***SPOILERS*** Kicked out of her apartment and told never to come and see her again Mavis Marlowe's recovering alcoholic husband and piano player Martin Blair hits the bottle real hard while someone sneaks into Marvis' pad and murders her. With all the evidence, and fingerprints on the murder weapon, showing that Marvis's lover musician Kirk Bennett, who was the one who found her body, murdered her it's an open and shut case for the D.A's office to have him convicted and sent to the state's electric chair. This has Bennett's wife, who he's been cheating on, Cathy join forces with the trying to find his wife's killer Martin Blair to get Bennett off the hook and out of the electric chair in tracking down Marvis' killer feeling that Bennett was innocent in her murder.One of the person's overlooked in Marvis's murder who in fact visited her moments before she was whacked was her boss nightclub owner Marko who left or fled the scene before the police arrived. In trying to get the goods on Marko, in Marvis's murder, both Blair and Cathy get together as a song & dance act get a job or gig at his nightclub in order to find out if in fact Marko did murdered Marvis in order to save Bennett's life. The ending is a lot more interesting with the killer himself giving himself up to the police after he realized her was the one who murdered Marvis Marlowe! But the rub in all this is will he be able to have time to save an innocent mans-Kirk Bennett-life from getting zapped in the electric chair.****MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS****The usual race against the clock to save an innocent mans life movie with Dan Duryea as the man on the spot pianist and song and dance man Martin Blair getting his head as well as act together in saving Bennett's life for a crime that he in fact committed! It was after his wife Marvis kicked Blair out of her apartment that he got himself juiced at a local bar and then totally unconscious to his surroundings came back for revenge. It was that poor sap Kirk Bennett who ended up with the short or sh*t end of the stick in being in the wrong place at the wrong time and convicted for Blair's crime. It took almost the entire movie with the help of a couple bottle's of booze for Blair to finally come to his senses and admit his guilt. But would he have enough time to get the cop on the case Captian Flood to get in touch, by phone, with the Governor to halt Kirk Bennett's pending execution?

I hate to carp, but this mostly watchable film, Roy Neill's last, is not film noir at all, although it has elements of mystery and crime drama combined. A weak and wayward script introduces Duryea arriving on a gritty Wilshire Blvd and then leaves him out of the film for twenty minutes; dispenses with the most interesting character of the film, singer Mavis Marlowe (wonderfully played by Constance Dowling) after ten minutes; presents a completely new character, Kirk Bennet, without any introduction or setting, as the husband of still another unknown character, a Mrs Bennet (June Vincent), who turns out to be the central female role; and even presents us with a completely anonymous character who seems to be central to Duryea's Martin Blair -- a wavering tippler- turned-songwriter -- who flits in and out of the film like a jack-in- the-box without explanation or rationale, but seems very concerned about Blair's well-being (is he his agent? his manager? a liquor salesman? We'll never know.) Neill directs this ambivalent script with occasional flair, like the sweep up from street-level Wilshire Blvd to Mavis Marlowe's flat on an upper floor of the apartment building across the street, which we then enter via a crack in the Venetian blinds. But much of the film is wasted on unnecessary moments like Bennet's trial, or Bennet being grilled by an almost-svelte Broderick Crawford playing the hard-boiled police captain (complete with an early version of what today is called good cop-bad cop.) I didn't like the film but Paul Ivano's photography is captivating and the film-score is unique: many popular songs found in big studio B&W's from this period (just before and just after WW II) can be banal and lifeless, but the three songs featured in Black Angel are well-crafted and complex songs in the popular idiom of the day. They are well-integrated into the plot, well-sung, and with stirring and original Jack Brooks lyrics and subtle melodies from Edgar Fairchild. Frank Skinner's score is also stirring and grand. BTW, June Vincent is not singing and Duryea is definitely not playing piano, for those curious: his fingers remain taut and straight throughout his first number, and in pianism the hand must be slightly arched if it is going to strike keys; but both he and June Vincent are well-mimed. This is good B entertainment, but contains about three plots in one: who did the murder, will the Duryea-Vincent match-up work out, and will the Duryea character ever recover from his alcohol addiction? Actually a fourth story line, will the Kirk Bennet character be saved from the gallows, is thrown in for good measure. Worth watching for the good acting, the unique pairing of Duryea-Vincent, the good photography, and Lorre's thinly-scripted but always-nearly-sadistic characterization of Duryea's nemesis.

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.

Seeing this referred to so often as a "noir" raises the question, "What does 'noir' mean?" Usually it suggests a despairing mood, stark lighting and odd camera angles, and a femme fatale. I think that's what the Frogs originally had in mind. But using those criteria rules out films like "Black Angel." True, it was released in 1946, is in black and white, stars Dan Duryea, and involves a deadly serious search for a murderer, but that's about it. If our definitions get too generous, then Charlie Chan movies wind up in the "noir" category too.Roy William Neal, the proficient director who gave us a couple of Universal's Sherlock Holmes, has given us a straightforward murder mystery that lacks a lot of tension because of its weak structure -- Peter Lorre is in this, why? -- and an ending that is a variation on the "it-was-all-a-dream" climax, only in this case a nightmare. I have no idea who or what the title, "Black Angel", refers to. All the women here are perfectly normal. But I suppose there had been a successful "Blue Dahlia," "Black Dahlia", "Blue Gardenia," and "Fallen Angel" -- so, why not? Whatever happened to gardenias, by the way? You never hear about them anymore.I'd never heard of June Vincent, the girl in the case, but whatever her acting talents, she has an admirable bosom. I kind of like Dan Duryea too. If his acting range and this role were part of a Venn diagram there would be considerable overlap. He's not his usual woman-slapping cad, but his whiny voice projects a weakness that fits the character. I also rather like him because he was a graduate of the same college I attended. (Well, what the hell.) There's no particular reason to get into the plot. Duryea and Vincent team up to find out the real murderer of Duryea's wife -- before Vincent's husband is executed after having been mistakenly convicted of the crime. There's nothing shameful about the film. Everything in it is pretty routine.