Endless Night (1972)

Endless Night is a 1972 British thriller written and directed by Sidney Gilliat and with an intriguing cast headed by Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett and Britt Ekland.

Gilliat and Frank Launder had been an immensely successful writing, directing and producing team (they wrote The Lady Vanishes for Alfred Hitchcock).

The movie is based on a 1967 Agatha Christie thriller. Yes, this is an actual thriller. Agatha Christie did write several thrillers and Endless Night was the best of them. It was her last truly great book.

Mike Rogers is a rental car driver although that is just the latest in a series of jobs. Mike is a very nice young man but he’s a bit of a dreamer. Mike has a fantasy - to build his dream house overlooking the sea. He has already chosen the spot, known as Gypsy’s Acre. The land would cost a lot of money, the house would cost a fortune and Mike is penniless. It’s just a dream.

Doing a driving job on the Continent he meets the renowned architect Rudolf Santonix (Per Oscarsson). Santonix is only in early middle age but he is running out of time. He has severe health problems and may only have a few years left. Mike shows him photos of the site at Gypsy’s Acre. It becomes a kind of dream for Santonix as well. This is a site worthy of him. He could design a house for that site, a house that would be his final masterpiece. But since such a house would be immensely expensive and Mike has no money it’s just a dream.

And then Mike meets a cute American girl, Ellie Thomsen (Hayley Mills). They take a shine to each other. What Mike doesn’t know is that Ellie is one of the richest women in the world.

It can’t possibly work out. Penniless hire car drivers like Mike don’t marry fabulously rich heiresses. But they do get married.

That’s when the plot twists start to kick in and the atmosphere becomes increasingly foreboding, and will soon become sinister. We know something bad is going to happen but we don’t know what it will be.

There are lots of potentially sinister characters. There’s the weird old woman muttering stuff about doom. There’s Greta (Britt Ekland). She’s Ellie’s best friend and was formerly her paid companion. Everyone warns Mike about Greta. There’s Ellie’s family, and a nasty money-grubbing snobbish bunch they are. Reuben (Peter Bowles) is married to Ellie’s aunt and he’s clearly a bad ’un. There’s Ellie’s aunt Cora (Lois Maxwell) who oozes spitefulness. There’s also the family lawyer, Andrew Lippincott (George Sanders). He’s charming but he’s a lawyer and much too clever to be trustworthy.

Both Mike and Ellie are dreamers. Santonix is a dreamer. The film has a slight fairy-tale vibe (and Ellie describes herself several times as Cinderella). My feeling is that you’ll appreciate this movie more if you think of it as having a subtle fairy tale quality. Ellie is the beautiful princess. Mike is the handsome but penniless coachman who wins her heart. The house is an enchanted castle, created by the wizard Santonix. Greta is a witch (the beautiful glamorous witches are the ones you have to watch out for). She might be a good witch or a bad witch. The crazy old lady could also be a good witch or a bad witch. Reuben is the adventurer who hoped to marry the princess. Cora is the evil stepmother. Andrew Lippincott is the old king’s courtier who might want the throne himself.

I have no idea if Gilliat had any of this in mind but there is a faint whiff of unreality to this movie. A slight storybook feel. It’s a long long way from fashionable 70s gritty realism. In fact the overall feel reminds me a little of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) which also has that ambiguity, that sense of being not quite reality. This is a movie that has more of a 1940s or 1950s feel than an early 70s feel. Although it does have a slight affinity with Roddy McDowall’s extraordinary The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970).

While these people live in a futuristic modernist house there are constant evocations of the past such as Mike’s love of beautiful old things, and the fact that Ellie is a singer but she sings 18th century songs. There are also subtle little otherwordly hints - when we first see Ellie she looks like a fairy dancing in a field, there’s the way the old lady keeps just appearing from nowhere. These are very subtle hints but to me they reinforce the idea that reality might not be all it seems to be.

There’s also a subtle dream-like quality to this movie. Again it’s a very slight undermining of reality.

This is a deceptive movie. It’s much smarter and more complex than it initially appears to be but you don’t know how smart it is until the end. It was promoted as an ingenious whodunit, which it isn’t. The mystery plot is very simple, very straightforward and very obvious. The mystery plot is not the point of the movie but you don’t know that until the end.

