Rent Black Angel (1946)

Clipped Wings - Black Angel review by CH

Any film made from a novel or story by Cornell Woolrich commands interest, even if the result is less than one might expect.

Not as well known as Phantom Lady or Rear Window, Black Angel (1946) - black was a key word for Woolrich - contains many familiar elements: a murder, a nightclub and a sinister owner with criminal connections (Peter Lorre), popular songs, newspaper headlines, thwarted love...

Dan Duryea is a song writer whose wife, a tremendous Constance Dowling, has quit him and is soon found murdered, with the blame and noose laid upon the man - John Phillips - whom she has been blackmailing. Philips’s wife - singer June Vincent - is sure of his innocence; with police assertions which counter that, she is determined to prove her hunch correct and works with Duryea to establish that.

There is some neat camerawork - the director was Roy William Neil who died soon after - including a shot which turns around, of all things, a waste-paper basket. For all this, and some neat integration of pleasingly-rendered songs, the sagging middle makes it all seem longer than eighty minutes.

Those with a taste for noir should certainly seek it out but, without saying too much, the ending, quickly and suspenseful as it portrayed, is more sleight of hand than coup de theatre. As for its contemporary reception, perhaps final words should be left with the view of a Louise Darcy in Biddeford who sent a letter to the New York Times to say that she had seen a trailer for it and that with the sight of “Miss Vincent bewitched by Dan Duryea I gave thanks that I, a much plainer woman, had never been driven to such desperate straits in my search for male companionship” As she put it, George Raft would have been something else: in her great phrase, “a horse on a different racetrack”.