Black Angel

1946, US, directed by Roy William Neill

An inadvertent last film for Roy William Neill, and by the looks of it a shame that his career was cut short because this looks a great deal more interesting than the programmers he had been doing before that (even if some of them, especially the Sherlock Holmes pictures, are in their way quite dear to me). Dan Duryea is front and centre in a race-against-time picture helping to reveal the truth so a man can be freed from death row, and Duryea is unusually sympathetic, at least by Dan Duryea standards. The picture borrows quite shamelessly from other fare of the period, and thus the flavour of mid-1940s Lang and Siodmak is never far away (particularly in some of the unreliable narration). Peter Lorre throws in an enjoyably oily turn, though the actor doesn't look in the fullest of health.