Eric Stanton, a well-dressed but down-on-his-luck drifter, feigns sleep but gets pulled off a bus in the hamlet of Walton because he does not have the fare to continue to San Francisco.
The townspeople are unwilling to buy tickets to Madley's "spook meeting" because Clara Mills, an influential local spinster, disapproves.
Using information secretly dug up by his assistant Joe Ellis, Madley brings up the sisters' financial problems.
According to the British Film Institute, "Hardly anything is known about Marty Holland except that ‘he’ was a she called Mary, who wrote two or three best-selling pulp novels and then in 1949—to all intents and purposes—vanished, there being no further record of her at all.
"[2] Holland faded into obscurity after her last published writing credit in 1952 until the 70th anniversary of crime drama imprint Série noire.
[6] For the role of June Mills, several actresses were considered, including Jeanne Crain, Olivia de Havilland, and Anne Baxter.
Alice Faye, who had been one of 20th Century Fox’s most notable musical comedy stars, had been on a career hiatus due to a lack of mature roles being offered to her.
"[9] She agreed to play the role of June on a few conditions, one being that she star with Dana Andrews, and another being that she got to choose and sing the theme song.
On her way out of the studio, she wrote an angry letter to Zanuck, left it on his desk, abandoned her new contract, and didn’t return to the industry for sixteen years.
[13] In January 1945, the role of Stella was given to Linda Darnell, who at this point was one of 20th Century Fox’s top actresses and achieved newfound success as a femme fatale.
He wrote, "As the frustrated adventurer, Dana Andrews adds another excellent tight-lipped portrait of a growing gallery.
Linda Darnell is beautiful and perfectly cast as the sultry and single-minded siren, while Miss Faye, whose lines often border on the banal, shoulders her first straight, dramatic burden, gracefully.
"[16] Critic Tim Knight of Reel.com notes that if the viewers can forget the "... headlong dive into preposterousness, it's still a lot of fun".
His review adds, "... the movie does have much to recommend, from Joseph La Shelle's atmospheric, black-and-white cinematography to Preminger's taut direction to the juicy, hard-boiled dialogue.
Veteran character actors Charles Bickford, John Carradine, and Percy Kilbride (of Ma and Pa Kettle fame) lend strong support to the sizzling twosome of Andrews and Darnell, who made only one more film together, when they were both past their prime: 1957's Zero Hour!, a forgotten grade-Z thriller.
"[17] Critic Fernando F. Croce wrote of the film, "Fallen Angel, the director's follow-up to his 1944 classic, is often predictably looked down on as a lesser genre venture, yet its subtle analysis of shadowy tropes proves both a continuation and a deepening of Preminger's use of moral ambiguity as a tool of human insight...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 dueling points-of-view in order to give them equal weight.
Fallen Angel may not satisfy genre fans who like their noir with fewer gray zones, but the director's take on obsession remains no less fascinating for trading suspense for multilayered lucidity.