The Dark Corner (US 1946)

Most of the noirs I’ve watched recently have been ‘ambitious Bs’ at best but The Dark Corner is very much a 20th Century Fox ‘A’ picture. It was directed by Henry Hathaway and photographed by Joe MacDonald and it runs 99 minutes with a production spend of $1.2 million. The lead is Lucille Ball and that’s interesting because her film career was very bumpy even if she later became arguably the biggest star on early 1950s US TV (and then worldwide via the export of her filmed shows). In a role not unlike Ida Lupino’s in High Sierra (1941) she heads the cast, but she isn’t the protagonist. That would be fourth-billed Mark Stevens who has a private eye’s office straight out of the Chandler playbook and close to the overhead railway in New York City under the name ‘Bradford Galt’. Ms Ball plays Kathleen Stewart who has been working as his secretary/receptionist for a few weeks. After a local police detective visits to warn Galt to be a good boy in New York after his move from California, the next ‘visitor’ is  a man in a white linen suit in the shape of William Bendix, a familiar heavy using a false name. But he’s not come to hire Galt. Instead, Galt has caught him watching the office and following Galt and Kathleen on a trip to have dinner together. Galt turns the table on him, roughs him up and sends him packing. Galt it emerges has an incident in his past and he thinks that a man named Jardine (Kurt Kreuger) might have sent Bendix.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to art-collector Hardy Cathcart played by the always debonair but sharp Clifton Webb. Webb was also cast in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1946) and there are some similarities between his role from that picture and his character here. In The Dark Corner he has a young and beautiful wife Mari played by Cathy Downs. Ms Downs is perhaps best known as the young wife of Henry Fonda in Ford’s My Darling Clementine (also released in 1946). Cathcart is involved in some way with Jardine in a criminal venture but he suspects that Jardine and Mari may be having an affair behind his back. That’s all I’ll reveal about the plotting.

According to the AFI (American Film Institute) details, Fox paid $40,000 for a Good Housekeeping short story by Leo Rosten as the basis of this production. Rosten also wrote the story that became Lured (1947) starring Lucile Ball – these connections numerous. There are several more not really relevant here. $40,000 is a considerable spend on a property to be adapted. The final script has two ‘romances’ and the Lucille Ball-Mark Stevens romance is the more compelling. That AFI entry suggests that originally the role of Kathleen was to have gone to Ida Lupino who was able to take other roles alongside her Warner Bros. commitments but in this case it didn’t work out. Similarly the Stevens role was to be filled by Fred MacMurray. Lupino and MacMurray would be an intriguing pairing but my concern here is with Ball and Stevens. Stevens was five years younger than Lucille Ball and that is emphasised by the boyishness of Stevens whereas Lucille Ball appears more mature in her manner in this role. This even becomes a repeated gag in the script when she refers to the ‘maternal instinct’ that drives her to want to protect Brad. Kathleen has no back story but she is clearly intent on marrying Brad Galt. She is maternal, professional and prepared to take risks for him but any physical relationship would have to wait until they were married. I quite like Stevens in the role of Brad but Lucille Ball is the main attraction for me in the film. I wish she had more to do in it. I would like to have seen her up against Clifton Webb.

Henry Hathaway didn’t get on with Lucille Ball on the picture and at one point is said to have questioned her professionalism. If this is true it didn’t come across in the final picture. However, Hathaway might not have been happy with the film as released. Certainly it performed only moderately at the box office. Hathaway was at this time in the middle of a run of spy thrillers and this title didn’t fit that mould. It did, however, follow his general approach at this time which saw good use of location photography, in this case in New York and the best action sequences in the film work very well.

But is it really classifiable as a film noir? A great deal of the action is at night and the Chandleresque setting of the private eye office links to the earliest noirs. There is deception in the dealings of the central characters but it is not the presentation of a typical noir narrative. The weakness of the film is in the plotting and I lost track of what was happening and why in the last section. Neither Lucille Ball or Cathy Downs comes across as a femme fatale, though Downs has her moment. The romance angle between Ball and Stevens is more interesting than the triangle of Webb, Downs and Kreuger. The best bits tend to feature William Bendix. When I found Variety‘s take on the film they appear to have taken a very similar view and suggest that the film would be much better losing 20 minutes and quite a bit of the dialogue. What would have been left would have made a tight ‘B movie’ crime thriller. The Dark Corner is worth watching for the New York street scenes, the noirish passages with Bendix and the performances of the leads but it isn’t typical of Hathaway or a classic noir. There are many free offerings of the film online and it is also available on Amazon. Here’s the opening to the film: