Black Angel is a good, fast-paced Cornell Woolrich mystery and certainly one of the noiriest of all noirs. It features lots of grimy black-and-white photography of seedy hotels and bars, and a nebbishy weakling who is falsely accused of murder and who is rescued from execution by a last-second phone call to the Governor. It also offers a blackmailing chantoosie and a hogshead of red herrings. The plot turns on an unusual episode of amnesia. Martin Blair, played by Cornellian Dan Duryea, has strangled his cheating ex-wife while in an alcoholic haze but doesn't remember that he did so. He gets himself involved with the attractive wife of a man who has been accused of the murder, abandons alcohol for Coca-Cola and sets out the find the killer. Eventually he falls off the wagon, and in a blackout suddenly "remembers" that he himself is the perpetrator. "It's Korsakoff's syndrome," mumbles an authoritative doctor, trying to add a glimmer of credibility to a doubtful turn of events.
I had never heard of Korsakoff's and I thought it was just mumbo-jumbo, but it turns out there is such a condition: "Korsakoff's syndrome is a chronic memory disorder caused by a severe deficiency of thiamine. It is most commonly caused by alcohol misuse."
But Korsakoff's is not a come-and-go disease; it's a progressive deterioration. Moreover, there's not the vaguest hint in the "literature" to suggest either that a Korsakovian is likely to commit a murder and then forget it or that a second bout of drinking can restore his memory. That sort of stuff is strictly Hollywood
Once again Hollywood amnesia proves to be the most flexible and variable of all diseases.
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