Hywel Bennett is outstanding. There were certain roles that he just did better than anyone else could have done. This is one of those roles. Hayley Mills is very good although she has a less showy part. Britt Ekland is very good indeed. This movie is stacked with fine British character actors and they’re all good.

Endless Night is intriguing, stylish, enigmatic and clever. Highly recommended.

And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Second Woman (1950)

The Second Woman (later re-released with the title Ellen) is a 1950 United Artists release that has languished in obscurity and that’s rather unfortunate.

The opening is obviously and I would assume deliberately reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. A woman tells us that she keeps remembering a house, a house named Hilltop, now just a ruin.

There are moments that will call to mind several other notable movies of the 1940s, including other Hitchcock movies.

We get a scene with a man seemingly over come by carbon monoxide fumes from a car with its engine kept running in a garage.

A woman is told that she should leave her house immediately because she is in extreme danger.

We need to be wary of taking anything we see in this movie at face value.

Then we go into a flashback which occupies most of the movie’s running time.

Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake) meets Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) on a train. He’s charming and friendly and he seems to be trying to pick her up (and she seems to like the idea) but there’s something slightly odd about him. He seems a bit distracted, a bit moody. As if something was haunting him.

They’re both heading for the same small town.

Jeff is an architect and apparently a very successful one. He’s well-liked but people worry about him. He has never been the same since the accident in which his wife was killed. Nobody likes to talk about the accident and Jeff certainly doesn’t want to talk about it.

But Ellen has fallen head over heels in love with Jeff and there’s no way to restrain a woman’s curiosity.

Jeff invites her to look inside Hilltop, the house he designed and in which he lives. That causes some surprise to the locals - Jeff has never allowed anybody inside Hilltop.

Jess seems to be getting more distracted and disturbed. And strange things keep happening to him. His much-loved horse breaks its leg. His dog is poisoned. There is worse to come. The painting is a particular puzzle. It’s one of Jeff’s prized possessions but the colours have started to fade. Ellen is convinced there’s something very significant about this painting.

And as Ellen says, it just isn’t possible for anybody to have that much bad luck. There’s something sinister going on. Everything that Jeff loves dies. Dr Hartley (Morris Carnovsky) is concerned that Ellen might be in danger. That seems more and more likely.

One nice twist is that we cannot be certain that Ellen is the one in danger. Events seem to be heading inexorably towards disaster but we don’t know from which direction the danger is coming and we don’t know the motive.

There are several plausible explanations for these strange events. The movie does a pretty good job of keeping us in doubt about the actual explanation.

The plot twists are handled quite deftly. There’s some decent misdirection. Mostly it relies on an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that builds gradually but inexorably.

I loved Jeff’s cliff-top modernist house (I dislike modernist architecture for public buildings but I have a real weakness for modernist houses).

I have issues with Robert Young in his 1930s movies. He tries too hard and he’s too hyper-active. By 1950 however he had learnt to tone things down and he gives a fine subtle performance here. Betsy Drake is a likeable lively heroine.

This is a psychological thriller at times veering toward psychological horror and with some hints of the gothic. There are obvious echoes of Rebecca but also of Suspicion and Spellbound and maybe Laura.

This movie ticks just about all my boxes. I enjoyed it enormously. It deserves to be much better known. Highly recommended.

My copy of this film, which obviously had fallen into the public domain, is in one of those Mill Creek 50-movie DVD sets (in this instance their Mystery Classics set). The transfer is quite good.

Devil and the Deep (1932)

Devil and the Deep is a 1932 Paramount pre-code melodrama that takes some bizarre turns.

The setting is a naval base in North Africa. It’s not specifically stated but one assumes it’s a British naval base (I don’t think the U.S. Navy would have had bases in North Africa in 1932).

Commander Charles Sturm (Charles Laughton) is the skipper of a submarine. He is married to Diana (Tallulah Bankhead). It is not a happy marriage. Commander Sturm is obsessively jealous. That’s not helped by the fact that there have been so many rumours flying around about his wife’s infidelities. Diana claims that her husband has started these rumours himself.

This is entirely possible. It is suggested at one point that he has undergone medical treatment for some kind of brain disorder. He is clearly severely paranoid. His jealousy is completely out of control.

