The Dark Corner

“I’m backed up into a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me,” says private detective Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) in Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner. Until recently, Galt had been serving time for manslaughter, having killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, an accident more or less choreographed by his former business partner and world-class thief Anthony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger). Now that Galt’s out of prison, it appears Jardine is after him again, but appearances are sometimes intricately designed by a third party who wants two men to kill each other: the third party in this case is wealthy art gallery owner Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb). Aided by his new secretary Kathleen (Lucille Ball), whose dedication and adoration go well beyond work, Galt must contend with Stauffer (William Bendix), an omnipresent goon hired to do the grunt work for the effete Cathcart. The film is violent — death by fire poker, death by defenestration, brawling in the dark — and the plot is complicated, but the “smoking and stripes” palette created by Hathaway and cinematographer Joe MacDonald is consistently stunning. Chiaroscuro lighting abounds in almost every scene, with clean white objects highlighted in the foreground, stripes of light like lattice around suspenseful moments, etc. Sound design is novel too: the dry hum of urban traffic, trains, and horns in Galt’s office scenes contrast sharply with the lush, orchestral music so prevalent in Cathcart’s environs.