Saturday Night Cinema: The Dark Corner

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema is a little known but superb film noir gem, The Dark Corner, starring Mark Stevens and Lucille Ball.

This grade-A example of “film noir” stars Mark Stevens as Brad Galt, an embittered ex-convict who returns to the private detective business upon his release. Sour and surly, Galt behaves himself only when he’s around his faithful and adoring secretary Kathleen (top-billed Lucille Ball). When Galt’s crooked former partner Tony Jardine (Kurt Krueger) inaugurates an affair with socialite Mari Cathcart (Cathy Downs), Cathcart’s waspish art-collector husband (Clifton Webb) arranges Jardine’s murder, carefully pinning the blame on Galt. On the lam from the cops, Galt must rely on Kathleen to help gather enough evidence to prove his innocence. Best scene: Cathcart’s abrupt but chillingly casual murder of his partner-in-crime (William Bendix). The deliberate lack of background music serves to enhance the gloomy atmosphere of The Dark Corner. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Bosley Crowther of The NY Times, May 9, 1946

When a talented director and a resourceful company of players meet up with a solid story, say one such as “The Dark Corner,” then movie-going becomes a particular pleasure. The new melodrama which Twentieth Century-Fox presented yesterday at the Roxy is a tough-fibered, exciting entertainment revolving around a private detective who is marked as the fall guy in a cleverly contrived murder plot. Mark Stevens, a comparative newcomer looking and acting very much like Fox’s Dana Andrews, is convincingly hard-boiled as the baffled gumshoe, Bradford Galt, who knows he is being framed into a murder rap but has no knowledge of who is pulling the strings or why. His one clew blows up when he is chloroformed by a strong arm “tail” and wakes up beside the battered body of a former partner who once had him railroaded to prison for manslaughter.

The trio of authors credited with “The Dark Corner” have not dealt all their cards above board. Their trump is a trick doublecross, but they have worked in that surprise with cunning and logic, so that the scattered story elements all fall together like so many pieces in a well-ordered jigsaw puzzle. The action, and there is plenty of it, is violent and explosive, starting with a going-over Galt gives a mysterious toughie who has been shadowing him. This character is identifield only as White Suit, obviously because he affects such a suit and he is played with rugged naturalness by William Bendix.

In fact, Director Henry Hathaway has drawn superior performances from most of the cast. Lucille Ball has one of her happier roles as an acid-tongued secretary who shares the private eye’s troubles, and Clifton Webb has another chance as an art gallery proprietor to indulge his talent for acerbic characters. But if Mr. Webb doesn’t change his style soon, his admirers are likely to grow impatient. A strikingly good-looking girl named Cathy Downs is introduced as a sort of second “Laura” in Mr. Webb’s cinematic marital affairs, but she is badly in need of dramatic training.

Mr. Hathaway has made such skillful use of the process screen in simulating a New York background that it looks as though the action was photographed in such locales as Third Avenue, Fifty-second Street and Broadway. And he happily eschewed murky photography for mood effect, using instead a muted and highly evocative musical score. His fine craftsmanship is very evident throughout “The Dark Corner,” and it is regrettable that he had to mar the atmospheric realism by resorting to scene-faking in a few sequences. But this is a minor shortcoming in an otherwise sizzling piece of melodrama.

Mark Stevens, who got his first good break in “From This Day Forward,” proves in “The Dark Corner” that he has a rare combination of talent and personality which, if properly developed, will place him in the forefront of leading men in short order.

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