Its the rare actress whose onscreen evilness makes even the eternally villainous Peter Lorre seem sympathetic. As Mavis Marlowe in 1946’s The Black Angel, Constance Dowling actually hits that mark again and again, creating a queen of mean for the celluloid ages.
A blackmailing torch song singer, Marlowe claims multiple victims in this black and white noir with stylish direction from Roy William Neill (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The Black Room). Nicely, Neill’s aesthetic here also includes encouraging Dowling to work with a flinty eyed haughtiness and a steely superiority. Whether verbally thrashing down a housekeeper or gleefully persecuting her ex-husband, Dowling’s Marlowe definitely gives the notorious women played by such genre fixtures as Barbara Stanwyck and Rhonda Fleming a run for their money.
Indeed, as mentioned above, even Lorre as Marko, a mysterious nightclub owner who is central to the plot here, comes off with a sympathetic aura due to this blatant femme fatale’s poisonous machinations.
Interestingly that same year, before she eventually left Hollywood for work in Italian films, Dowling essayed another sinister baddie in Boston Blackie and the Law.
A return to the US found her embracing marriage and motherhood and leaving behind her performing career. Unfortunately, after years of seeming happiness, a heart attack at the age of 49 assured that she would make no onscreen comebacks.
Still, the skillful viciousness with which she supplied Marlowe assures her a place in the history of dark cinema for all of time.
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A former cop turned determined bounty hunter, Ruger here is dead set on taking down Cavanaugh, a vile criminal who murdered her former partner and who has recently kidnapped Mike Rhodes, a handsome mayoral candidate. Much of Ruger’s time is spent protecting Mike’s uncooperative wife Kelly, a woman whom Cavanaugh wants decidedly dead. As Ruger tries, mightily, to protect this innocent bystander, she systematically works her way through Cavanaugh’s associates. Growing ever more stern and calculating, when she finally gets to the man, himself, even the plot’s fun twists and turns will not deter her.
Exposed as an often rigid and uncompromising force in Steve Taravella’s well researched biography 
The niece of the series’ stalwart Jessica Fletcher, a mystery writer who continuously finds herself solving real crimes, Cochran is accused of offing Joyce Holleran (Jessica Walter, 
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