Angeli neri: il mondo tenebroso di Cornell Woolrich nel cinema di François Truffaut

In his 1971 preface to the short-story collection Night webs, Truffaut talks of the clouds of ignorance surrounding American authors such as Woolrich, and it would appear that at the start of the 21st century nothing had changed, with the introduction to his novel Rendezvous in Black pointing out that: “Revered by mystery fans, students of film noir, and lovers of hard-boiled crime fiction and detective novels, Cornell Woolrich remains almost unknown to the general reading public” (Dooling 2004: vii). There are of course well-known advantages to a director deliberately picking a lesser known, or second-rate writer, to base a film on: it means that the viewer will not have the burning temptation to continually compare book and film and that critics will not merely “assess a picture on the basis of its literary quality rather than its cinematic quality” (Truffaut 1983: 69). While taking for granted that Truffaut is the sole author of his films, making use of literary works which are then freely refashioned so as to create films which bear his hallmark, the aim of this brief paper is to investigate some of the characteristics of Woolrich’s vast output in order to attempt to understand how much of this writer’s macabre pen can be traced in these two films by Truffaut. In doing so, I will refer not only to the novels The Bride Wore Black and Waltz into Darkness, but also to other works, in particular the novel Rendezvous in Black, a revisitation of the Bride wore black published in 1948. Dooling, Richard. 2004 [1948]. Introduction. In Cornell Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black, New York: The Modern Library. Truffaut, François . 1983. Hitchcock, Revised Edition, New York: Schuster.