The Black Angel (1946)
Posted: May 22nd, 2007, 5:48 pm
After coming across this title in a post by MikeBSG, I ordered this from Netflix and I was not disappointed. While not breaking new ground, the film focuses on its sometimes haunting little story (based on a story by masterful noir writer, Cornell Woolrich). The last directorial stint of the sometimes stylish journeyman Roy William Neill, (who was responsible for some of the better Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone), this Universal picture had a good cast headed by the vastly underrated Dan Duryea in a sympathetic role for once, albeit with a twist that most 8 year olds will spot 15 minutes into the film. In some ways it's as though the lads at Universal got together a checklist:
Marginal Character types of all stripes, including:
Caring desk clerk
Creepy janitor
Blowsy bottle-blonde barfly
Tough but unimaginative enforcer
Skeptical cops
Bored, indifferent medicos
Mysterious international sort
Innocent blonde
Incendiary blonde
Hapless male victim of blondes
Brooding hero
Oodles of Atmospheric moodiness, including:
Seedy milieus
Most action confined to dim, dark night or glossy interiors at night
Brooding sense of injustice
Inexorable fate
Fatalistic, doomed love
Excellent dream sequence
Excellent binge montage depicting descent into lower depths
Bluesy music
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.
Marginal Character types of all stripes, including:
Caring desk clerk
Creepy janitor
Blowsy bottle-blonde barfly
Tough but unimaginative enforcer
Skeptical cops
Bored, indifferent medicos
Mysterious international sort
Innocent blonde
Incendiary blonde
Hapless male victim of blondes
Brooding hero
Oodles of Atmospheric moodiness, including:
Seedy milieus
Most action confined to dim, dark night or glossy interiors at night
Brooding sense of injustice
Inexorable fate
Fatalistic, doomed love
Excellent dream sequence
Excellent binge montage depicting descent into lower depths
Bluesy music
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.