User Reviews

This episode starts out fairly typically for The Fugitive. Richard Kimball is en route once more to yet another town. A road block to search the bus for a suspected thief, like the batting of a butterfly's wings, changes Kimball's plans into something deeper and darker. Taking refuge on the secluded rural milk farm of Sam Braydon seems like a good happenstance. The darkness in the episode looms large as there is a strange kind of family dynamic going on at the Braydon farm. There's papa Sam and his two daughters, Clara and Mattie. Clara's childhood love and fiancé, Bob Matthews works and lives with the the family. Things seem tenuous between the girls, but why? Mattie is the baby of the family and much revolves around giving her what she wants, she has been blind since an accident when she was eight. Whatever is swirling seems deeper than sibling jealously.

The story of Dark Corner is complex and The Fugitive really delivers considering that it has just under an hour to weave it. While the story may be a bit rushed it's brought to life by an excellent cast. Tuesday Weld stand out as the manipulative Mattie. Her beauty holds the camera it's no doubt, but it is her excellent mysteriously dark nuances that linger in the viewer's mind. One wants to feel sympathy, but little things she does and says keep the ability to do so just a bit removed. Elizabeth MacRae brings a slight tension to her role as Clara which alerts one to deeper, more sinister, ties between not just her and her sister, but everyone. Kimball has landed in a real slow pot-boiler in which, perhaps, he becomes a catalyst. The glue, which has managed to keep things from falling apart is the patriarch Sam and the excellent Crahan Denton (To Kill A Mockingbird) may be losing his grip on his two daughters who he loves dearly.

What happens as things get really dark is almost unthinkable, yet we know from the Biblical account of Cain and Abel what can happen. Dark Corner explores this and it doesn't water it down. This is fine TV and a must see The Fugitive episode. Kimball survives, but is truly shaken this time and not because of Gerard.

When I was in college there was a blind student on campus I always saw walking around with a cane. I wound up on a street corner waiting for a light with this person. I was a little nervous and really didn't know what to do, if anything, but made myself ask him if he wanted any help getting across the street. He said "thank you" and held my arm as we crossed. I told him where the curb was. He thanked me. We were going in different directions from there so I wished him a good day and went on my way. I later read an interview in the student newspaper with him and he said it amused him when people supposed he couldn't cross the street without assistance and that he let people help him while he was secretly laughing at them.

I got two lessons out of this: (1) Don't underestimate people. If they really need your help, they will ask for it. (2) Don't assume that because a person is blind that that means they are a nice person. Somehow, there's a tendency to assume that a crippled person who can see and communicate well is frustrated and angry but that a blind or deaf person is sweet and gentle just because they don't communicate as much and have to be patient to get along in life. At least there is that tendency in dramas such as "A Patch of Blue" or "Johnny Belinda". In fact people with handicaps are just that: people, with the full range of personality traits, some of which may be a reaction to their limitations and some of which are unrelated to it.

Kimble is again fleeing the police, (interestingly, he has a limp which goes unexplained for a couple of scenes, suggesting that it might be the result of the wound he sustained in the previous episode- but then there's a reference to his injured ankle). He hides in a barn, which turns out to also be the studio of a young blind woman, (Tuesday Weld), who is a sculptress. She uses her fingers to explore her subject, rather than her eyes. She decides she'd like to explore Richard Kimble. She lies to the police both to save him and keep him there, (it turns out these cops were after another guy but she doesn't tell him that so he will continue to hide out). She becomes still another apparently helpful person with her own agenda.

And that's what the story is about. She's very pretty, (made up to look glowing and ethereal, while her sister, played by the normally glamorous Elizabeth McRae, has little or no make-up on). She has artistic talent and sensual fingers. She seems like a nice lady. But she isn't. She's totally selfish, spoiled and conniving. In fact, this episode resembles "The Bad Seed" more than Johnny Belinda. Tuesday went blind from a fall off a cliff when she was trying to push her sister over it. She's now trying to steal her husband but takes time out from that to keep Kimble as her own personal man-toy. Her father tries to interfere and she puts his car in gear while he's closing the garage door and runs him over! Then there's that sculpture she's made of Kimble's face that might interest the sheriff.

Dick is on a bus that is boarded by cops as this one opens. He escapes out the back door one step ahead of the law, and twists his ankle jumping a fence. He doesn't know it, but the cops are actually looking for someone else. The fuge ducks into a building behind a farmhouse, where Ms Weld is using it as a studio to do sculptures in clay. Tuesday is blind, and seems at first to be a real sweetie, but it's soon apparent that she's anything but. She also happens to be, as always, breathtaking. She always seemed to be playing the same character, except for the blind thing. Which wasn't far from reality. Colonel Parker told Elvis not to mess with her because she was trouble. Anyways, she manipulates Kimble into staying for awhile, posing as a model for her sculpting. He also makes himself handy with his amazing ability to repair farm machinery. He finds out that Tuesday is fooling around with her sister's fiancé. This girl is beyond even Dick's ability to rehabilitate. She went blind when she fell down a steep hill as a child, and it turns out she was trying to throw her sister down the hill when it happened. But the worst thing happens when she puts the truck in reverse and it kills her daddy. She says it was an accident, that the transmission slipped, but Dick knows she's lying because he fixed the transmission. She comes on to Dick, putting her arms around him and tells him she likes him, a lot, as she rubs up against him. Dick frees himself from her embrace and walks away. He walks a little funny, but he walks away. She then calls the cops. Instead of running away, Dick has a good deed to do, so he stays until the sister and boyfriend get there and he tells them everything. The sister, who would later become Gomer Pyle's girlfriend, already knew some of it. Tuesday then breaks down and starts to get over her blindness just before the cops get there. The two of them cover for Kimble, who gets away in the nick of time. He hops a freight at the end, and though nothing good ever happened to Dick in a boxcar, we don't know what happens next, except that he remains......a fugitive.

Tuesday Weld always plays beautiful women whose beauty has made them needy and manipulative. Even as late as the 1990s, in FALLING DOWN she plays the manipulative, formerly beautiful wife of the principal cop (Robert Duvall). "It's not easy to see your beauty go when that's all you had," Duvall explains to his fellow cop. In real life, she (Weld) was equally needy because her father died when she was young and she had to support her family boy modeling and acting. She began drinking when she was ten years old attempted suicide when she was 12.

Here she plays an early variant, a beautiful blind girl who constantly tests her family's love for her by deliberately complicating their lives.