96 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
By John Bleasdale
John Huston’s 1941 noir The Maltese Falcon closes
with the police escorting murderer Brigid
O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) down to street level
by elevator. Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade takes
the stairs. They are both going to hell, though
she’s going to get there first. In the closing
moments of Alan Parker’s 1987 neo-noir Angel
Heart, a morally dubious private eye will once
more take a final elevator to the pit, although
this time the descent feels far more literal.
Based on William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling
Angel, and set in 1955, Parker’s film tells the story
of seedy New York detective Harry Angel (Mickey
Rourke), who at the behest of his mysterious
client Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) goes on a
search for Johnny Favorite, a crooner injured in
World War II who Cyphre says owes him a debt.
Favorite has gone missing and Angel pursues
his traces from Harlem to New Orleans, through
acquaintances and past lovers. As he does so,
someone is murdering the people he interviews.
Angel is a classic noir protagonist: a man
trapped in a larger plot he only belatedly realises
was there all along. “I know who I am,” he repeats
over and over, having learned via a set of military
dog tags towards the end of the film that he and
Johnny Favorite are one and the same man. Harry
Angel was a young soldier, sacrificed in a satanic
ritual, whose identity was stolen. Rourke’s voice
is raw, following a throat-shredding scream.
He is sweaty, unshaven; a man destroyed.
This is a genuinely powerful twist, playing
against audience assumptions that Rourke –
then at the height of his stardom – couldn’t
possibly be the doomed villain. The second
revelation isn’t so much a surprise as a
confirmation of what we knew all along:
Louis Cyphre is a pun on Lucifer – “a dime
store joke”, as Angel puts it. “Mephistopheles
is such a mouthful in Manhattan,” De Niro’s
devil quips in response, as an almost parodic
clap of thunder sounds on his appearance.
Revelations in whodunits usually return order
to the universe by identifying the guilty and seeing
justice done. But noir is crime drama with a gothic
undertow, and in the Manichean universe of Angel
Heart, the revelation does no good. As Cyphre says,
quoting Sophocles: “How terrible is wisdom when
it brings no profit to the wise, Johnny.” Cyphre
lets his hair down from its sleek ponytail, and
his long fingernails, which seemed like a mere
affectation when we saw them peeling hard-boiled
eggs earlier, are now more recognisably talons. His
confirmed identity also reveals the genre of Angel
Heart as a supernatural horror film. The Voodoo
clues earlier on were not some Scooby Doo-like
ruse. Cyphre’s voice now growls and his eyes take
on a snake-like appearance as he lays claim to
Johnny’s soul. Such an over-the-top conclusion
could be risible and Parker knows it, but the
performances, the writing and the atmosphere
all combine to create a tragic resonance.
As Cyphre puts on a record – ‘Girl of My
Dreams’, one of Johnny’s old hits – we and Johnny
(as we must now call Angel) see scenes the film
has so far omitted – the moments when Johnny
himself committed the murders. He has had
visions throughout the film – including during a
sex scene with Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet),
drenched in raining blood, which almost earned
the film a commercially fatal X certificate. This last
image reappears once more at the conclusion of
the montage and brings Johnny back to the present
and the realisation that Cyphre has disappeared.
Outside in the street, rain pours on New Orleans.
Johnny stumbles into the deluge and splashes back
to his hotel room, where further horrors await.
Lisa Bonet’s casting as Epiphany was a source
of controversy. She gained fame as the daughter
in the wholesome sitcom The Cosby Show. And
now, following that contentious earlier scene, she
is a corpse on the bed, the victim of a terrible sex
crime, shot with Angel’s gun and wearing his dog
tags. In another shocking twist, Johnny identifies
her as his daughter. “You’re going to burn for
this, Angel,” the incredulous cop says. Johnny
resignedly agrees, having had his own epiphany
of how doomed he really is: “I know... in hell.”
But one final twist is in store, as Epiphany’s
baby is brought on to the bloody crime scene.
As Johnny looks on, the child is revealed to
share the same reptilian eyes as Cyphre. The
elevator doors clang open and, as the final
credits roll, Johnny descends to his fate.
Angel Heart is released on Blu-ray
by StudioCanal on 14 October
ANGEL HEART
The road to hell is paved with good
intentions for doomed detective
Harry Angel, in Alan Parker’s
diabolically effective horror noir
The conclusion could be risible,
but the performances, the writing
and the atmosphere all combine
to create a tragic resonance
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Endings, 1
