Blind Corner

The 1961 film PIT OF DARKNESS amounts to all I recall watching done by English Director Lance Comfort. I quite liked it, too, in fact I preferred it to BLIND CORNER, aka MAN IN THE DARK, which I find to be the more fitting and descriptive of those two titles.

William Sylvester plays the role of the blind musician well, Ronnie Carroll sings the songs he composes competently enough, and Barbara Shelley offers no comfort as Sylvester's stunningly elegant and classy scheming, cheating, gold-digging wife en route to a triple life, using and discarding lovers like so many undergarments.

Thankfully, beautiful Elizabeth Shepherd is on hand to offer love to the blind lead, and Alex Davion is a potential murderer with a conscience, so in the end this is one murderless murder tale.

No great names in the cast, but credibly acted. Generally tight, simple, effective script and cinematography, better than usual for a B picture.

Well worth your time, though I will only rewatch it if I come across it and I do not remember seeing it. 8/10.

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.

BLIND COMFORT is an engaging little B-picture that acts as another version of the 'blind person in peril' sub-genre. It's a film that benefits from fine leading performances from William Sylvester - utterly convincing as the blind and embittered husband - and Barbara Shelley as his adulterous wife. As is so often the case with such films, Shelley is desperate to get her hands on her husband's fortune so concocts a murder plot with the aid of her lover.

Most of the film takes place in a single location, a lavish penthouse apartment with a balcony overlooking the city. I wonder if this was an inspiration for the recent B-movie PENTHOUSE NORTH which had almost exactly the same setting and was also about a blind person terrorised in her own home.

The script is well written and well paced, with plenty of material to fill up the running time. It manages to successfully pull the rug out from under the viewer's feet on at least one occasion, and even if you think you know how this one's going to play out, there are still surprises in store. I found that Sylvester gave a very sympathetic performance without ever overdoing the sentiment, while Shelley plays a very different kind of character from those we know in her Hammer pictures. I found her completely despicable, the most horrible character of her career. BLIND CORNER was directed by veteran director Lance Comfort, who would go on to direct Sylvester again in the following year's horror picture, DEVILS OF DARKNESS.

Lance Comfort made a long string of excellent thrillers from the 40s and on, and this is just one more pearl in the necklace. Paul, a composer and pianist who composes pop music for a change to make money, is married to an actress, who married him before he went blind, and after the curtain fall of his blindness she would use do anything to get out of her marriage and to dispose of the blind pianist, of whom she is tired of just pitying. So she gets some lovers and use them in an intrigue to set her husband off. The script is very well written and cleverly composed, the dialog is excellent, and above all, the music is outstanding and veils the film in silk. You might object against the cynicism of this brilliant chamber play, but the character of the blind pianist (William Sylvester) outweighs any objection. More often than not, blind men acquire a second sight and deeper sensitivity and sharper sense of reality than any easily fooled superficial eyesight.

The blind man can be an "excellent "victim in the thriller genre : see David Eady's "faces in the dark" (1960 )and Henry Hathaway's " 23 paces to baker Street "(1956): "blind corner " borrows the "in the dark,we are equal " from the latter (a trick which would be used again in "wait until dark" (1967))

That said ,the screenplay is not as exciting as the aforementioned movies : it drags on in the first part ,and the syrupy songs are filler .But it hits its stride in the second one,full of sudden new developments ,with a good cast including excellent William Sylvester ,people outside England recall as "2001" doctor Floyd. He is very convincing as a blind man who's got some kind of "sixth sense" .