Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Excellent but underrated film

Crappy film

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

This film begins with a man named "Martin Blair" (Dan Duryea) attempting to visit his wife "Mavis Marlowe" (Constance Dowling) in her high-rise apartment but being intercepted by the doorman and refused entry. Not long afterward another man by the name of "Marko" (Peter Lorre) is inexplicably allowed access which causes Dan to visit a nearby bar and become quite inebriated. The next morning Dan wakes up in his bed from his drinking binge and is told that his wife has been murdered. Not long afterward another man by the name of "Kirk Bennett" (John Phillips) is arrested and charged with the crime. He is subsequently tried and upon being found guilty he is incarcerated in prison to await execution in the gas chamber. Yet, in spite of all of the evidence against him, his wife "Catherine Bennett" (June Vincent) believes in his innocence and with nobody else to turn to decides to search for clues which might exonerate him. It's at this time that she happens to meet Dan and together they decide to conduct their own investigation which leads them directly to none other than—Marko. But there is a big difference between having a possible suspect and obtaining actual evidence which might free Kirk--and time is not on their side. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that I found this movie to rather enjoyable for the most part with several twists and turns along the way. Unfortunately, I didn't care for the ending at all and because of that I have somewhat lowered my rating accordingly. Average.

Of course, we're all familiar with the saying "The suspense is killing me!" - Right?... Well, with Black Angel, it isn't the suspense that'll kill you. No. It's the sheer boredom of it all that's gonna do you in, for sure.Black Angel was a very dry and uninspired "Whodunit" where it seemed to me that all of the actors were playing their parts in a state of half-stupefied sleep. I ain't kidding! It was the miscast actor, Dan Duryea, in particular, whose stunned character (the popular songwriter, Martin Blair) that seemed to be forever moping around in a muddled state of alcoholic amnesia. (I guess Blair was supposed to be the "black angel" who this film's title is referring to) Initially this amateurish Detective/Thriller started off with plenty of promising dramatic-clout. But once that snarling, queen-bitch, Mavis Marlowe got bumped off, its story took an immediate nose-dive as it continually turned over just about every melodramatic cliché in the book.And, speaking about actor Peter Lorre - It really killed me in a number of scenes where this 5' 3" pipsqueak was ordering everyone around, trying to be such a big, tough menace.Time & again, Lorre stood at least a full-head shorter in height than all the rest of the actors, including the women. Believe me, this munchkin posing as a tough guy was just too funny for words.*Trivia Note* - Black Angel was director Roy William Neill's last film. The following year, at the age of 59, he died of a heart attack.

Not too many people are going to mourn the passing of Constance Dowling who by all accounts was a two timing blackmailer. John Phillips has drifted into an affair with her and she's making him pay big time. So when she's found strangled and he's nearby suspicion falls on him and homicide cop Broderick Crawford makes the arrest. Phillips is scheduled to die in the gas chamber.That does not sit well with Phillips's wife June Vincent who is a nightclub singer. She's still working to prove her man innocent and she collaborates with Dowling's former husband, composer Dan Duryea who has a drinking problem to rival Ray Milland's in The Lost Weekend. In fact the last ten minutes of the film are dominated by a very powerful performance by Duryea, very much rivaling what Milland got an Oscar for in The Lost Weekend. I'm betting that's what attracted Duryea to the role.As singer and accompanist Vincent and Duryea take a job at Peter Lorre's nightclub. Lorre is known to be mobbed up to the gills and the team hopes to find answers there.Black Angel is a real sleeper of a noir film with great performances all around by a talented group of players. But even with a scene stealer like Peter Lorre exuding the menace he does, the film is dominated by Dan Duryea who is a tragic figure.

I wish I couldn't recommend Black Angel, but as it stands it's a passable film-noir that happens to contain some moments of good suspense. This comes, frankly, after the first expectation has been passed aside (to put it this way, if you introduce the gun in act 1, as the director does here with Peter Lorre, you expect by act 5 it'll go off in a BIG way, which it does not here for sure) and we're left with something else that is even more expected. One does hope that things might turn out not so great, actually, to make it more dramatically horrific and worthy of the dark tones of the style and definite noirish characteristics of the lighting. While the actors, mostly Dan Duryea and for what he's worth in an underused role for Peter Lorre, do what they can, it kind of reverts back to what was in the Hayes code at the time, which was that justice must be served and the real criminals couldn't get away with the crime and yada yada.The source material from Cornell Woolrich supplied some good dialog and a mid-section involving the piano player and his singer (quite a team they make for all of five minutes), but I wonder if the material was much the same in the story as here. The ideas of guilt and repression come out differently here, which is the one plus, in that Duryea only comes off like a total sneaky little s*** in one scene (the one right before he goes to drink his head off a second time around), and makes the character almost sympathetic amid drunken hazes and horrible moments of violence. There's a lot going for Black Angel, but the director only realizes some of the possibilities and leaves the rest as B-movie fodder- not even a shot imitating that of Vidor's The Crowd or some interesting "hazy" camera-work can make this truly notable... just, not bad.