Marginal Character types of all stripes, including:
Caring desk clerk
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Creepy janitor
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Blowsy bottle-blonde barfly
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Tough but unimaginative enforcer
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Skeptical cops
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Bored, indifferent medicos
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Mysterious international sort
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Innocent blonde
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Incendiary blonde
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Hapless male victim of blondes
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Brooding hero
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Oodles of Atmospheric moodiness, including:
Seedy milieus
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Most action confined to dim, dark night or glossy interiors at night
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Brooding sense of injustice
![Image](http://www.geocities.com/finial12/checkmark.gif)
Inexorable fate
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Fatalistic, doomed love
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Excellent dream sequence
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Excellent binge montage depicting descent into lower depths
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Bluesy music
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The really perfectly cast actors are rounded out by a wonderful turn by Peter Lorre as a nightclub owner, Broderick Crawford as a decent police detective with a perfunctory sense of justice, Wallace Ford doing his patented decent but weak schlemiel number, Hobart Cavanaugh enjoying himself as a venal, uncaring janitor, a weathered looking bartender played by Ben Bard, and a rather bland June Vincent as the loyal wife of a convicted murderer. Ms. Vincent bore an uncanny blonde resemblance physically and in her semi-somnambulent acting style to Joan Caulfield and Jean Wallace--who were all very appealing looking, but somewhat oddly expressionless in a goddess-like way at times.
Speaking of the goddess-like, the film is enlivened considerably by the brief moments when the strikingly beautiful and quite carnivorous-looking Constance Dowling is on screen. Ms. Dowling, whose real life beaus included Elia Kazan, numerous French intellectuals of the exisentialist movement, and Italian poet Cesare Pavese, who killed himself over her, is a remarkable creature. Too bad she didn't make more American films in her time. Interestingly, one of Pavese's last poems, written about Dowling, is entitled "Death will Come and (She) Will Have Your Eyes". You can see how one would get that idea after seeing her in this movie.
Constance Dowling as she appeared in The Black Angel.