He is just about to ruin the career of a young officer, Lieutenant Jaeckel (Cary Grant) whom he suspects of having an affair with Diana. The various exchanges we see between Jaeckel and Diana would seem to indicate that there was nothing more than the mildest flirtation involved. Possibly not even that. But the Commander is not just jealous and paranoid, he is vindictive.

We start to suspect that he may in fact be insane. Diana suspects his as well.

After another stormy scene Diana heads for the bazaar. She meets a handsome mysterious man (played by Gary Cooper) and by this time she is so fed up that she actually is unfaithful. This is a pre-code movie so we’re left in no doubt that they do indeed sleep together.

The mysterious stranger (in an unlikely coincidence but this is melodrama so let’s not worry about coincidences) turns out to be Lieutenant Sempter. He is about to take Lieutenant Jaeckel’s place as executive officer of Commander Sturm’s submarine.

Things get rather tense. How much does the Commander suspect? How much does he know?

At this point the plot gets totally wild and crazy and twisted but I’m not going to give away any spoilers.

The North African setting qualifies this as a “sex, sin and madness in the tropics” melodrama, which is just about my favourite movie genre.

Of all the great English theatrical hams Charles Laughton was the hammiest, and the greatest. He had a knack for giving performances that were both absurd and strangely magnificent. He could be grand and terrifying and pathetic all at the same time. It’s hard to think of anyone better suited to playing a madman like Commander Sturm. Laughton at his peak could make this kind of performance work in a way no other actor could have done. And he manages to make us feel some empathy for this horrible but suffering man.

Tallulah Bankhead is excellent. She manages to make us feel sympathetic towards a woman pushed over the edge, and to keep us guessing as to whether this really was the first time she had betrayed her husband. And that’s important. The movie is not being coy - it’s made crystal clear that Diana and Sempter do sleep together. But it’s important in plot terms that the audience should be left uncertain as to whether Commander Sturm really is a wronged husband who has been made a fool of countless times or whether it’s a paranoid delusion on his part. We need to be unsure if Diana is a faithless wife or a wronged woman finally driven to actual infidelity.

Gary Cooper is the weak link. I have to say that I am not a Gary Cooper fan. He’s dull and wooden here. Of course his fans will point to this as an example of his subtlety. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste. He’s an actor who just never really grabs me.

Cary Grant has only a small role. He was still developing his screen persona at this point. Within a couple of years he would have been a more interesting choice as the male lead but in 1932 Cooper was a huge star and Grant was just a promising up-and-comer.

Russian-born director Marion Gering had a brief Hollywood career in the early to mid 1930s. He does a competent job here and manages a few quite clever compositions. This is a great-looking movie with lovely cinematography by Charles Lang and some nice sets (including some left over from Morocco).

Devil and the Deep has its problems but Bankhead and Laughton are very watchable and the crazy late plot turns are fun. Recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a solid Blu-Ray transfer.

Black Tuesday (1954)

Black Tuesday is a 1954 independent production released by United Artists. It’s included in one of Kino Lorber’s film noir boxed sets. It’s certainly a very grim brutal hard-hitting movie but I don’t think that’s necessarily enough to make it a film noir.

Racketeer Vince Canelli (Edward G. Robinson) and bank robber Peter Manning (Peter Graves) are to die in the electric chair. Manning stole $200,000 but refuses to reveal where the money is.

Vince has no intention of keeping his date with death. His girlfriend Hatti (Jean Parker) has an ingenious plan. It’s so crazy it might work.

If Vince escapes he’s taking Manning with him. That two hundred grand will get them out of the country.

They leave a few corpses behind them and they take some hostages.

The first half of the movie is the prison break. The second half is the manhunt which ends in a bloody siege. The body count will be high.

This movie delivers plenty of violent action, and by 1950s standards it really is violent.

Edward G. Robinson is in fine form. He plays Vince as a madman, ready to explode into violence at any moment.

Peter Graves is the standout performer and Manning is the most interesting and complex character by far.

All the supporting performances are good, the one exception being Milburn Stone’s dull turn as the priest.

What makes this movie a cut above most prison break movies is its moral complexity. Vince is a vicious crazy killer but his love for Hatti is real. He cares about her more than he cares about anything else.

Manning is a nice guy gone wrong. He’s bitter but he takes no pleasure in killing.

