Angel (1984) Review
4/10
Official trailer
A fifteen-year-old attends a private school on a scholarship, returns to a Hollywood apartment where her mother has gone, and works the boulevard to pay the rent. A man begins killing women on the same street.
The 4 is a split rating and the split needs stating. Cliff Gorman, Susan Tyrrell, Rory Calhoun and Dick Shawn are giving real performances, the boulevard footage is a document, and the film was marketed on the sexualization of a child.
The frustrating thing about Angel is how good some of it is. Tyrrell, Gorman and Calhoun are worth watching in anything, and the street footage is priceless, and all of it was put to work selling a fifteen-year-old on a poster. That’s a poor use of talent by the people who built this thing, because the cast deserved a better picture than the one New World wanted to sell.
Shawn was a stand-up comedian and character actor with a long career and the part is given dignity the genre didn’t require. Mae is competent, funny, protective and never the object of a joke, which in 1984 in this category was a decision somebody had to make deliberately. That’s the central fact about it and no amount of craft assessment displaces it. The tagline was printed on the poster, the premise is the selling point, and the commercial logic of the production isn’t separable from the content.
That tagline is also the only thing most people know about the film, forty years on. That’s the marketing working exactly as designed and outliving everything else in the production.
The Premise Is the Objection
The film’s marketing was built entirely on the contrast between a schoolgirl and a sex worker, and the contrast is the product.
What that produces structurally is a picture that has to keep returning to the contrast. School uniform, then the boulevard, then school again, and the alternation is the film’s rhythm because the alternation is what was sold. I find that rhythm wearying and a little ugly, since every scene in the classroom plays as setup for the next trip back to the street.
The school material is also the thinnest thing in the picture. There’s a teacher, a classmate, an assignment and a scholarship, and none of it is developed, because the school exists to establish the contrast and not to be a place. Donna Wilkes was twenty-five when this was shot. That’s the standard mitigation offered and doesn’t address the objection. The character is fifteen, the film knows it, and the camera treats her accordingly in several sequences.
The film also can’t commit to its own position. It presents the work as dangerous and degrading, gives her a speech about wanting out, and then continues staging her at length in the same material it’s just condemned.
Compare what Ms. 45 does on this page with material that’s in some respects worse. That film films its assaults briefly and without eroticizing them, and the difference between the two pictures comes down entirely to a set of decisions about where a camera goes, how long it stays there, and what the people operating it had been instructed to go looking for in the first place.
A premise that exists to deliver a contrast will produce a structure that keeps returning to it, because the contrast is what the premise promised the reader. Test your premise by asking what the poster would say. If the poster is the reason the book exists, you’ll build the book to serve the poster.
Condemning something you’re also staging at length is the most common bad-faith structure in fiction. The reader receives the staging and discounts the condemnation. Casting an adult doesn’t change what a character is. The text says fifteen and the text is what a reader responds to.
The Supporting Cast Is Good
Susan Tyrrell plays Solly Mosler, the landlady, and the performance is the best thing in the film by a considerable distance. Tyrrell had been nominated for an Academy Award a decade earlier and spent the rest of her career in work like this. That’s its own subject. Solly is loud, protective, coarse and entirely unsentimental, and Tyrrell plays her as somebody who has decided to look after a child nobody else is looking after.
The best thing she does is refuse to be grateful for her own decency, and I adore her for it. Solly treats looking after a child as an irritation, complains about it nonstop, and keeps doing it anyway, and the film is smart enough to let her. Whenever she’s on screen I forget for a minute what kind of movie I’m watching.
Rory Calhoun plays an ageing cowboy actor who performs on the street for tourists, and the character is written with real affection. He had been a studio contract player in the fifties and is playing a version of that decline.
Dick Shawn’s Mae is a drag performer who’s the closest thing the film has to a family for its protagonist, and the part is handled with considerably more respect than a 1984 exploitation picture had any obligation to show.
Cliff Gorman
Lieutenant Andrews is the detective and Gorman plays him as a working professional with no interest in being the hero of anything. The performance is doing something specific. Andrews is decent, tired, and treats the women on the street as witnesses and people and not as a moral category, and the film uses him to establish that somebody in authority sees them.
