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Black Angel, 1946
Screenplay by Roy Chanslor, from the 1943 novel by CW
Directed by Roy William Neill
Black Angel, novel and film, has a family resemblance to Phantom Lady. A glamorous, unloving wife is strangled on the fifth anniversary of her marriage to a man she cant stand. A husband is rudely interrogated by some loutish cops, found guilty and condemned to death. The woman who loves him struggles and connives to find the evidence that will clear him. Theres also a detective who is at first skeptical, then accepting, of the mans innocence. (And [SPOILER] her partner in detection, who is played by the top-billed actor, turns out to be the killer.)
A couple of differences: the Black Angel loser is a lover of the murder victim, and the woman avenger, Catherine (blond, charisma-challenged June Vincent), is his betrayed wife. When her schlub of a two-timing spouse is sent to jail for the murder of showgirl-vocalist Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling), Catherine tracks down Mavis ex, a part-time songwriter, full-time drunk named Martin Blair (Dan Duryea). I had to see you, she implores, and he snaps, Why? Because I had a wife who needed killing. And you had a husband who took care of it.
Marty has a locked-room alibi — a pal had bolted the lushs apartment door from the outside just before the murder was committed — and, as played by Duryea, is a sympathetic soul looking to redeem a promising life pissed away. Hes also falling in love with Catherine. So he joins forces with her as a pianist-singer duo at the nightclub of menacing Marko (Peter Lorre), who knew the dead woman. All this amateur sleuthing wins the initial contempt of detective Broderick Crawford, who snarls to Marty, You just gotta play detective. Do I go around playin piano?
The movie has a pretty twist in store. [SPOILER] Nice-guy Marty is indeed the killer — the janitor had let him out of his room, he went to Mavis place hoping for an anniversary reunion and, when she rudely rejected his affections, he strangled her with his scarf (overtones of Franchot Tone!) — but he doesnt remember because his alcoholic stupor blotted out the deed. Now that all is clear, he wants to save the husband of the woman he loves. A killer racing against time to turn himself in: thats a poignant twist.
The Woolrich original had a different twist in mind: the twisting of the womans righteous quest into soulless revenge, as, one by one, the suspects die off and our heroine grows callouses on her conscience. The book was a variation on Woolrichs first novel, The Bride Wore Black, which was also the story of a woman who, having been infected by wrongful death, spreads the contagion around to other innocent people. (The woman may have transferred her husbands betrayal onto other men.)
Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins, Jr., says this is the best film adaptation of a Woolrich novel. But Black Angel the movie uses only the situation, not the soul, of the original. It de-kinks the novels plot — just who is the black angel here anyway? — and the result is a B-minus remake of Phantom Lady.
Fear in the Night, 1947
Screenplay and direction by Maxwell Shane, from the 1941 story And So to Death / Nightmare by CW
In the Black Angel movie, a man has forgotten he killed someone. In Fear in the Night, a man dreams he killed someone, then wakes to find evidence indicating he really is a murderer. Vince Grayson (DeForest Kelley in his movie debut, 19 years before he became Bones McCoy on Star Trek) has memories of a mirrored room and a woman watching as he strangles a man. Vinces policeman brother-in-law Cliff (Paul Kelly, who looks like the seediest possible Johnny Carson), refuses to take his complaint seriously: If you want me to arrest you for murdering a man in your dream, well ... Im off-duty when Im dreamin.
Vince finds a house, and a mirrored room, that resembles his dreamscape; and Cliff learns that a murder was recently committed there. This being a thriller, they have to stay there to discover that the murderer was [SPOILER] a cuckolded husband who hypnotized Vince to kill the man she was fooling around with. Vince still isnt sure if he did it: Ive got an innocent mans conscience in a killers body.
