... was marveling at all the well-known names involved, both onscreen and off. Aside from that, these half-hour imitation-noir sketches were either dramatically inert or else soporifically slow, extremely mannered (to the point of parody), and -- their biggest drawback -- often quite predictable. Some of the actors tended to speak so languidly, with long silences between their sentences, that I wanted to shout at them to pick up the pace. The gauzy color photography looked all wrong; everything onscreen just felt phony and artificial. The productions also suffered, obviously, from a low budget, with small casts and minimalist sets.
Truth be told, I watched only half a dozen entries in this series before bailing on it, which is why I'm not giving it a rating, but I saw enough to know that it was pretty joyless. It's no surprise that it failed to catch on and is virtually unknown today. Even the bad black-and-white noirs (and most of them WERE bad) had a kind of authenticity about them, something this series lacks. A few modern-day homages to noir have worked splendidly -- I'm thinking of "L. A. Confidential" in particular -- but "Fallen Angels," though it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, tried to fake it and failed.
