MartinHafer The late 1960s brought the world a lot of trippy psychedelic films, though one of the trippiest and strangest must be "Angel, Angel Down We Go". To say it's bizarre, amateurish and silly would be a great understatement. I would go so far as to wonder if anyone NOT intoxicated has even enjoyed this film.Despite being immensely wealthy, the Steele family is hopelessly screwed up and hypocritical. Dad is a wimp, mom an ex-porn actress and their chunky daughter is pretty much on her own--and seems to ease her pain and emptiness with food. The family announces to the daughter that they're having a coming-out party for her, but it's really just an excuse for the mother (Jennifer Jones) to prance about and hope that everyone admires her beauty. While she looks her 50 years in some ways, I must admit that Jones' figure was amazing in the film--and you end up seeing more of it than you'd expect considering she ONCE was a star. As for the daughter, she's miserable at the party but connects up with the musical act that performed for the party. The leader is named 'Bogey' and is a charismatic and devilish guy--and he has four little disciples who follow him everywhere--even though NOTHING Bogey says makes any sense at all. She joins this little cult and they hang about saying profound things that make no sense, go skydiving and have sex. Later, to scare the girl's parents, the gang drops in and behaves like they are strung out on LSD--which I assume they were. If you think all this is headed somewhere and there is significance to it, don't bother. It all just goes on and on and on--and never makes any sense.Aside from an incomprehensible story, the film features some really weird artsy camera-work with random pictures inserted throughout the film, a sprinkling of nudity, homosexual references, dialog that seldom makes sense, comments about the sexual prowess of black men, child sexual abuse, a lady sleeping on the ceiling and MANY actors who later must have regretted doing this film. Aside from Jones, Roddy McDowall and Lou Rawls (yes THAT Lou Rawls) star in the film.By the way, if you are wondering why a star like Jennifer Jones did such as god-awful film, my guess is because she and her husband (the recently deceased David O. Selznick) went through bankruptcy when his films started losing money. I can only assume she had to take ANY work she could find--and this would definitely fall into the category of ANY. In fact, it might just be the most embarrassing film by a once-great Hollywood star. Mae West's necrophilic performance in "Myra Breckenridge" and Burgess Meredith's nude scenes in "Such Good Friends" might possibly be a bit worse, but neither ever were respected A-list stars like Jones. And, neither could boast that they had once won an Oscar.As one of the reviewers said, when this film debuted, David O. Selznick must have been rolling in his grave!

nisiimperasset These IMDb comments intrigued me enough to order this, but the film as a whole is a mess that left me tired. A few scenes stand out--I actually sort of dug the music, and Jordan Christopher shirtless and in leather pants as Bogart is easy on the eyes. Despite her top billing, Jennifer Jones simply isn't in the film much at all, and while she seems attractively well preserved, her closeups are filmed through Vaseline and she wears yards of billowing fabric in most of her costumes, so it's hard to say. I thought it was funny that when she finally hooks up with Bogart she cries out "I'm 50!" (her actual age when this was filmed). The references to Tara, "Gone with the Wind," and Jones' reaction to it all are interesting but muted. For all the drama of the advertising, this film was surprisingly plain and underwhelming. The trippy cutaways to hallucinations are overdone, but worth watching at least once.

Delly Of all the films I know from the period, by no means all of them, Angel, Angel Down We Go is surpassed in the annals of 60's camp only be Joseph Losey's Boom! and Modesty Blaise ( I have high hopes for The Angry Breed. ) Robert Thom's visual style is occasionally inspired but no match for Losey's tailgunning assaults on the retina. But he compensates with his words -- he is the Shakespeare of AIP. "Fat girls are the remembrance of things past." Can we not admit, in the age of the skeleton girls and bobbleheads, that this is at least as prophetic as the words of Elijah?Casual viewers may mistake this kind of movie as the work of indulgent, drugged-out weirdos but, sad to say, the real Hollywood reptilians make stuff like Love Story and Mission: Impossible III. Let's not forget that Bob Crane once starred in Disney films. It pains me to disappoint connoisseurs of what was once called trash, but there is always a moral component to the most outrageous camp classic. Beauty is truth and truth beauty. Valley of the Dolls ends with a parody of Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, where Neely O'Hara is reduced to nothing and screaming for God, until she rebels and begins howling her own name! Showgirls of course is devoted to the most microscopic investigation of modern man's nostalgie de la boue. The remake of The Stepford Wives outdoes Von Trier by telling of women who perpetuate their own slavery by creating robot husbands to keep them in an idle luxury they never really wanted to give up. Almost every film by Takashi Miike is an illustration of my theory -- mocking the people who believe in a sort of "extreme cinema" divorced from spiritual context.Likewise, Thom tells it like it is -- the world he sees is a slaughterhouse draped in the latest fashions. But he is also on an apostolic mission. Out of this muck, one soul is restored to its original innocence: Jennifer Jones. Those who know anything about her tortured history will understand that this film is less a paycheck for her than a bizarre form of penance. This is a woman who, after leaving Robert Walker for David Selznick, and becoming Hollywood's most classic example of bartering her soul for fame, seems to have been a walking magnet for extreme wealth, almost as if she were being taunted. Can you imagine what it meant for her, in a fictional context at least, to trade in all her jewelry for cotton candy? Which she throws away without eating? This scene proves to the cosmos that her heart was always shielded from the lie of existence. And you can't fail to notice that this aging star, who has always attracted mystical projects, looks about nine years old in her orange jumpsuit, shortly before leaping to her death -- this scene would be the last of her career. Now you know who the angel of the title is. If you still want to see something sick and "extreme" with the same actress, leave Angel, Angel on the shelf -- for I fear it is actually boring and saintly -- and check out Selznick's wartime propaganda film Since You Went Away. There the resourceful Selznick actually cast Jones opposite Walker and made them reenact their youthful love affair under his merry, twinkling eye.

ian-milliss This must be one the greatest, least recognised trash films of all time. It has such a strange mixture of truth and pretentious phoniness that it is in a class of its own. What Hollywood film of the time (or now even) would dare show anything as pornographic (for Fat Amerika) as Holly Near's binge eating scene at her birthday party? Yet the incredible tackiness of it all perfectly illustrates the tackiness of late 60s rock culture, even if it gets all the details wrong, oh so wrong. I love it, it's one of my top ten all time favourite films.