Johnny Angel (1945)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Being a fan of film noir is often simply being a fan of atmosphere. Take Johnny Angel, for instance—it’s readily watchable, executed with some competence, and has what fans expect of noir: murder, mystery, a square-jawed hero, one or two femmes fatales, plenty of stylish atmosphere… but in the end, does it do anything distinctive? There’s the opening mystery, I suppose, as a ship is discovered without anyone aboard—the kind of spooky-horror premise that her leads to a far more humdrum mutiny plot. There’s George Raft, if you insist: The gangster-adjacent leading man of the 1930s who got eclipsed by “backup Raft” Humphrey Bogart at the beginning of the 1940s. There’s the setting, maybe, taking place in New Orleans’s shipping underworld. None of these strengths amount to much in the end, though: the impression left by Johnny Angel is one of a core film noirs without being a particularly good or distinctive one. Maybe its place as an early entry in a developing subgenre that reached its potential late in the 1940s explains much. That’s fine: The interest of a corpus (of being a fan of a corpus) isn’t as much the best of the genre as much as the most average of the genre, and Johnny Angel certainly gets closer to that than being a top-notch example of the form.