BLACK TUESDAY is certainly the best rediscovery in American noir for some time, though some of that is due to the fact that things have been so thoroughly combed through in the past 10-15 years that there was little left to find. Robinson elevates the film despite it being a type of role we've seen from him a number of times before, and I agree with Erickson's point about character/bit actors bringing their "A" game to their scenes with him was another reason why the film works despite the rather static script.
Fred Sears never had a budget one-third the size of what was supplied for BLACK TUESDAY, and we'll never know what he could have done if he'd been sprung from his Sam Katzman prison cell. Fregonese came to the US with a bit of pedigree from his work in Argentina, and got to make B+ films with reasonable budgets and fairly big names while at Universal. He was definitely at his best with location shooting, but he handled the studio-bound sequences in BLACK TUESDAY well, probably in part because he had a lighting genius to work with in Cortez.
All that said, I tend to think VICE SQUAD is the better film, with Robinson showing more of his range in a story that has a great deal of "moral ambiguity"!
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