A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, November 7, 2025

Black Angel (Roy William Neill, 1946)

June Vincent and Dan Duryea in Black Angel

Cast: Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, Broderick Crawford, Constance Dowling, Wallace Ford, Hobart Cavanaugh, Freddie Steele, John Phillips, Ben Bard, Junius Matthews, Marion Martin. Screenplay: Ray Chanslor, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography: Paul Ivano. Art direction: Martin Obzina, Jack Otterson. Film editing: Saul A. Goodkind. Music: Frank Skinner.

What Black Angel has going for it is Dan Duryea in a role that departs from his usual villainy, and a setup derived from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, a writer given to nasty surprises. It takes place in a noir milieu that largely consists of bars and nightclubs, the main one presided over by a sinister Peter Lorre with a cigarette constantly dangling from his lip. The result is a solid B-picture that could have been better than that with a more capable leading lady than June Vincent and more imaginative direction than Roy William Neill gives it.

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