Angel Heart

For other uses, see Angel Heart (disambiguation).

Angel Heart
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Alan Parker
Produced by	Alan Marshall Elliott Kastner
Screenplay by	Alan Parker
Story by	William Hjortsberg (Novel)
Starring	Mickey Rourke Robert De Niro Lisa Bonet
Music by	Trevor Jones
Cinematography	Michael Seresin
Editing by	Gerry Hambling
Studio	Carolco International N.V.
Distributed by	TriStar Pictures
Release date(s)	March 6, 1987
Running time	113 minutes
Country	United States Canada United Kingdom
Language	English French
Budget	$17 million
Box office	$17,185,632 (US only)

Angel Heart is a 1987 American psychological horror film written and directed by Alan Parker, and starring Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, and Lisa Bonet. The film is adapted from the novel Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg, and is generally faithful to the novel with the exceptions being the introduction of a child of Epiphany Proudfoot conceived at a voodoo ceremony by "a devil", and that the novel never leaves New York City, whereas much of the action of the film occurs in New Orleans.

A highly atmospheric film, Angel Heart combines elements of film noir, hard-boiled detective stories and horror.

Plot

The movie opens in New York City, in January 1955. Harry Angel (Rourke), a downtrodden private investigator, is contacted by an attorney named Herman Winesap (Dann Florek) and instructed to meet a client named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) in a Harlem church. While a competent detective, Angel is notably unshaven, unkempt and slovenly; he avoids looking at himself in mirrors. Cyphre could not be more different, he is an elegant, mysterious man who affects a beard, long hair and nails, and carries a cane. He tells Angel about a popular pre-war crooner named John Liebling, known as Johnny Favorite, who suffered severe neurological trauma resulting from injuries he received in World War II. Favorite's incapacitation disrupted a contract with Cyphre regarding unknown collateral, and Cyphre believes that a private upstate hospital where Favorite was receiving radical psychiatric treatment for shell shock has falsified records, deliberately preventing the contract from being fulfilled. He hires Angel to discover the truth and locate Favorite's true whereabouts.

Angel travels to the hospital and discovers that the records showing Favorite's transfer on December 31, 1943, were indeed falsified by a physician named Fowler (Michael Higgins). Discovering that he is a morphine addict, Angel withholds his fix until Fowler admits he was paid $25,000 by a wealthy friend of Favorite's and an unknown woman and that one night, years ago, they put Favorite, whose damaged face was heavily bandaged, in a car to be taken south. Angel feels Fowler is still withholding information and leaves with his morphine, hoping to sweat him some more, but when he returns he finds the doctor murdered. Fearing he will be a suspect and anxious to quit the job, he meets Cyphre to apprise him of this literal dead-end. However, Cyphre pays him $5,000 to continue the search, so Angel uses a former journalist lover to research Favorite's background. Although Johnny had a wealthy southern society fiancée named Margaret Krusemark (Charlotte Rampling), he also had a secret love named Evangeline Proudfoot in addition to being involved with a Coney Island gypsy fortune teller, Madame Zora. Learning that voodoo practitioner Madame Zora was actually the debutante Krusemark, Angel travels to New Orleans to find her.

Displaying an aversion to chickens that parallels his avoidance of mirrors, Angel is at a disadvantage in New Orleans. Margaret divulges little information to him, telling him that Johnny is dead, and if he is not, he is dead to her. He then tracks down Johnny's former secret love and discovers she is dead, but her daughter, Epiphany Proudfoot (Bonet), was conceived during her mother's relationship with Favorite. Epiphany is equally reluctant to speak, so Angel locates Toots Sweet (Brownie McGhee), a blues guitarist and former Favorite bandmate. After witnessing Toots and Epiphany at a voodoo ceremony that night, Angel uses force to try to extract details of Favorite's last known whereabouts from Toots, who refers him to Margaret and informs him that Epiphany, like her mother, is a voodoo priestess. The following morning, Angel awakes to find the New Orleans police in his hotel room; they inform him that Toots was murdered the night before. Returning to Margaret's home, Angel later finds her murdered, her heart removed with a ceremonial knife. Angel is then attacked by agents of Ethan Krusemark, a powerful Louisiana patriarch and Margaret's father, and told to leave town. Epiphany then visits Angel's hotel where they have sex; during this time she reveals that Johnny Favorite was considered an extremely evil man who turned on everyone he knew. Angel suspects that Favorite is in hiding and is killing off his former friends to prevent his whereabouts being discovered.

