GamerTab That was an excellent one.

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

gavin6942 When Kirk Bennett (John Phillips) is convicted of a singer (Constance Dowling)'s murder, his wife (June Vincent) tries to prove him innocent... aided by the victim's ex-husband (Dan Duryea).What you need to know: Roy William Neill (1887–1946) was an English film director best known for directing the last eleven of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, made between 1943 and 1946 and released by Universal Studios. "Black Angel" was his final film.There are some very stylish shots in this film, especially in the opening scene. The plot and mystery are good, maybe even great. Allegedly the original writer id not care for the script, but not being familiar with the differences I happen to like the film version.

bnwfilmbuff This gets off to a strong start. We have a blackmailing socialite singer (Dowling) get murdered. A guy (Phillips) stumbles into her apartment touching everything in sight including the murder weapon to ensure he is the number one suspect. He gets nabbed and railroaded into a quick conviction. His wife (Vincent) takes up the cause of trying to find the killer enlisting the help of the murdered woman's drunken piano-playing husband (Duryea), who evidently was not at the trial! Peter Lorre, a nightclub owner/mobster, hires the couple as performers in his club and subsequently is suspected by the couple as the probable real killer. One big problem with all of this is the speed of conviction and trial seems improbable. But the other is that there are just no other suspects. We know Phillips isn't the killer. And it becomes all too obvious who is. And the movie drags as the romance between Duryea and Vincent develops. Duryea was far better in bad guy roles. Broderick Crawford is as subdued as I have ever seen him. Wallace Ford has a nothing role. Lorre does a pretty good job for what he has to work with. Constance Dowling was the best part of the movie but she doesn't last long. Fortunately, neither does the movie. So in spite of the good start and noirish atmosphere I can't recommend this.

dbdumonteil What's lacking here is a great director,someone like Robert Siodmak ("Phantom Lady" ) or Mitchell Leisen ("No man of her own").Who says Truffaut?("the bride wore black").Even flawed ,"Black Angel" is far better than the two Truffaut movies (the second being "La Sirene Du Mississipi" ) cause only an American can feel the desperate atmosphere of Cornell Woolrich's (aka William Irish)best novels and short stories.Generally the character who experiments tragedy is a woman ;such is not the case here.Martin is the loser,the unfortunate expiatory victim who is looking for a second chance.Some people won't accept the fact that half of the action is based on a wrong track:it's necessary to make us feel Martin's growing hope.His moonlight sonata is not only a warning,it's also a love message (look at his face when he is playing ) When Cathy tells him there can only be one man in her life ,he's got no reason to live anymore.Hence this ending a la "lost weekend" (which was released the precedent year) and these words of Martin when he says he is happy now.William Irish's novel was arguably not his best :the story is too close to that of "phantom lady" and Cathy becoming a singer overnight is not very plausible. But it's Dan Duryea's hope against hope and his face longing for happiness and peace of mind that will haunt you after watching this good film noir.

MisterWhiplash 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.