Man in the Dark *** (1953, Edmond O’Brien, Audrey Totter, Ted de Corsia) – Classic Movie Review 5186

Director Lew Landers’s 1953 film noir thriller stars the always excellent Edmond O’Brien, Audrey Totter and Ted de Corsia, is filmed in 3D and is based on a story by Henry Altimus and Tom Van Dycke. The first Columbia Pictures film released in 3D, it is a remake of the 1936 Ralph Bellamy film The Man Who Lived Twice.

O’Brien stars as jailed criminal Steve Rawley, who, in exchange for his freedom, suffers a partial lobotomy to cure his violent tendencies. But it also removes his memory of where he stowed his last big haul of $130,000 heist money. Only now his old crook partners Lefty (Ted de Corsia), Arnie (Horace McMahon) and Cookie (Nick Dennis) do not believe him and kidnap him to find out where the loot is.

The good cast is largely battling the contrived and frankly unbelievable situation and the mechanically developed screenplay by George Bricker, Jack Leonard and William Sackheim in a mostly unremarkable thriller, except seen in its original 3D print, which uses the medium with excitingly rash abandon. Landers keeps it plenty 3D lively, with a cigar, a spider, scissors, forceps, scalpels, fists, bullets, bodies, whirling car rides and a roller coaster etc etc all coming at you.

Even here, though, O’Brien is excellent, while Totter and de Corsia are very good value too as O’Brien’s greedy girlfriend Peg Benedict, and the gang’s greedier new boss.

Also in the cast are Dayton Lummis, Dan Riss, Shepard Menken, John Harmon, Ruth Warren, Paul Bryar, Mickey Simpson, William Tannen, Robert Williams and Carleton Young.

The amusement park was filmed at Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

Warner Bros claimed House of Wax (1953) as ‘the first feature produced by a major studio in 3D’ but Man in the Dark premiered two days earlier. Arch Oboler’s hit 1952 3D film Bwana Devil – the first 3D sound feature in English and the first 3D film in colour – panicked the major studios into making 3D movies. Columbia rushed its current film into 3D production and completed it in just 11 days.

Happily, it is again available in 3D. On 1 February 2013, it was shown in digital 3D in a double feature with Inferno (1953) in the Noir City Film Festival at San Francisco’s Castro Theater.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5186

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