Angel forces one of the men who attacked him to take him to Krusemark, who confronts Angel in a shed at his racetrack and reveals the horrible news: Favorite was actually a powerful magician who sold his soul to Satan in exchange for stardom, but then sought to renege on the bargain. With the help of Toots and the Krusemarks, Favorite kidnapped a soldier on New Year's Eve and, using an obscure rite, murdered him and ate his still-beating heart in order to steal his soul and assume his identity. Favorite planned to drop out and resurface as the soldier, but the boy was drafted due to the sudden outbreak of the war and his subsequent amnesia from his injuries ruined Favorite's plan. Hoping to jog Johnny's memory, the Krusemarks later snuck an unresposive Favorite out of the hospital on the last day of 1943 and released him in Times Square during the celebrations that night. Demanding to know who the hapless victim was, Angel has a panic attack and runs into the bathroom; he emerges to find Krusemark drowned in a cauldron of boiling gumbo. Fleeing to Margaret's home to find the sealed vase containing the clue to the soldier's identity Favorite gave her years ago, Angel breaks it open, revealing a set of dog tags with the name "ANGEL, HAROLD" stamped on them. Angel was, and has been, Johnny Favorite all along.

Louis Cyphre, a homophone for Lucifer, appears in Margaret's living room and tells him despite his, Favorite's, attempt to break the contract, he has known his true identity since the beginning. Angel refuses to believe him, insisting that he knows his own identity and will tell Winesap that Cyphre is trying to frame him for murders he himself has committed. Cyphre then reveals that Winesap is also dead, and proceeds to unleash Angel's repressed memories: in a fugue state that Cyphre induced, Angel did indeed murder Fowler, Toots, and the Krusemarks. Finding himself alone, Angel then flees to his hotel where he finds the police in his bedroom. The body of Epiphany, wearing his dog tags, is in his bed, killed with his pistol. Harry/Johnny finally accepts the truth of who he really is, stating that he knows he will burn in hell. He will be executed for his own daughter's murder, and Cyphre can at long last claim what is his: Favorite's immortal soul.

Over the end credits, there is a lengthy sequence of Angel inside an ancient iron Otis elevator cage, which is interminably descending, presumably to hell. (Short clips of this sequence have been seen in Angel's dream sequences throughout the film.) As the screen fades to black, Cyphre can be heard whispering, "Harry" and "Johnny," announcing his dominion over both their [shared] souls.

Cast

• Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel
• Robert De Niro as Louis Cyphre
• Lisa Bonet as Epiphany Proudfoot
• Charlotte Rampling as Margaret Krusemark
• Stocker Fontelieu as Ethan Krusemark
• Brownie McGhee as Toots Sweet
• Michael Higgins as Dr. Albert Fowler
• Elizabeth Whitcraft as Connie
• Eliott Keener as Det. Sterne
• Charles Gordone as Spider Simpson, bandleader
• Dann Florek as Herman Winesap
• Kathleen Wilhoite as Nurse
• George Buck as Izzy

Reception

Angel Heart gained attention and controversy even before its release. Bonet was previously known for her role on the family-oriented sitcom The Cosby Show, and several seconds of her extended, graphic and blood-drenched sex scene with Rourke had to be trimmed in order to secure the film an 'R' rating on initial release, though later an uncut X rated version was released.

Some blamed the controversial sex scene for Bonet's departure from The Cosby Show, which resulted in her starring on the Cosby-produced program spin-off, A Different World which premiered in 1987.

Rotten Tomatoes counted 21 reviews with 76 percent of them being "fresh" or favorable; Average Rating: 7.2/10. Angel Heart broke even at the box office with its budget of $17 million. After being released on home video it became something of a cult film^{[citation needed]}, appreciated for its unsettling tone, bleak cinematography (by Michael Seresin), its sad and eerie score (by Trevor Jones), and its blend of genres^{[citation needed]}.

Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars. He said: "Angel Heart is a thriller and a horror movie, but most of all it's an exuberant exercise in style, in which Parker and his actors have fun taking it to the limit".

Winesap's death was filmed but never included in the theatrical film, nor was it included in the deleted scenes on the DVD release. The only evidence of its existence is a fleeting shot during the love scene as well as an on-set photograph from a 1987 issue of Fangoria magazine which shows director Alan Parker crouching over the mannequin of Florek's character. From the photograph, it can be inferred that Winesap was decapitated by an industrial fan in an unknown building by an unknown party; because Winesap was alive in New York during Angel's stay in New Orleans, it is likely that Cyphre had him killed remotely. The shot during the love scene shows an unknown man grasping Winesap by the lapels of his jacket and is followed by a shot of an industrial fan in an unnamed location. It is also likely that some of the footage of veiled people cleaning blood off walls were also from this scene.^{[citation needed]}

External links

• Angel Heart at the Internet Movie Database