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My first contact with Cornell Woolrich was Truffaut's adaptation of The Bride Wore Black, starring Jeanne Moreau as the first of Woolrich's avenging angels in the book of the same name. I didn't much like Truffaut's movie (I still don't now that I've read the book), but there were elements that struck resonant chords in spite of itself. Many years later, I began to collect Woolrich's fiction in earnest, only to discover that I was familiar with much of it already through the movies. Certainly, The Black Curtain, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, The Phantom Lady, and especially Black Alibi (filmed by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur as The Leopard Man) and Rear Window (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock) form a distinctive body of film. After a while, I began to fixate on the films of Woolrich's work that I hadn't seen. Prime among them was The Black Angel, adapted from one of the best of Woolrich's "Black Novels." I wound up waiting for a long time. The video revolution began around 1980, give or take, but The Black Angel didn't make it on to video until 1998. In the meantime, its position has slipped. Andrew Sarris once described it as "one of the 25 most memorable cult movies," which may have been true at the time, but nearly 20 years of unavailability have surely eroded that claim. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it listed for release in the same breath with Siodmak's Phantom Lady and The Killers, Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear, and Raymond Chandler's The Blue Dahlia.  Almost immediately, I bundled off an order to Amazon and spent a bad couple of days while I waited for my package of goodies.

Was it worth the wait? Of course it was, but perhaps my expectations were a tad bit high.

The Black Angel was directed by Roy William Neill, who had previously directed some of the Rathbone and Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies and one of my favorite unknown horror movies, The Black Room with Boris Karloff. The Black Angel was his last movie. Some of my reference materials refer to it as his best movie. I don't agree with that statement. It's a good movie, but it doesn't sing at the top of the Film Noir range. It contains another of Woolrich's avenging angels, here intent on clearing her husband of the murder of the woman with whom he was cheating on her. To this end, she transforms herself from a frumpy housewife into a glamourous femme fatale and enters the lives of the other men in the murder victim's datebook, hellbent for bringing the real murderer to justice. June Vincent's performance is adequate for the movie, I guess, but she really doesn't have the screen presence to pull off the character that has been written for her. Fortunately, the supporting cast is excellent. Peter Lorre is delightfully sinister as Marko the gambler, the prime suspect. Dan Duryea plays his drunk with great sensitivity. Broderick Crawford is downright menacing as the cop who is keeping an eye on our heroine's progress. These are good characters and the plot is superb, but something else is missing. The Black Angel lacks for the poetry of film noir. It is too well lit. It doesn't have inky pools of shadow to reinforce the spiritual darkness at the heart of the form. Fortunately, The Black Angel preserves the heart of Woolrich's plot, which is the main strength of his novels, and gives the audience a satisfying twist of the tale at the end.

So let's summarize what we get from The Black Angel: a weak central performance, terrific supporting performances, pedestrian cinematography and direction, and a crackerjack screenplay. Ordinarily, I would call this a draw, but a crackerjack screenplay goes a long way toward tilting the balance. So, yeah, in the final analysis, The Black Angel is definitely a pleasure to watch, but it isn't perfect by any means.