User Reviews

A nice compact little tale of lust and greed.

William Sylvester plays a blind but very successful composer who's wife played by the scheming Barbara Shelley has a lover on the side, an artist played by Alex Davion.

Things get complicated when Shelley sends her lover round to bump off her husband to get her hands on his money.

But things go badly wrong when Davion is confronted by Sylvester and told the real truth about his wife, "I may be blind but I'm not stupid" claims Sylvester.

Meanwhile Sylvester's loving secretary is doing all in her power to get her boss into her arms but he will have none of it, he then sets up his wife and catches her with her real lover who happens to be Sylvester's manager who pro-fuses to hate Sylvester's wife but in fact they are having an affair.

Neat little thriller with good performances all round.

With Fathers Day coming up I started looking round for movies that my dad would enjoy. Speaking to a DVD seller,I found out that they had recently tracked down a Film Noir starring Hammer Horror Queen Barbara Shelley,which led to me shaking hands with the man in the dark.

The plot:

Whilst he has written hit singles since becoming blind, Anne Gregory finds everything her husband Paul does to agitate her,with Paul turning to drink when the music fails to play his tune.Crossing paths, Anne begins having an affair with artist Rickie Seldon-who Anne openly kisses in front of the blind Paul.Finding Paul to be getting closer to uncovering the truth,Anne uses her charms on Rickie to hatch a plan to blind Paul off the face of the earth.

View on the film:

Despite the ending slipping into the optimism of Film Gris,the screenplay by James Kelley/Vivian Kemble & Peter Miller compose a toe-tapping Film Noir,which makes blind Paul be the only one able to clearly see Anne's mind games in sight.Playing away from home,the writers give Anne and Seldon's affair a playful mood that turns sour with every hard shot Paul takes.

Lingering in the shadows,director Lance Comfort and cinematographer Basil Emmott give the title a twitchy Film Noir mood,as a fight breaking out in total darkness allows Seldon to stylishly experience Paul's blindness. Slithering across the screen,the alluring Barbara Shelley gives a great performance as Anne,whose up-beat mood Shelley breaks with a femme fatale smirk hinting at Anne's poisonous plans. Slugging drinks back, William Sylvester gives a terrific performance as Paul,thanks to Sylvester shaking Paul's blunt Film Noir bitterness and the desire to fight on for the Film Gris,as the man in the dark turns on the lights.

Ann Gregory (Barbara Shelley) is the wife of a blind but successful composer called Paul Gregory (William Sylvester) but she is secretly having an affair with a young, strugling artist called Rickie Sheldon (Alexander Davion). As an excuse to spend more time with her lover, Ann suggests that she persuades her husband to hire him to paint her portrait. Paul agrees but after a recording session with crooner Ronnie Carroll (who plays himself in the film) he is tipped off by his recording manager and best friend, Mike Williams (Mark Eden), who does not get along with Ann, that he saw both her and Rickie dining together at a restaurant and that they looked like more than strangers - they are in love. Paul wastes no time in informing the pair that he is aware of the affair and Ann tells Rickie that the best way to keep their "champagne and caviar lifestyle" is to murder her husband by pushing him off the balcony of their flat when he has had too much to drink so that it looks like an accident. She tells Rickie that their affair must end if he does not do it. He eventually agrees but are things what they really seem?

A better than average crime b-pic from director Lance Comfort who worked almost exclusively in this area of the British film industry throughout his career. Unusually it features a nice twist in its tale of adultery, greed and murder that comes as quite unexpected. Performances are good all round too except for Mark Eden's unconvincingly characterised record producer who says laughable lines like "One ring-a-ding-ding okay all systems go,success!" in a hopeless bid to sound "with it". But the screenplay by James Kelley, Vivian Kemble and Peter Miller does allow William Sylvester's character a more realistic side. Gregory is a hard drinker who does not appreciate the quality of his work despite its success. "Churning out three minute commercial music...success does not necessarily mean its good". He also states that his real love is for composing concertos. In real life there has been stars be they musicians, film makers or whatever who are dismissive about the quality of what they do even though it has made them famous. One slight drawback is the numbers sung by crooner Ronnie Carroll who was at the height of his fame with hits like Roses Are Red under his belt when he appeared in this. But the two songs he performs in this, Blind Corner and Where Ya Going?, are typical examples of very moderate songs written especially for a low budget film and do little to have us believe that they are the work of the film's fictional hit composer. I very much doubt that they would have even dented the Top 50 had they been released as singles. The latter is staged as a TV performance in which real life Radio Luxembourg DJ Barry Aldis puts in an appearance as the compere. But another plus side is that despite the majority of the plot taking place on a couple of studio bound sets with very few exteriors, the film has a real sense of place and atmosphere enlivened by strong performances and Basil Emmott's atmospheric black-and-white camera-work.

