir film, Fallen Angel manages to
demonstrate the problems besetting the common man tempted by new social opportunities,
as evidenced by Detective McPherson’s entering the world of Manhattan’s rich and famous
and drifter Eric Stanton groping for stability and ultimately finding himself at odds and
disgusted by his own corrupt behaviour.
It is from this detachment and objectivity and “his pragmatic curiosity for people”,
as Croce suggests, that Otto Preminger’s status as an auteur has often been defined. When
analysed as an auteur, Preminger is also often referred to as a show-business phenomenon,
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