Freely adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, Black Angel portrays a world rife with deviousness, desperation, greed, and betrayal, where human affairs have value only as long as they keep paying dividends, and the forces of law and order, however well-intentioned, can do little more than turn up in the aftermath to pick up the jagged pieces. Its characters seem haunted by the consequences of their own worst instincts. Clocking in at barely 80 minutes, the film possesses a relentless forward momentum, courtesy of its “race against the clock” scenario, while also serving up a completely unsuspected twist in its last act.
When avaricious chanteuse Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) turns up dead, suspicion falls on the last man seen in her company, Kirk Bennett (John Phillips), who also happens to be a married man. Bennett is quickly caught, tried, and sentenced to death, in a sequence that’s punctuated by those familiar montages of blaring headlines and torn-off calendar pages. Convinced of her husband’s innocence, Catherine Bennett (June Vincent) enlists the aid of Mavis’s alcoholic former husband, Marty Blair (Dan Duryea), to help clear his name. As a tentative relationship blossoms between the two, evidence soon points to shady nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre). But the real killer turns out to be the one person you’d least expect, and who seems to have an ironclad alibi.
Director Roy William Neill, arguably best known for helming nine of the Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, brings a sense of consummate, if often unobtrusive, craftsmanship to Black Angel. Neill has an eye for balanced compositions and a penchant for sinuous, constantly roving camera movement. There’s a startling shot early in the film that cranes up past a street sign and across a fashionable hotel’s façade before alighting on a certain window—an effect that was apparently accomplished by constructing a miniature of the building. Marty Blair’s stay in a dipso ward seems like it could have been lifted straight out of Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend, with the added bonus of a stylishly expressionistic flashback sequence that finally reveals what actually happened to Mavis Marlowe.
One of the many pleasures to be derived from classic Hollywood cinema is the way that any given film plays a game of theme and variation with a star’s public image. Dan Duryea, who had established his brand of slicked-back smarm in two Fritz Lang noir titles, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, plays a far more sympathetic character here. He may be down and out, but he’s valiantly struggling against his addictions and hopeful (almost despite himself) for the course of his new romance. Blair’s earnestness thus renders doubly tragic the film’s final revelations. And Peter Lorre, so memorable as the cowering, quailing child killer in Lang’s M, exudes a cosmopolitan charm and competence as Marko. Lorre also finds a vein of humor in the character, infusing a bizarre streak of sadomasochism in Marko’s relationship with his hulking henchman, the ironically named Lucky (Freddie Steele).
Image/Sound
Arrow presents a 2K transfer of Black Angel that’s derived from two different sources, which goes no doubt explains some of the variance on display when it comes to overall image brightness and fluctuations in grain level. Notwithstanding these intermittent irregularities, contrast levels are nicely balanced, blacks are deep and uncrushed, and the fine details of costume and décor stand out nicely. The LPCM mono track sounds great, with clean, clear dialogue, and a commendable presentation of Frank Skinner’s lovely score, as well as the handful of torch songs and other tunes performed throughout the film.
Extras
The commentary track from film scholar Alan K. Rode is jam-packed with thoroughly researched information (down to quoting memoirs and studio memoranda) about every aspect of the film’s production history. Rode is a fount of information concerning the careers of the crew and cast, all the way down to the bit players. Rode has a lot to say in particular about “Dangerous” Dan Duryea’s resolutely normal home life, which stood in stark contrast to his onscreen persona as the callow cad, a type he perfected in noir titles like Scarlet Street and Criss Cross. Rode also relays the intriguing tidbit that Duryea actually learned to play the piano pieces in the film, with June Vincent providing her own vocals. In an on-screen interview, film historian Neil Sinyard delivers his own reading of the film, fixes its place in the film noir pantheon, and makes a convincing argument that Duryea’s character serves as a biographical stand-in for author Cornell Woolrich.
Overall
Black Angel plumbs a world rife with deviousness, desperation, greed, and betrayal, and it gets a solid A/V transfer and set of extras from Arrow Films.
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