Black Angel

Black Angel is a 1946 American film noir directed as his final feature by Roy William Neill and starring Dan Duryea, June Vincent and Peter Lorre. Produced by Universal Pictures, it is set in Los Angeles and broadly adapted from the 1943 novel of the same title by Cornell Woolrich. Plot Catherine Bennett, a falsely convicted man's wife, teams up with alcoholic musician Marty Blair in an attempt to clear her adulterous husband of the murder of a singer, Mavis Marlowe, Marty's ex-wife. Their investigation leads them to confrontations with a determined policeman, LAPD Captain Flood, and a shifty nightclub owner, Mr. Marko, whom Catherine and Marty suspect may be the real killer. Marty had seen Marko heading for Mavis Marlowe’s apartment on the night of the murder. Since Marty is a composer and pianist, while Catherine is a former singer, the two audition for a spot in Marko's club and are hired. Their suspicion is increased when Catherine recognises an envelope from Mavis's branded stationery in Marko's office; she therefore decides to search it in his absence. When she is caught, Marko admits that his daughter was being blackmailed by Mavis, but the main evidence they had been looking for, a distinctive heart-shaped brooch that Marty once gave Mavis, is not there. Marty has fallen in love with Catherine during their partnership and he has given up drinking. On the night Catherine's husband Kirk is due to be executed, she admits to Marty that Kirk had always been the only man for her and that their own association has no future. In his disappointment, Marty goes back to the bars where he used to drink and chances on a girl wearing the brooch for which he and Catherine had been searching. The girl insists that it was Marty himself who had given it her on the night the murder was discovered.