By coincidence I was reading the iconography of Lance Comfort in the British filmmakers series when I came to view this film.Lance Comfort started directing A films in the early 1940s and drifted down to B features and TV work.Difficult to know why.This film came towards the end of his career.It would seem to be more of a co feature than B feature.It is a competently made film on a fairly familiar theme.Namely blind men in jeopardy.Here William Sylvester plays the apparent victim and Barbara Shelley the adulterous wife who wants to get her hands on Sylvesters money without having to bother about a divorce.However her ingenious plan to have Sylvester go wrong in a rather unexpected way.Incidentally there are two numbers by crooner Ronnie Carroll who only died a short time ago.

Produced by Mancunian Films who mainly produced comedy films popular in the north of England this is instead a good example of a crime film, possibly a film noir as it has a femme fatale played by seductive Barbara Shelley. Her character Anne knows what she wants and would do anything to get it, including persuading her erstwhile lover to murder her blind husband by pushing him off a balcony. Ms. Shelley is the best thing in the movie and overshadows the other members of the cast, though William Sylvester as the husband Paul in peril and Alex Davion as the artist Ricky play their roles well. The only thing that diffuses the tension of the movie are the two musical numbers by Ronnie Carroll. I enjoyed the film, particularly the last twenty minutes.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is known for its outer space special effects, prehistoric monkeys and a nefarious computer. As for humans there are two British actors (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) and one American as that pair of astronauts' chief...

But William Sylvester, though born in Oakland, California, is as much a British actor as they are, trained in RADA and a fixture of England's cinema since after the war...

Though known mostly for the Godzilla/King Kong homage GORGA {pre 2001), Sylvester's best performance is the title character from MAN IN THE DARK, actually called BLIND CORNER, which sounds more like the Noir that it is, one of many low budget 1960's crime flicks from the British New Wave.

Playing a pianist with Ray Charles-like shades, Sylvester's Paul -- without falling into too many blind character clichés -- plays talented, classically-trained musician who writes teeny-bopper tunes for the money, and he's got plenty of that...

Enter his gold-digging betrothed, and half of the very familiar plot-line of a cheating wife with a young/poor handsome dolt, and like all these Cuckold-Noir templates, the lover's sent in for the "perfect murder" so the wife can get both men out of the way and, with the money, hook up with someone else...

All this however occurs in the 11th hour through action-set dialogue by William Sylvester defending himself inside a house that he's "felt out" over the last three years and knows like the back... or rather, the inside of his eyelids...

A tightly-wound climactic fight scene igniting into an original twist that makes this Lance Comfort programmer a nifty, far above average hour-long thriller. And it's a chance to see "Dr. Heywood Floyd" take the full reigns without competing with outer space special effects, prehistoric monkeys and... Isn't this where we came in?

A blind composer, who earns good money, gives his wife a generous allowance. She, in turn, showers her lover with money for the little luxuries in life. Soon the wife arranges for her lover, a professional painter, to paint her picture. In between a variety of horizontal posing sessions she tells him about her weary disgust with married life...

"Blind corner" is a good, twisty thriller about a blind man surrounded by betrayal. The movie doesn't waste much time on frills and digressions, although there are a few musical numbers to sit through. (The composer, who dreams of creating a serious masterwork, earns his money writing popular songs.) It also doesn't overstay its welcome, being concise and to-the-point.

I try not to overindulge in nitpicking, but still, there was one detail about "Blind corner" that irked me no end. If you were blind, if you liked the occasional whisky and if you lived in a building with a balcony, wouldn't you arrange for the parapet surrounding the balcony to be both sturdy and high ? And if that were somehow impossible, wouldn't you move with lightning speed to another, safer dwelling ? It is one thing to be capable and confident, it is another to go through life like a lemming on laughing gas.

An incredibly slow moving plot, where nothing happens for what seems like hours, is somewhat salvaged by a disarming final twenty minutes or so, where we find out that things are not what they seem. Adulterous wife, Anne, of blind composer, Paul, openly flaunts her affair with Ricky, a painter of unsaleable art works. She wants Paul's money, and tells Ricky that their affair is over unless he agrees to bump Paul off in order to fund their future together. But it turns out that Ricky is an even more incompetent murderer than he is a painter, so Paul survives and explains the plot to him. Ricky is actually a stooge, set up by Anne to take the rap for the murder, while she and her true lover, Mike, take off with the loot - she and Mike have kept up an act of mutual antipathy in all public appearances as cover for their affair. Anyway, Paul outsmarts them, and the police nab the villains.

Okay, so the ending creates some unexpected interest, but you wonder whether the revelation of Anne's affair with Mike rather undoes the logic of what's gone before. For example, why does Mike need to pretend to Paul that he saw Anne and Ricky in a restaurant together - the lovers' plan does not require that Paul knows anything about the affair, they only need Ricky to believe that Anne plans a future with him once Paul is dead? Also, as far as we see, Anne spends every available minute away from Paul, on various phoney pretexts, having sex with Ricky, and Mike is meant to be okay with that is he? We have no idea when Anne and Mike are getting their quality time together, so in this sense the film doesn't really play fair with the viewer. And, if the 'perfect murder' plan is plausible enough to convince Ricky, why not just do the deed themselves, and save Anne all the wasted time, and sex, with a man she has no interest in?

A competent cast do their jobs largely convincingly, just a shame about the needless Ronnie Carrol, and those hideous songs.