Angel Heart

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Movie
German title Angel Heart
Original title Angel Heart
Angel Heart Filmlogo.png
Country of production United States , Canada , United Kingdom
original language English , French
Publishing year 1987
length 113 minutes
Age rating FSK 18 (original rating)
FSK 16 (re-examination 2001)
Rod
Director Alan Parker
script Alan Parker
William Hjortsberg
production Mario Kassar
Elliott Kastner
Alan Marshall
Andrew G. Vajna
music Trevor Jones
camera Michael Seresin
cut Gerry Hambling
occupation

Angel Heart is an American-Canadian-British mystery and psychological thriller from 1987 . Directed by Alan Parker , who also wrote the screenplay based on the novel Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg . Mickey Rourke played the main role .

action

The shabby-looking private detective Harry Angel lives in New York in the mid-1950s . An obscure client - Louis Cyphre - hires him to track down a debtor. The wanted one is a musician named Johnny Favorite, who has been considered missing since the end of the Second World War . The trail leads to a private sanatorium, where Favorite was treated after brain damage and the resulting amnesia . Angel breaks into the doctor's house and finds several bottles of morphine in his refrigerator . When the detective surprises him as he enters his apartment, the drug addict reveals to him that, for a fee of 25,000 dollars, he had secretly placed Johnny Favorite, who had been disfigured by a war wound, into the care of a man and a woman twelve years earlier, but he did not know where the two took him. Since Angel believes the doctor is hiding something from him, he unceremoniously locks him in a room. When he later checks on him, he finds the doctor murdered in his bed by being shot in the head. As a precautionary measure, Angel removes his fingerprints in the house and seeks out a friend of his journalist friends to find out more about Johnny Favorite. This tells him that two members of his band still live in the south and that one of them, who calls himself Toots Sweet, is still performing. He also learns that there is a fortune teller on Coney Island who calls herself Madame Zora and who can tell him more about Favorite. From her he learns that Favorite was engaged to an upper class lady in New Orleans named Margaret Krusemark and that she was a student of Madame Zora.

Angel then takes the train to New Orleans and visits Margaret Krusemark under an assumed name. He reveals to her that he is following in Favorite's trail, but she is not ready to give him any information. With the words that the singer has already died and if that is not the case, he has died for her anyway, she expels him from the house.

Angel then takes a rental car and drives to the grave of Evangeline Proudfoot, the former lover of Johnny Favorite. Once there, he observes a young woman with her child at Proudfoot's grave. When he starts talking to her - her name is Epiphany - it turns out that she is their daughter. Her mother died after waiting all the time for the singer to return. Angel takes a liking to her, but can't find out more about Favorite. He drives back to New Orleans, where he meets Toots Sweet in a bar where he is still performing. However, he is just as reluctant to talk about Favorite. During a break in play, he follows him to the toilet to question him further. Angel notices a severed chicken leg. When he asked what that meant, the guitarist replied that it was a warning because he was chatting too much. Before Angel can question him further, he is beaten up by a man and thrown out of the bar.

But Angel doesn't want to give up and waits in his car in front of the bar for the nightclub to close, then secretly drives Toots Sweet after. He observes him attending a voodoo ritual; Surprisingly, he also sees Epiphany there, who apparently plays a leading role as a shaman. Angel follows Sweet to his apartment and overwhelms him there. He intimidates him until he gives him the name of a voodoo priestess - Evangeline Proudfoot - who is said to have had a relationship with the singer Favorite.

Angel has nightmares at his hotel. When he wakes up, two police officers are searching his room. They tell him that Toots Sweet was cruelly murdered shortly after Angel questioned him at home. Angel is told not to leave for the time being. He decides to visit Margaret Krusemark again, but finds her murdered in her house, too, with her heart cut out. He later notices that he is being followed by two men in a pickup truck . They beat up Angel and, on behalf of Margaret Krusemark's father, demand that he leave town. Angel then visits Epiphany again and speaks to her about the voodoo ritual and the murders. Epiphany finally reveals to him that Favorite is her father.

After another meeting with Louis Cyphre - in a church - Angel finds Epiphany in front of his apartment door, who has been waiting for him in the rain. After an ecstatic act of love, there is a knock on his window and the two police officers tell him that the fortune teller Margaret Krusemark has been murdered, which, given the high position of her family, means a catastrophe. However, Angel hides the fact that he already knows this and instead pretends not to know her. Angel becomes more and more panicked at the fact that all murders somehow point to him as the perpetrator. He is particularly dismayed that he is repeatedly haunted by fragments of memory for which he can find no explanation.

