Blind Corner (1964)

What makes it different from others?

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

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.

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.

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.

I thought the story line was well thought out by the writer, dornford Yates. Maybe not one of the best he ever wrote, but i really liked it because my father-in-law, Frederick Munday, was in it. Although he never had a speaking part or was recognised in the credits, he was the policeman that led the murderer off to serve his sentence. He appeared, as an extra, in many movies including those magnificent men in their flying machines. He died on 4th April 2006 aged 77. Also known in the U.S. as man in the dark, There were times during the film i wished that they could enlarge on the characters a bit more and i felt the story line quite flimsy, William Sylvester and his character, Paul Gregory,made up for it. A very watchable afternoon matinée movie.