Hatti’s devotion to Vince is absolute. She would die for him.

The bad guys are dangerous killers but in some ways the ostensible good guys are worse.The bad guys might be killers but they are at least brave men (and in the case of Hatti brave women). The prison guards and the reporters get real pleasure out of watching prisoners get executed. They get even more pleasure from psychologically torturing condemned prisoners beforehand. What they enjoy most is that they get to participate in legal killings without taking any risks.

Apart from Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole this may be the most negative portrayal of journalists in any 1950s movie.

Manning killed a cop. But the police in this movie are quite happy to sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians (including a young woman) for the sake of exacting vengeance on Manning. Apparently cop lives matter but civilian lives don’t.

It’s clear that capital punishment is seen purely as revenge. As a response to violent crime it simply fuels further violence. When men know that the state is going to execute them they have nothing to lose - they might as well keep on killing if that’s the only way to stay alive. Vince Cannelli is a killer but he’s a man and he wants to survive. It was the state’s death sentence on him that fuelled his final murderous rampage. If you brutalise already violent men you’ll just make them more violent. The cycle of violence keeps going.

Peter Manning is not a vicious psychopathic killer to begin with but with that death sentence hanging over his head he will kill to stay alive. Black Tuesday does not indulge in any obvious overt messaging but there’s some real substance to this movie if you dig a bit deeper.

The priest is self-satisfied and ineffectual. He has nothing but platitudes to offer. He’s the prison chaplain. His job is to persuade men to die meekly when they’re told to so. He never really figures out why those men quite rightly despise him.

Argentinian director Hugo Fregonese does a fine job here. Mention must be made of Stanley Cortez’s superb noirish cinematography.

Sydney Boehm wrote the screenplay. His credits include the classic The Big Heat (1953) and a stack of great movies such as Violent Saturday (1955), Secret of the Incas (1954), Union Station (1950), Side Street (1949) and High Wall (1947). Toughness was a major characteristic of his writing.

Black Tuesday isn’t pure film noir but it has some genuine noir flavour. An excellent underrated hard-edged crime thriller. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a lovely transfer and Gary Gerani’s audio commentary is very worthwhile.

From this same Edward G. Robinson boxed set I’ve also reviewed Nightmare and Vice Squad.

The Shadow Strikes (1937)

The Shadow Strikes is a 1937 B-movie based on the Shadow character featured in a series of pulp novels and radio dramas. The Shadow was typical of the pulp heroes of that era. They were not superheroes as such but characters like the Shadow and Doc Savage could be regarded as proto-superheroes. Masked crime-fighters were very popular.

Rod La Rocque plays the title character. For some unknown reason the Lamont Cranston of the pulps and radio dramas becomes Lamont Granston in this movie.

This was the first movie appearance of the Shadow. It was made by a small outfit called Grand National Pictures. They made a follow-up movie, International Crime, a year later (again with Rod La Rocque). There would be later Shadow movies from Monogram in the 40s.

The Shadow Strikes opens with a brief scene which gives us, in a perfunctory manner, the information that the wealthy Lamont Granston (Rod La Rocque) has a secret identity as the masked crime-fighter known as the Shadow.

The Shadow interrupts a burglary in the office of lawyer Chester Randall. The Shadow has given the police a tip-off but he is unable to make his getaway before they arrive. Luckily the cops, led by Captain Breen (Kenneth Harlan), are not too bright - at no point in the movie do they actually check any information given to them, they just take everything anybody says at face value. The Shadow, who has at least had time to shed his masked crime-fighter garb, is easily able to fool the police into believing that he is in fact Chester Randall.

Then there’s a telephone call for Chester Randall. Granston decides to continue his impersonation - he has a hunch that he will uncover something interesting by doing so. A wealthy old guy, Caleb Delthern, wants a new will draw up. It has to be done urgently. He thinks his life is in danger. He’s not wrong about that. Minutes later he is shot dead through a window by an unknown assassin who makes a successful escape.

Caleb’s heirs are a motley assortment of nieces and nephews and the terms of his will are such as to make them all possible suspects. They all behave rather suspiciously. The youngest of the nephews, Jasper, is a dissipated young man heavily in debt to gambling boss and presumed racketeer Brossett (Cy Kendall).

