Every three months, Fox Film Noir turns out another three gems on DVD. There have now been twelve releases, and all have been good movies well-presented in fine prints with commentary tracks and other extras. Even the box covers have been thoughtfully prepared, using original poster art in eye-catching designs. One of the latest releases is The Dark Corner(1946), Henry Hathaway's moody and stunningly photographed drama of a private investigator whose past continues to ensnare him.

Mark Stevens plays Bradford Galt, a P.I. who has set up shop in San Francisco after serving a jail term on manslaughter charges. Galt was framed by his former partner, Tony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger), and when he finds himself now tailed by a thug in a white suit (William Bendix), Galt believes Jardine is after him once more. Soon Galt finds himself in a complicated maze which also includes Clifton Webb as an effete art dealer named Hardy Cathcart and Cathy Downs as his trophy wife Mari. Helping Galt work his way out of this mess is his secretary Kathleen - the top-billed Lucille Ball.

In all, The Dark Corner is a rather implausible story (even for this era) which suffers somewhat from having its main character - Galt - sit around brooding and depressed much of the time, trying to figure out what to do. He's rather passive until light bulbs start popping off inside his head and he then springs into action. Stevens is OK but never quite feels right for the part. He was a Fox contract player who started in musicals, and this film was an attempt to change his pretty-boy image. But he still looks too polished and young to be a tough guy, and as a result his hard-edged, Chandleresque dialogue is prone to sounding forced and unconvincing. Stevens later directed a film noir, Cry Vengeance (1954), in which he virtually recreated this character but made him even more violent and moody.

Lucille Ball was not a happy camper on this set. She had recently sued MGM to get out of her contract, and as revenge they loaned her to Fox for this low-budget movie. She is perky and energetic as the secretary who falls in love with her boss and sticks by him no matter the dark morass he falls into. But Ball hated her performance and suffered a nervous breakdown during filming because of the tyrannical methods of director Henry Hathaway.

Clifton Webb plays pretty much the same part as he did in Laura (1944), which is a movie that Darryl Zanuck desperately wanted The Dark Cornerto emulate. Zanuck put one of the primary writers of Laura, Jay Dratler, to work on The Dark Corner, and the script is partially set in the same upper-crust world and even features a painting of one of the female characters (Cathy Downs), which Webb (another Laura alum) loves more than the real thing.

While the script doesn't rise to the level of Laura, and while Stevens was not ideal casting, the movie is still a winner thanks to several inspired scenes of hard-hitting violence and shocking murder, as well as to the real star of the movie - cinematographer Joe MacDonald. MacDonald was approaching the golden period of his career at this point. His next assignment would be My Darling Clementine (1946), and collaborations with Elia Kazan and Sam Fuller were around the corner. The Dark Corner is full of deep, velvety blacks and hard shadows which create wonderful menace and make otherwise ordinary scenes stunning. From one scene to the next, it's a beautiful-looking movie (which thankfully has received an excellent transfer onto DVD).

The commentary track by film noir historians James Ursini and Alain Silver gets a bit dry in places but is otherwise quite good. They have done several of these DVDs now and have comfortable conversing styles, covering both the thematic content of the film and its techniques. One interesting tidbit of many is their observation of a sequence in which Ball and Stevens enter a diner after Stevens has narrowly avoided being hit by a car. All the characters and extras in the diner, Silver and Ursini point out, are wearing dark clothing "so the light mostly highlights their faces and other bits and pieces. It's a very painterly rendering by MacDonald in anticipation of the motifs that have to do with Cathcart and his obsession with art."

Fox Film Noir will return in March, 2006, with No Way Out (1950), Fallen Angel (1945) and The House on Telegraph Hill (1951).

For more information about The Dark Corner, visit Fox Home Entertainment. To order The Dark Corner, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold