From the Rental Vault: So-So Twinbill

Mavis Marlowe is dead, and Kirk Bennett (John Phillips) didn't do it. Trouble is, the only one who believes that is his wife Catherine (June Vincent), so Kirk is just weeks away from paying the ultimate price for the crime in 1946's The Black Angel.

Cathy enlists the aide of Mavis's ex-husband Martin Blair (Dan Duryea), formerly her musical partner but now a drunk, wrecked by the memory of his lost love. Together, the pair try to get close to nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre), who had a connection with Mavis and who was there on the night she died. Blair, wanting to help Catherine, sobers up and works with her as a piano-player/singer duo. He also begins to fall for her a little bit, and though Catherine knows Kirk was having an affair with the dead woman, she only vaguely discourages him so she can keep his help.

Angel was taken from Cornell Woolrich's novel, but Woolrich hated the adaptation because it kept Catherine on the straight and narrow, while he had the wife take more extreme measures to try to prove Kirk's innocence and gain revenge. It's acted well enough and the story doesn't meander (and it's scary how much the younger Willem Dafoe looks like Duryea), but it seems more like a few set pieces glued together that a smooth narrative. Today it's considered kind of a minor noir classic, but that probably has as much to do with the style, some of the surprising little turns the story takes and the ever-reliable creepiness of Peter Lorre than it does anything else.

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Michelle Yeoh had already been a high-level Hong Kong movie action star, but her 1997 role opposite Pierce Brosnan in The World Is Not Enough and her 2000 turn in the international smash Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gave her serious pull in the Hong Kong and southeast Asian film industry. One of her first co-productions was the 2002 adventure movie The Touch, also starring Ben Chaplin and Richard Roxburgh.

Top-level burglar Eric (Chaplin) has stolen an ancient Buddhist holy relic for international financier Karl (Roxburgh). But he steals it back from Karl because it may be the key to a great treasure, and he takes it to the family of acrobats who adopted him when he was younger. That family is now led by eldest daughter Pak Yin Fay (Yeoh), who as it happens had been given the responsibility of safekeeping this very same artifact before it became lost many years ago.

Karl knows Eric re-thieved the relic and so the chase is on. He holds a trump card, too - Pak Yin Fay's younger brother and the brother's girlfriend.

The poster and the concept are probably meant to suggest an Indiana-Jones-type adventure, and there's no question that should be the kind of story delivered, with Yeoh as a co-producer and co-writer. The field may not be huge, but she's easily one of the very best female action stars in movies (like Jackie Chan, in whose movies she really gained notoriety, Yeoh does her own stunts), and as her praised role as Aung San Suu Ky in 2011's The Lady shows she can act as well. Roxburgh is properly menacing as the ruthless billionaire, but the role is mostly flat with a couple of clever lines. And Chaplin is a sliding record needle almost every time he has to do more than mug for the camera or throw a kick.

Fortunately, the unpromising start didn't sideline Yeoh long, and she continued to work in front of and behind the camera. Even if The Touch didn't have the touch, Yeoh still does.