[Warning, metablogians: do not read the following paragraphs if you're planning to see Black Angel, a curious, interesting 1946 noir. Your viewing pleasure will be ruined by the following "all spoiler" entry.]
Once again, it's amnesia, Hollywood style — an alcoholic blackout that is granted a patina of respectability when a doctor calls it Korsakoff's syndrome. The plot in brief: a whiskey-soaked amnesiac (Martin Blair, played by Cornell's own Dan Duryea) has just plain forgotten that he murdered his bad-girl blackmailing wife.
I must say it's a difficult premise for me to swallow — but is nevertheless the kind of oddity that's par for the course in the Hammett-Chandler-Woolrich universe.
To add to the complexity, forgetful Martin sets out to find the killer, and is hot on the trail when his memory suddenly returns — and in a flash he realizes that he himself is the guilty party for whom he's searching. It's a mighty contrived and out-of-left field kind of revelation — but I must confess that I fell for it. I was deceived by a series of red herrings and was surprised by the film's outcome. I rather doubt that most viewers will be as much a sucker as I was.
Like many noirs, Black Angel gets off to a very fast start. Scarcely thirty seconds in, Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) opens a bureau drawer and retrieves her nice ladylike pistol. I respect a movie that's thoroughly and instantaneously loyal to its genre. I wonder, though, whether future generations, studying those many black-and-white crime films of the 1940s and 50s, won't think that every chest of drawers, armoire, lowboy, highboy, tallboy, dresser, and chiffonier in Los Angeles or New York City harbored an easily accessible derringer, rod, gat, or piece.
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