The Dark Angel (1935): A Lot of Staring and Not Enough Talking

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you’re a fan of old-school weepies where people communicate exclusively through pained expressions. It’s a movie for the romantics who enjoy a good, long wallow in misery. If you’re looking for snappy dialogue or pacing that doesn’t feel like it’s walking through wet cement, you’ll probably want to skip this one.

Merle Oberon looks absolutely stunning throughout, but she spends an awful lot of time just looking out of windows. The whole thing feels like a stage play that someone forgot to take off the soundstage. It’s got that specific, dusty 1930s feeling where everyone is just a bit too polite about their own destruction.

The War, or whatever

The First World War is the background noise here, but it’s really just an excuse to break up the furniture. Every time things get slightly comfortable, someone puts on a uniform and walks into the mist. It’s almost comical how easily the characters give up on each other. One wrong letter, one misunderstanding, and suddenly we have twenty minutes of people staring at fireplaces.

Fredric March is doing that thing where he tries to be heroic and haunted at the same time, which is fine, but it gets a little repetitive. You just want to grab him and say, "Just tell her the truth, man!" But then the movie would be ten minutes long, I guess.

Small things I noticed:

• The lighting is incredibly moody, almost to a fault. Sometimes it feels like they were filming in a literal closet.
• The way they transition from childhood to adulthood is so abrupt it gave me whiplash.
• There’s a scene near the end that lasts so long I actually checked to see if my Wi-Fi had frozen. It hadn't. They were just still staring.
• Reminds me a bit of the heavy-handed pacing in The Moth, though at least this one has a bit more money behind the curtains.

It isn’t a bad film, really. It’s just very, very committed to its own brand of gloom. You can feel the studio executives pushing for those big, dramatic close-ups where the eyes get all misty. It works, sure, but it’s exhausting. 🕯️

Sometimes I think about how different this would feel if it were made today. We’d probably have a montage of them texting or something equally stupid. I’ll take the staring, I guess. At least it’s honest.