Most of this movie’s many problems stem from the fact that it’s a very low-budget production from a particularly low-rent Poverty Row outfit. Director Lynn Shores relies heavily on lengthy very static dialogue scenes, these being scenes that could be shot very quickly, easily and cheaply. There was obviously neither the time nor the money to attempt any worthwhile action scenes.

A bigger problem is that it’s played as a standard crime mystery B-movie. Lamont Granston spends almost the entire movie pretending to be Chester Randall. We see the briefest of glimpses of him in his Shadow guise. There is no mention of any of the Shadow’s special talents. He becomes just a stock-standard amateur detective.

The best thing about this movie is the almost complete absence of the irritating comic relief that ruined so many American B-movies of this era.

The Shadow Strikes is just too stilted and too talky and it lacks atmosphere. The plot is serviceable. The acting is at best adequate. It’s just a very unexciting routine mystery that takes no advantages of the possibilities afforded by the original version of the character. Maybe worth a look for its curiosity value if you’re a Shadow fan.

I found a copy of this film, which obviously had fallen into the public domain, in one of those Mill Creek 50-movie DVD sets (in this case their Mystery Classics set). The transfer is a bit rough but watchable.

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

Diary of a Lost Girl was the second of the two silent films Louise Brooks made in Germany for director G.W. Pabst. Pandora's Box is by far the more famous and celebrated of the two.

I have to put my cards on the table right here. While it’s generally regarded as a cinematic masterpiece I am not a great fan of Pandora’s Box. For me it’s an interesting but flawed movie and its only claim to greatness is the performance of Louise Brooks.

One thing that the viewer needs to bear in mind is that not all German movies of the 1920s belong to the Expressionist movement. Pabst most definitely did not adhere to that school. He was a realist.

Diary of a Lost Girl is a realist film but with a plot that is pure melodrama.

Thymian is an innocent young girl. Louise Brooks had many virtues as an actress but playing an innocent virginal young girl was quite outside her acting range. Thymian’s father owns a pharmacy. Thymian is cast out by her family when she falls pregnant to her father’s sleazy assistant pharmacist Meinert. He knocked her out with a sleeping draught in order to have his way with her.

The family is outraged that she then refuses to marry Meinert. She also faces implacable hostility from Meta, her father’s housekeeper. Meta intends to marry Thymian’s father.

Thymian is sent to a reformatory. It’s like a cross between a workhouse in a Dickens novel and a women’s prison in a 1970s women-in-prison exploitation movie. It’s run by a couple of crazed sadists who would be more at home in a horror movie.

Thymian’s only ally is the young Count Osdorff (André Roanne). With his help she escapes, along with one of the other girls, Erika (Edith Meinhard).

Thymian then suffers a personal tragedy, discovering that her child is dead. This is one of the film’s narrative weak points. No woman would bounce back so quickly after the death of a child.

Thymian becomes a high-class prostitute. The nicest, sanest, happiest people in this movie are the madam and the girls in the brothel. They are cheerful and easy-going. The madam obviously looks after her girls and is fond of them, and they’re fond of her. The brothel is an oasis of camaraderie and happiness in an otherwise bleak world. And this is the one time Thymian seems really happy.

Then another plot twist kicks in, followed in quick succession by several others. Pabst seems to be aiming for irony here, and also to give the movie a satisfying cyclical twist.

I believe Pabst was forced to change his original ending which would have been more satisfying and more in keeping with the tone of the film.

On the surface this is a conventional melodrama with an innocent girl corrupted and forced into a degrading life of prostitution (she becomes a “lost girl”) but Pabst was clearly trying to give the story an ironic twist. In this movie trying to be respectable and conform to society’s rules will get you nowhere but if you become a lost girl, a prostitute, you paradoxically find happiness and friendship. It’s a message that might be too radical for many modern viewers.

This movie doesn’t really pull its punches. It’s made quite explicit that Thymian falls pregnant after being taken by force by Meinert. There is no attempt at all to disguise the fact that the brothel is in fact a brothel. It’s also made quite clear (and this might certainly be too radical for some viewers today) that the brothel girls enjoy working in a brothel.

After a shaky start Louise Brooks gives a superb performance. Anyone who thinks actresses in the silent era were not capable of subtle naturalistic performances needs to see Brooks in this movie.

