- There goes my last lead. I feel all dead inside. I'm backed up in a dark corner, and I don't know who's hitting me.
- For a supposedly sharp private detective, Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) sure spends a lot of time in The Dark Corner not knowing what's going on. While out on a date with his devoted secretary Kathleen (Lucille Ball), Galt spots a conspicuous, white-suited heavy (William Bendix) tailing them. A scene or two later, he's smashing white suit's finger and getting him to sing about his employer, Tony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger). Jardine and Galt used to work together back in San Francisco, but their partnership was effectively dissolved when Jardine landed Galt in jail for manslaughter. Some years later, Galt's set up shop across the country in New York, but it looks like his past has caught up with him at last.
- Or at least, that's what it looks like. Sure, Jardine is up to his sleazy old tricks, this time with the wife (Cathy Downs) of an art collector named Cathcart (Clifton Webb), but he claims not to know anything about the thug in the white suit. Maybe Galt doesn't believe Jardine at first, but his story appears rather more plausible when Galt wakes up to find Jardine killed by the poker in his own hand. Galt's been framed "easier than Whistler's Mother," but who besides Jardine would have wanted to frame him? Maybe Galt's frame fits a different picture entirely. The film's appropriately shadowy sets and imposing silhouettes only enhance the feelings of confoundment shared by nearly all of its characters.
- With these complicated set-ups and framings going on, it's easy to overlook the fact that The Dark Corner is one of the more surprisingly progressive films noir when it comes to its female characters. Kathleen is not only as observant a detective as Galt, but she's a good deal more emotionally resilient than him, too (her father was a baseball umpire, after all). Likewise, Mrs. Mari Cathcart goes from being a complete doormat to taking her fate into her own hands, for better or worse. Even a young girl (Colleen Alpaugh) proves to be a reliable eyewitness, slide-whistle and all. In the meantime, the men in the film are a completely hopeless detective, an caddish blackmailer, a mercenary brute, and an effete, jealous, implied homosexual (of the sort that defined Webb's career). The film may be best remembered as an impressive demonstration of Lucille Ball's versatility, which it certainly is, but director Henry Hathaway sneaks some pretty interesting subtext into the film's myriad dark corners.
- Also starring Constance Collier and Reed Hadley, the latter of whom is actually not the narrator for once.
