Why does Herbert Marshall do so much walking in this? Besides being very good at walking, he’s an important rich person with neglected wife Marlene Dietrich (shortly after her great Sternberg run), ditching her for work events in the same way as Ray Milland in The Big Clock but with much more charm than Ray. There’s a love triangle in Paris facilitated by Madame Pittypat, and Marlene starts secretly dating her husband’s old army buddy Melvyn Douglas. Melvyn is hunky and all, but extremely elegant people belong together, so the marriage is saved.
As much as any film made under the Production Code, Angel dares to challenge the ready-made conventions of vice and virtue, good and evil, light and dark on which mainstream Hollywood entertainment has traditionally been based. It is subversive cinema of the most glittering and highly polished order – and all the more radical for being produced on a lavish Paramount budget.