Fallen Angel (1945) Alice Faye and Dana Andrews in a turgid noir melodrama that becomes more and more ridiculous as it nears its emotional climax, until we were just about busting a gut laughing. An incoherent story made worse by bad studio decisions that ended Faye's film career. I didn't expect it to be very good but never thought it would be as hilariously awful as it was. Poor Percy Kilbride delivers the biggest, albeit unintended, laugh of his career. 3/10
Addendum: Being in more of a mood to elaborate on this, I shall. Though the story itself is pretty incoherent, and it was obviously made more so by deleting anything that would show Faye's motivation for marrying a rather rude and peevish acquaintance of a few days, much of the basic atrociousness of it comes from being directed by Otto Preminger. He was at his best when directing pure melodrama like Laura, where people can suddenly go off into hysteria and neurosis with little cause, but he was occasionally brilliant with more gritty material, such as the outstanding Dana Andrews vehicle Where the Sidewalk Ends. Fallen Angel is a good example of the sort of badness at which Preminger was so good, never better/worse than in his two astounding treatments of the Nelson Algren novels The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side.
