Word: novels
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...novel?s suspense came from its withholding of the news that [SPOILER ALERT] Scott?s upper-class friend Jack Marlow is the killer. You can?t obscure the star till the end of the movie, so Schoenfeld and Siodmak don?t waste time trying. From the moment Marlow (Franchot Tone) enters Cliff?s dingy digs and mutters, ?What a place. You can feel the rats in the walls,? he has pearly psychopath written all over him. Especially his hands, which poke out of the shadows into harsh light. ?How interesting a pair of hands can be,? Marlow muses, as Cliff...
...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 can?t 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. There?s also a detective who is at first skeptical, then accepting, of the man?s innocence. (And [SPOILER] her partner in detection, who is played by the top-billed actor, turns out to be the killer...
...Woolrich original had a different twist in mind: the twisting of the woman?s 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 Woolrich?s 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 husband?s betrayal onto other...
...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 novel?s plot - just who is the black angel here anyway? - and the result is a B-minus remake of ?Phantom Lady...