Black Angel is based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich whose works have provided material for movies as diverse as the classic Rear Window to the atom bomb with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie called Original Sin. As luck would have it, Black Angel falls closer to the Rear Window side of the coin than to the Original Sin side.
Martin Blair is a drunken piano player who gets embroiled in the murder of his wife, Mavis. She refuses to see him one evening at her swanky apartment building (I know it’s swanky because it’s got a large doorman that Martin threatens) so Martin has a gigantic heart-shaped broach sent up that was so gaudy no one but that great-aunt who smells like diapers when she tries to kiss you would think about wearing it in a million years.
As Martin is leaving the building he spots a rotund grease ball that can only be Peter Lorre, going up to see her. After that, another dude, Kirk Bennett rolls up to see her, but he finds only her strangled body.
Somehow or other the killer manages to steal the heart shaped broach while Kirk is lollygagging around in the room, so that Kirk notices it has been swiped. He leaves and eventually gets tapped for the crime, but we have our hook. Whoever has the broach is the killer.
Bennett’s wife, who is a lot less perturbed that Kirk was having some type of affair with this dead woman than she ought to be, is convinced that Kirk is wrongly accused. Since he is wrongly accused, he is convicted in about a week and sent to the Big House where they’ve booked him a reservation in the gas chamber in about two weeks!
Even though his wife, Catherine, is a dunderhead when it comes to men, she knows how to investigate a crime! She immediately rolls up to that drunk Martin to find out what he knows. Eventually, Martin agrees to help Catherine find out the truth.
Using a mysterious phone number that was on a matchbook that Mavis had, they figure out that they need to go down to this nightclub run by Marko (Lorre). Martin thinks that maybe he’ll see the man that was going up to Mavis’ apartment as he was being kicked to the curb by the doorman.
He sees Marko and says that’s the guy! In a scheme that reeks of one of the better episodes of Hunter, they decide to go undercover as a nightclub act!
She used to be singer so she uses an assumed name and I guess hopes that no one’s been reading the papers about the big murder and these two get jobs as a piano and singing duo at the nightclub. This allows them investigate and to slow things down with a bad song or two.
Lorre has her up in his office and lets her watch as he opens up the safe that he keeps a box in marked “Incriminating evidence – do not open!” Later, Lorre goes out on a date with a male gossip columnist so Catherine goes up to his office and gets into the safe. She also calls the cops. Marko comes back unexpectedly and it turns out the business with the safe was all a set up!
Martin starts to think maybe that Bennett did do it after all and with him getting gassed tomorrow it sure seems like a waste to have this blonde widow out there all by her lonesome, so he makes his move and she just shoots his ass down! She doesn’t want to give up on her no-good husband and she says he is the only man for her!
Marty checks his watch and notices that it is now officially beer-thirty and will be for the next several days! Binge time! You get a pretty sweet montage of Marty getting ripped all over L.A. which consists of him not combing his hair, sweating a lot and getting a three o’clock shadow on his pretty little mug.
He has an encounter during his bender that causes him to go crazy and he gets himself locked up in the nuthut. This gives him time to reflect on what has happened.
Through the hazy fog of his on-going alcohol detoxification he sees what really happened that night Mavis was whacked!
Dan Duryea (Criss Cross, Too Late For Tears) elevates this movie from it’s fairly tawdry True Detective-type story and turns what could have been merely a pathetic character into someone that fails in life in spite of his own heroic efforts.
Duryea, who looks a little like William H. Macy and sounds a bit like Willem Defoe, gives us a performance where we believe that the character of Martin Blair is a drunk and when not drunk, fragile enough that he may go careening off the wagon at the first sign of trouble.
When we meet him, a woman has done him wrong, and we presume that that is what caused his drunkenness in the first place. It takes another woman who shares his interests to dry him out. But even so, the specter of the bottle is just another failed relationship away.
As in many film noirs, women are portrayed as the great destroyers of men. Marko survives everything precisely because he hates women. Paradoxically, that trait is limited only to evil characters – heroes and good guys always just want to be loved by women, even though it seals their fates. This film and so many like it then recast the mating game into a protracted dance of death with women as black widows who literally mate, then annihilate their partners. But do you really need some classic movie to tell you that?
© 2011 MonsterHunter
