In short: Blind Corner (1963)

aka Man in the Dark

Blind composer of horrible popular songs Paul Gregory (William Sylvester) thinks his marriage to former actress Anne (Barbara Shelley) is a bit more healthy than it really is, with Anne tolerating his bouts of cynicism (caused by his blindness) and his low-level alcoholism, and he in turn tolerating her unpleasant interest in money and love for being the social butterfly of the couple.

In truth, Anne has not been loving anything about Paul anymore but his money for quite some time now, and is having an affair with the young, and rather weak-willed, painter Rickie Seldon (Alexander Davion); Paul for his part is not exactly doing much to dissuade his secretary Joan (Elizabeth Shepherd) from her big fat crush on him.

Anne knows quite well that she won't be able to divorce Paul and keep access to his pile of money, so she's trying to convince Rickie to murder her husband, who likes to cavort drunk on their flat's balcony, so that they both can be together and rich - or so she says. Rickie's not too excited about the plan, but once Paul finds out about the affair and Anne puts the painter on the spot telling him he's either going to kill her husband or will never see her again (and, to Rickie's defence, she is played by Barbara Shelley), he comes around to the plan.

Both haven't counted on Paul being blind but far from stupid or helpless, though. There's also an additional nasty surprise waiting for the painter.

Lance Comfort's Blind Corner is - despite two horrid musical numbers that make quite clear why Beatlemania was good and necessary - a pretty swell little melodramatic thriller.

Comfort's direction isn't much to talk about. Blind Corner more a case of a director not getting in the way of his actors than of one putting his own mark on the proceedings, but that does of course imply that Comfort - veteran of British B-movies that he was - was quite capable of realizing the quality of his cast and giving them room to do their thing without him trying to get in their way.

For it is the quality of the cast and the script that makes Blind Corner worth watching. All of the principals are just really excellent at fleshing out the small complexities the script by James Kelley allows them. Sylvester's projection of a combination of ill-served romanticism (which is paralleled in Davion's also rather problematic - seeing as it leads him into an affair with a married woman and a murder plan - romanticism), bitterness and self-loathing is a thing to behold, while also making it more understandable why Anne might not want to live with him any longer (without excusing murder, obviously). Shelley (who is one of the great actresses of British genre films, of course) for her part makes for a fantastic femme fatale, carrying herself with the right mixture of allure and cruelty, yet also showing why life with Paul has - at least in part - made her how she is, in a performance that's more complex than you'd expect in your run of the mill low budgeted thriller melodrama.

Blind Corner is a fine example of the British low budget thriller, and comes highly recommended, even to the fools who don't adore Barbara Shelley.

 

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In short: Devils of Darkness (1965)

British writer Paul Baxter (William Sylvester) and his friends, the Forest siblings, are on vacation in a picturesque little village in France. As this is a British movie, there can only be something sinister afoot in continental Europe. And in fact, the village turns out to be the nest of a Satanic cult serving the very subtly named vampire Count Sinistre (Hubert Noel) and his chosen bride Tania (Carole Gray).

The Forests don't survive their stay in the village for long. The brother is killed in a caving "accident" when he stumbles onto the coffin of Tania. I think there might be a better place - preferably with locks - for a vampire's coffin than a dank cave, especially when her fiancée owns a village, but what do I know?

Soon after, the bereaved Forest sister doesn't survive the good Count's very special attempts at comforting her. Officially, she drowns.

Baxter is getting a little suspicious of the whole affair, but the local police blocks his attempts to find out what really happened (while drinking coffee, instead of tea - the fiends!), and his only hints for solving the mystery are a short glimpse of bite marks on the dead woman's neck and a golden bat talisman he finds where she was killed. The only thing Baxter can do is to pack his things and take his fancy new amulet back to England for further research.

What Baxter doesn't know is that the golden bat is the most prized possession of Sinistre - that's why he lost it so easily - and that the vampire's Satanist cult has a branch office in London. So while our hero is trying to find out more about the amulet, evil plans are set in motion by the vampire and his friends.

The best part of those plans is obviously the kidnapping of Karen (Tracy Reed), a girl Baxter has just met at a party, to try and use her as a hostage against the writer. That's a real tactical masterstroke by Sinistre, which only gets better when the rather distractible vampire decides that he'd rather have Karen than Tania as his bride. A vampire marriage crisis ensues.

What begins as a standard Gothic vampire film with a few short scenes about the awakening of Sinistre in ye olden times, soon turns into a standard Gothic contemporary vampire film. It seems however that Devils of Darkness' director Lance Comfort isn't satisfied with making "just" a nice Gothic genre piece, and so the film again transforms into one of those vampire films that try to be contemporary. Unfortunately, while Comfort manages to make his film very pretty to look at, he never finds a way to either lose the Gothic trappings completely or use the friction between the modern and the Gothic to any memorable effect.

This failure certainly has a lot to do with the film's inability to understand its contemporary pop culture, which leaves us with some of those dreaded scenes of very polite British mid-60s beatnik "orgies" as seen through the eyes of a scriptwriter nearing his or her fifties.

Then there's the rather confused and very very slowly developing plot that does contain some funny ideas (monogamous vampire counts? really?), yet prefers dithering to coming to any point; building any form of tension is right out anyhow. It's never a good sign when the best end a film can find for its main villain is to die by randomly running into a cross on a graveyard. Of course, Hubert Noel and his not utterly unthreatening thick French accent and presence are well served with that sort of ending, as they are with the bland William Sylvester as their enemy.

 

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