His interview scenes are the film’s best procedural material. He takes statements, writes things down, asks follow-up questions, and treats the answers as information and not as testimony about somebody’s moral condition. Gorman was a serious stage actor who had originated the lead in The Boys in the Band and won a Tony, and he’s operating here at a level the material doesn’t require.
What the character provides structurally is the film’s only adult position. Every other authority figure in the picture is either absent, predatory or ineffective, and Andrews is the single point where an institution behaves reasonably.
The killer, by contrast, is barely a character, and it hurts the film more than it should. He’s a man with a grievance about women, established in two scenes, and the film has no interest in him beyond needing somebody to put pressure on the street. A thriller with a villain this thin is leaning on its premise to supply the menace. That tells me exactly where the filmmakers’ attention was.
One character who behaves reasonably establishes what the rest of the world is failing at. Without a functioning adult somewhere in the frame, a story about neglect has no measure. The mistake is making them ineffective. Andrews is competent and constrained. That’s different from useless.
A performer operating above the material is worth noticing. It usually means somebody read the part and found something in it that the script didn’t know was there. Treating your minor characters as witnesses and people and not as a category is a decision one character can carry on behalf of the whole work.
Tyrrell also died in 2012 having worked almost continuously in this category for forty years, and a page like this is where most of that work sits. A nominated actor spending a career in exploitation pictures is a fact about distribution instead of about ability.
The Boulevard
The location work is the film’s other real asset. Hollywood Boulevard in 1983, shot at night, in the actual arcades, theaters, apartment buildings and doorways.
The specificity is what survives. Individual marquees, a costume shop, a wax museum, the pavement stars, and the particular quality of a street that was a tourist destination and a working district at the same hours.
The Chinese Theater forecourt appears repeatedly and is the one location a modern viewer will recognize immediately. That makes the rest of the block’s disappearance more legible by contrast. Like Times Square on this page, the footage has outlived the film. That stretch of boulevard was considerably redeveloped from the late nineties and the version in these frames is gone.
What the film does with it is mixed. The daytime material treats the street as somewhere people live and work, and the night material treats it as a set, and the difference between those two approaches is visible within single sequences. John Diehl is also in it as a street hustler and the performance is the earliest thing of his I’ve seen. He’d spend the eighties in work like this and then turn up in Stripes, Miami Vice and a long run of character parts.
What New World Was
This was produced under Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. It’s the context that explains the whole object.
The model was specific and it worked. Identify a marketable premise, budget it low, hire capable people who need work, shoot fast, and release wide, and the premise is the first decision instead of the last.
That order is why films like this exist. Nobody arrived at a story and then found a way to sell it.
New World also had a fixed arrangement about running time and rating. Ninety minutes, a certificate the drive-in market could take, and a poster that could be designed before the script was finished, and all three shaped what arrived.
The company also gave early opportunities to a great many people who went on to significant careers.
That’s the standard defense of the operation and is true. Both things are true at once. A production model that trained a generation of filmmakers also produced a considerable amount of work built on premises like this one.
Three sequels followed. That tells you the commercial answer. My rating is a judgment about a film, and the market delivered a different one. It doesn’t move me an inch. A poster can keep selling tickets for forty years and still be selling the wrong thing.
The sequels also moved the character steadily away from the premise. That’s the clearest evidence that the studio knew the original hook wasn’t repeatable. By the fourth film she’s a private investigator.
When the premise is the first decision, everything downstream serves the sale. That’s a production model instead of a moral failing in any individual, and it produces predictable work. The corresponding trap in publishing is the concept that’s easier to pitch than to write. A system can be good at developing people and bad in what it produces, and holding both is more useful than choosing one.
Commercial confirmation isn’t a rebuttal. Three sequels means it sold, and selling was never the question.
Should you watch Angel?
For the supporting cast and the footage, with the objection standing.
Susan Tyrrell, Rory Calhoun, Dick Shawn and Cliff Gorman are all doing real work, and Hollywood Boulevard in 1983 is on screen in a way nobody can film again. That’s what keeps it at a 4. The premise the film was sold on is why it goes no higher, and putting that premise on the poster and calling it a hook was a cheap shot.