Some of the other acting turns are rather bizarre. The villains in this movie are outrageously over-the-top, almost as if they were appearing in a pantomime. There’s an uneasy mix of tones in this film. Pabst was by inclination a realist but here he’s working with material that is not just pure melodrama but melodrama of an extreme type.

This movie is a bit of a mess in many ways but it has its compensations. Thymian is never presented as a bad girl, or even a good girl gone wrong. Becoming a prostitute is seen as just a perfectly reasonable way to make a living. For all its flaws it’s an oddly fascinating movie, recommended for that reason.

I’ve also reviewed Pandora's Box (1929).

Black Angel (1946)

I would not describe Black Angel, released by Universal in 1946, as an obscure film noir but over the years it definitely has not received quite as much attention as it deserves.

It is based on a Cornell Woolrich novel and it was almost impossible to make a bad movie based on a Woolrich story. His stories just really lent themselves to cinematic adaptation. Woolrich was not a great prose stylist but he had a talent for viciously twisted plots and for creating an atmosphere of paranoia, despair and madness. When translated to the screen his stories just worked.

And there’s some impressive talent involved in this movie. Dan Duryea and Peter Lorre in a film noir. That’s a very promising start. Plus Broderick Crawford who did some fine noir work.

And then you notice that the movie was directed by Roy William Neill and you remember his Sherlock Holmes B-movies for Universal. A very competent director with the ability to get great results from limited budgets.

We get plenty of noir atmosphere right from the get-go. There’s a glamorous blonde and she’s a canary and we know she’s having man trouble. Then Dan Duryea makes his appearance. He seems edgy. That’s all Dan Duryea had to do to give a movie a serious noir vibe.

Immediately afterwards we get our first glimpse of Peter Lorre, looking prosperous and chomping a cigar. We just know he’s involved in something twisted and sinister.

The songbird is Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). On this night she has several visitors. One of them is Marty Blair (Dan Duryea) but she refuses to see him even when he explains to the hotel doorman that he’s her husband. Another is Kirk Bennett (John Phillips). Maybe there was another visitor, and maybe there wasn’t.

Mavis ends up dead and Kirk (who is one of life’s great saps) does every dumb thing that movie protagonists always do. He picks up the gun, getting his fingerprints all over it. Then he scrams, and gets seen by the maid while doing so. He has now ensured that he will be the prime suspect. Homicide Captain Flood (Broderick Crawford) isn’t a bad guy as cops go but the evidence against Kirk is overwhelming. Just to top things off he has a motive - Mavis was blackmailing him. He’s a married man and she was a married woman but they weren’t married to each other so it’s not hard to figure out the blackmail angle. It’s no surprise that Kirk gets arrested and convicted.

But all this is just the beginning of the story. Kirk’s wife Catherine (June Vincent) won’t accept that her husband is a murderer. She is determined to find the real murderer.

She has in her possession a clue. It’s easy to see why the police overlooked it. It appears to have no significance. She thinks it has no significance, until quite by accident she finds out that it’s actually crucial.

When you’re well into this movie you might find yourself thinking that it’s not very Woolrichian. Don’t worry. When the Woolrichian elements kick in they do so in big way. I can’t tell you any more than that without revealing spoilers.

If there’s a minor weakness in this movie it’s June Vincent. She’s not the greatest of noir leading ladies. She’s no Lizabeth Scott. But Catherine is after all a very ordinary woman faced with an extraordinary situation so June Vincent’s hesitant performance actually works fairly well.

Dan Duryea is of course terrific. The great thing about Duryea is that no-one could be more slimy and menacing and no-one did self-pity better but he could also project genuine charm and likeability. That works here. Marty Blair is a self-pitying drunk with a temper but we can’t be sure if he’s going to turn out to be a vicious killer or a really nice guy.

Peter Lorre oozes sinister menace as rich nightclub owner Marko who plays a vital role in the story. He gets what he wants. Including women. He wants Catherine. But this is Peter Lorre so there’s an extra something to his performance, a slight touch of ambiguity which suggests that maybe we shouldn’t take Marko at face value. It’s a fine performance.

And Black Angel has some suitably noirish visuals.

Black Angel belongs to the Woolrichian noir sub-genre and it’s a fine example of the breed. Highly recommended.