After another confrontation with his tailors, Angel seeks out Ethan Krusemark, who set the men on him. Krusemark tells him an incredible story. It was he and his daughter Margaret who picked Favorite from the clinic and secretly dumped him in New York's Times Square , in the hope that the singer, who suffered from amnesia due to a war injury, would remember who he is. Favorite and Margaret are said to have dealt with black magic and performed a ritual there in a hotel with which he wanted to change his identity. For his career as a singer, Favorite had sold his soul to Satan and he, Krusemark, witnessed how he actually conjured up the prince of Hell. In order to escape the consequences of this trade, however, Favorite searched for and found a magic formula in an old book in order to be able to swap his own identity with that of another man. So he hoped to outwit the devil and thus save his soul. With the help of Krusemark's daughter, they are said to have persuaded a soldier of the same age who was going to celebrate in Times Square on New Year's Eve 1943 to come with them to Johnny's hotel room. There Favorite performed the ritual by cutting out the young soldier's heart so quickly that it was said to have been beating while he was swallowing it. Then he sealed his army identification tag in a vase. But before Favorites was finally transformed, he was called up for military service. So he only acquired the memories of the soldier he killed from his previous life, but not his external appearance. Angel is now slowly realizing that in truth he must be the singer Johnny Favorite and that he has been looking for himself all the time. He does not want to admit this, however, and describes what he has just heard as "a pot full of shit". When suddenly the door between him and Krusemark slams shut, he walks around the room and finds him drowned in a large cauldron of steaming gumbo soup.

He then rushes to Krusemark's daughter's apartment again and finds the vase there. He smashes it and actually finds the dog tag of the dead young soldier named Harry Angel. When he goes into another room with the stamp in hand, his client, Louis Cyphre, is sitting there, who tells him that knowledge is something terrible if it is of no use. Favorite now notes that the name Louis Cyphre means nothing but Lucifer . He makes it clear to him that under his influence he killed all those people he questioned in search of himself, and that he had been condemned for his identity since the moment he killed the young soldier Harry Angel to accept.

He returns to his apartment where the two police officers are already waiting for him. The dead Epiphany Proudfoot is lying in bed, although he now also realizes that he unknowingly slept with his own daughter - and in her vagina is the revolver with which he fired. One of the two officers told him that he would be burning for it. Angel nods and replies that he knows. "In hell." The final sequence shows Harry Angel / Favorite riding down a large elevator - an allusion to the ride to hell .

Motifs

Some motifs are repeated several times:

  • "The Girl of My Dreams": This melody accompanies Harry throughout the film. It is Favorite's most successful song.
  • Guns: Harry touches all guns before the victims are murdered with them - an allusion to the fact that it is he who carries out these acts.
  • Reverse rotating fan: In all murder attacks, the fans suddenly start rotating backwards.
  • Mirror: Every time Harry looks in a mirror, he sees a flashback of New Year's Eve when he murdered the young soldier. The flashbacks are each accompanied by a heartbeat.
  • Dogs: They react nervously in Harry's presence - a nod to the fact that dogs have a sixth sense and recognize Harry's malevolent nature.
  • Chickens: They appear several times and are a continuous motif that is enhanced in a discarded chicken foot and culminates in the blood sacrifice of a chicken. Harry keeps saying that he can't go with them, he keeps getting frightened of chickens, when crossing a chicken coop they scare him.
  • Names:
    • Harry Angel: According to the Bible, Lucifer is viewed as a fallen angel who has turned away from God.
    • Johnny Favorite: According to the Bible, Lucifer was initially seen as God's favorite angel.
    • Louis Cyphre: An allusion to Lucifer.
    • Winesap and MacIntosh: The names of Louis Cyphres lawyers are apple varieties. In Christian symbolism, the apple stands for the temptation to fall into sin .
    • Edward Kelly : The alias of Krusemark; he was an occultist from the 16th century.

Reviews

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times of March 6, 1987 that the plot of the film followed the peculiar logic of a nightmare. He praised the portrayals of Lisa Bonet and Brownie McGhee and the style of the film. The role of Bonet, which is very different from that in the Bill Cosby Show , is controversial in its untamed sexuality. However, he also pointed out that Rourke occupies the center of the film like a “bed that was forcibly unmade” .

Rita Kempley wrote in the Washington Post on March 6, 1987 that Robert De Niro was exaggerating his portrayal. She praised the portrayals of Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet and Charlotte Rampling.

The lexicon of international films praises Angel Heart as a brilliantly staged, but extremely bloodthirsty film, which "fascinates as a game with the suggestive power of cinema, but as a possible reflection on belief, superstition, occultism and Satanism is not to be taken seriously."

The editorial staff of Prisma -Online.de described the film as "intelligent" and "delicate" . The staging and presentations were praised.

Awards

In 1988, Robert De Niro was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor, Lisa Bonet for Best Supporting Actress and Alan Parker for the script of Angel Heart . Lisa Bonet was honored with the Young Artist Award .

backgrounds

Filming took place in New York City , New Jersey and Louisiana . The production cost was given at around 17 million US dollars. The grossing income in the US theaters amounted to 17.2 million US dollars. In Great Britain it was 1.1 million pounds sterling, in Germany the equivalent of 5.4 million euros.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Angel Heart . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , December 2012 (PDF; test number: 58 355 V).
  2. ^ William Hjortsberg: Angel Heart . Area, Erftstadt 2006, ISBN 3-89996-839-5 .
  3. ↑ Film review by Roger Ebert : "It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you."
  4. ↑ Film review by Rita Kempley
  5. ↑ Angel Heart. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. ↑ Film review on prisma-online.de