The movie isnt much, but Kelley nicely conveys a doomed mans look and walk, as if hes wearing invisible shackles. His voiceover has the voluptuous tone of a bad dream, or bad pulp writing: It seemed as if my brain was handcuffed... My stomach was riding a roller coaster... I was scared sick. The film stretches its minuscule budget with effects like showing murder in Vinces eyes — literally: the camera closes in, Kelleys eye sockets turn black and we see the nightmare killing in them. Writer-director Shane would remake this film in 1956 as Nightmare, with Edward G. Robinson in the Kelley role. Apparently the same dream kept dogging Shane, and he had to film it, over and over, to get it out of his system.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1948
Screenplay by Barr Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, from the 1945 novel by George Hopley (CW)
Directed by John Farrow
Another man with visions: he can see death coming but is powerless to stop it. Vaudeville mindreader John Triton (Robinson, in the first of two haunted Woolrich roles) has presentiments of doom for a child playing with fire, a newsboy heading into traffic, his own fiancee, her eventual husband. All of these quickly died. Now, 20 years into his premonitory curse, he has a forewarning of doom for his beloveds rich daughter (Gail Russell). The world thinks Triton is mad, and he does too, but his conscience goads him to warn her that she will die under the stars — the nights thousand eyes — at 11p.m. and that her death will be presaged by a gust of wind, a broken vase, a crushed flower, a lion and the words, Theres no danger now. The night in question, one by one, each element comes true...
The books intended victim was a wealthy tycoon, but the confluence of zany coincidences and logic lapses is the same. Theres a why in this too big to go down on any report, the books detective says. It seems to slip away each time you think youve got it pinned down. In the baronial study, the girl, her lover (John Lund), the cop (William Demarest) and a few businessmen all wait for the witching hour. Then [SPOILER] a mysterious figure moves the minute hand on the grandfather clock ahead, and when that clock chimes 11 the girl and her protectors (who never look at their own watches) think all peril is over. Thats when the murderer strikes. Jeez!
Night was Woolrichs prime mixture of the paranoid and the paranormal — a cocktail that rarely fizzes in this flat adaptation. You will make do with minor pleasures: Robinsons walking-dead pallor as Triton (who calls himself a zombie in reverse); Russells fragile beauty (she would drink herself to death at 36); the movies last words, that there are things on earth still hidden from us. Secret things, dark and mysterious. Like the resolution of a Woolrich plot.
The Window, 1949
Screenplay by Mel Dinelli, from the 1947 story The Boy Cried Murder / Fire Escape by CW
Cities crush people, sometimes. They surely crush them together, making it hard to keep a secret. An apartment dweller can hear the bickering couples argument through the walls; he can tell what the family downstairs is eating from the fugitive aroma. If hes up late on a sweltering night, he might glimpse a murder.
Nine-year-old Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) has taken his bedding to sleep where its cooler, on the fire escape outside the apartment upstairs. There he sees a woman (Ruth Roman) stab a man and, with her husband (Paul Stewart), take the corpse away. Tommy, who has the reputation as a fibber, cant get his parents or the police to believe him. Hes in deeper trouble when his mother makes him apologize to the murderers. The next night, his folks have to go out overnight. Dont leave your room, warns his mother. I wont, Mom, he says hopelessly. Theres no place for me to go. But theres a place for the killers to go: his place.
Prime-cut Woolrich: the accused must corral the killers to exonerate himself. And who could be more helpless than a child — alone, abandoned, unbelieved — pursued in the dark by a murderer? This atmospheric thriller, shot almost entirely at night, tautens the suspense like rough hands around a little boys neck. Driscoll was a Disney star (Song of the South, Treasure Island) who somehow knew the way to plant fear and grit on a winsome face. He makes The Window one of the most modest and satisfying Woolrich adaptations. Driscoll earned a special Oscar for his acting that year, but with puberty his value to Hollywood waned. He later said, I was carried on a velvet pillow and dumped into a garbage can.
A city like New York holds a lot of garbage, and a few secrets. In 1968 two children chanced upon a corpse in an abandoned Greenwich Village tenement. The body was buried as John Doe in a paupers grave. A year later, fingerprint tests revealed the mans identity: Bobby Driscoll, dead at 31 of a drug overdose.