Black Angel

Black Angel is a crime mystery set in Los Angeles. A popular nightclub singer, Mavis Marlowe, is found dead in her apartment, and Kirk Bennett, a man she had been blackmailing, is arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for her murder. Convinced of her husband's innocence, Catherine Bennett approaches Martin Blair, the victim's estranged husband, a once-successful songwriter whose career and life have collapsed into heavy drinking. The two join forces to track down the real killer before the execution is carried out.

Their search draws them into the orbit of Marko, a shady nightclub proprietor, and the pair take work there as a musical act while they investigate. Dan Duryea plays Martin Blair, June Vincent plays Catherine Bennett, Peter Lorre plays Marko and Broderick Crawford plays Captain Flood. Constance Dowling appears as Mavis Marlowe and Wallace Ford as Joe. The film was directed by Roy William Neill, who also produced it with Tom McKnight, from a screenplay by Roy Chanslor. It was Neill's eighth credited directing effort in the chronological list of his films, arriving after a run that included several Sherlock Holmes pictures, and it followed Dressed to Kill and Terror by Night the same year.

It runs eighty-one minutes and was released by Universal Pictures on 2 August 1946. Audience reception has been modest but persistent: on IMDb it holds a 6.9 rating from around 4,500 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.1 from a much smaller pool of 59 votes, so the stronger showing rests on the larger sample.