TV REVIEW : ‘Angels’ Doesn’t Double-Cross Viewers : Television: Showtime’s series of all-star half-hours evokes a Chandler-esque ‘40s L.A. It’s high on style, if not always on story.

The neo- noir show “Fallen Angels,” a series of all-star half-hours based on the hard-boiled murder stories of the 1940s, is airing on Showtime, sans commercials, of course. Still, given that the genre does revolve around the uncovering of cynical secrets and hidden loyalties, a viewer’s mind may drift toward speculation about who’s really behind the show. Namely, cigarette companies and the Venetian blinds industry.

There’s nothing terribly subtle about the way “Fallen Angels” (premiering Sunday at 10 p.m.) offers up the ‘40s L.A. where all the stories are set. All the standbys of film noir that weren’t quite cliches when Hollywood’s original Post-Expressionists were doing them are in place: Lonely saxophones. The kind of mood lighting that suggests no one could afford a good lamp after the war. Cancer-baiting femme fatales who walk out leaving only their last filter-less exhalation to linger suggestively in that mood lighting. A city full of people who betray and shoot each other but at least wear swell hats.

And, most reassuringly, great, bitter bon mots.

Sunday’s opener, “Dead End for Delia”--directed by Phil Joanou (“U2 Rattle & Hum”) and written by Scott Frank (“Dead Again”)--stars Gary Oldman as a cop determined to stay on the trail of whoever it was that clubbed to death his estranged knockout wife, Gabrielle Anwar, outside the dance hall she frequented. Oldman brings just the right mixture of sulking and sudden explosiveness, and Joanou handles essential flashbacks cannily enough to slowly clue viewers in to twists without bludgeoning us himself.

Tom Hanks makes a more than decent directorial debut with the second and possibly best episode, “I’ll Be Waiting” (Aug. 15), based on Raymond Chandler’s story. Filmed at the shuttered Ambassador Hotel, it has Bruno Kirby as a savvy house dick looking out for Marg Helgenberger, an endangered moll holed up in a penthouse. The double crosses between warring gangsters in the parking lot aren’t always easy to follow, but Hanks draws fine performances out of a slew of character actors--and out of himself, in a very funny cameo as a nasty.

Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies, and videotape”) brings a nice, slow hand to the third show, “The Quiet Room” (Aug. 29), about a shakedown scam between crooked cops in love--Joe Mantegna and Bonnie Bedelia--that backfires predictably but satisfyingly.

The three remaining episodes, all premiering in September, aren’t as strong, although there are moments throughout. Weakest is “The Frightening Frammis,” Tom Cruise’s directing debut, starring Isabella Rossellini, Peter Gallagher and Nancy Travis. The Jim Thompson-based story of grifters isn’t too meaty anyway, and Cruise unfortunately fleshes it out by camping the whole thing up.

“Murder, Obliquely,” based on a Cornell Woolrich tale, is thin too but has style to spare, thanks to location shooting at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House. It’s a triangle between Alan Rickman, Laura Dern and Diane Lane, who huffily strips down to her skivvies in a scene to remember.

The finale, director Jonathan Kaplan’s “Since I Don’t Have You,” is the only episode in black and white, and also the sole show based on a recent story, by James Ellroy. The foul language in Gary Busey’s voice-over comes off as rather contrived, although it is a pleasure to hear hyper James Woods (as gangster Mickey Cohen) exclaim, “When the cat’s away, the mice will va-va -VOOM!”

Aside from the silly weekly introductions and Cruise’s genre-parodying episode, most of the choices in this show (executive-produced by Sydney Pollack, who used to direct this sort of thing three decades ago in “The Naked City”) are respectful toward the not-always respect-inducing pulp source material. All the scripters have come up with the requisite crackling hard-boiled chatter, and the cast members--with character players like Dick Miller and Dan Hedaya regularly popping up alongside the big names--are almost always up to it.

It’s worth watching just to hear sultry, depressed Helgenberger demur at the thought of suicide, hard-boiled-style: “Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on and wither.” May this series hang on and thrive.