Man in the Dark (Columbia, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 9) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Man in the Dark, a 1953 Columbia production (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCsHuDq2vrg). The initial auspices did not bode well: the director was Lew Landers, who despite having a few good films on his résumé (notably the 1935 The Raven, under his original name, Louis Friedlander; also Condemned Women, Night Waitress and Twelve Crowded Hours), was mostly a mindless hack. The script was committee-written: the original story was credited to Tom Van Dycke and Henry Altimus, “adaptation” by William Sackheim, and the actual script to George Bricker and Jack Leonard. It turned out to be a remake of a 1936 Columbia “B” called The Man Who Lived Twice which starred Ralph Bellamy in the role played here by Edmond O’Brien: Steve Rawley, a common criminal who’s the guinea pig in an experimental operation done by a brain surgeon who’s convinced that at least some people are made to commit crimes by tumors in their brains, and if they’re operated on to remove them, they can live happy law-abiding lives when they recover. The Man Who Lived Twice (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-man-who-lived-twice-columbia-1936.html) also had a director who turned in a much better job than you’d think from his hacky reputation (Harry Lachman), and it begins with an exciting scene in which the cops are chasing Rawley through a university classroom and the adjoining lab until he runs into Professor Clifford Schuyler (Thurston Hall) in the middle of a lecture to his class explaining his theory of brain surgery as a cure for crime.

In Man in the Dark, Rawley (Edmond O’Brien) is already in custody when he volunteers for the super-operation, performed by a surgeon whose name in this version is Dr. Marston (Dayton Lummis). Rawley is convinced that he won’t survive the operation, and O’Brien’s acting in this scene is quite dark in its world-weariness and acceptance of impending death from the operation. He makes just one request: that a mirror be mounted in the operating room so he can watch the medical personnel for as long as he remains conscious. (Director Landers gets some unusual and quite impressive shots of the mirror-imaged doctors and nurses.) Once Rawley goes through the operation and recovers, he’s given a new identity, “James Blake,” and he has no memory of his former criminal life. Unfortunately, a lot of people want to shock him into recalling the past whether he wants to or not, including the police, a maniacal Javert-like insurance investigator named Jawald (Dan Riss) who’s determined to recover the $130,000 Rawley and his gang stole in their last robbery before Rawley was sent to prison for it, and Rawley’s old partners in crime. They are Lefty (Ted de Corsia), Arnie (Horace McMahon), and Cookie (Nick Dennis), along with Rawley’s former girlfriend Peg (the always electrifying Audrey Totter, billed second after O’Brien). The bad guys are determined to get the secret of where Rawley hid the $130,000 out of him even if they have to beat him within an inch of his life to do it. Peg tries to seduce the secret out of him but also becomes convinced that whatever happened to him in the prison hospital, it made him forget the hiding place where he stashed the loot.

Lefty, Arnie and Cookie kidnap Rawley from the grounds of Marston’s clinic and take him to an apartment in San Francisco overlooking the famous amusement park Playland by the Beach, also the setting for the climaxes of such well-known movies as Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Welles protégé Norman Foster’s Woman on the Run (1950). At one point Lefty threatens to put out Rawley’s eye with a lit cigar; he thrusts the cigar directly at the camera, and that shot made me suspect – correctly – that Man in the Dark was originally filmed in 3-D. There’s another 3-D shot of a bird flying straight at the camera when the crooks take Rawley to his former house, which is now boarded up and is about to be torn down to make room for a “motor company” (which could mean anything from an automobile family to a car dealership), and the crooks break into and walk Rawley through his former home in hopes that will jog his memory. Alas, neither the crooks’s brawn nor Peg’s wiles are able to tap Rawley’s unconscious to worm the secret out of him. Ultimately, realizing that both the crooks and the cops (not to mention the insurance investigator; ironically Edmond O’Brien played a maniacally obsessed insurance investigator himself in the 1946 film The Killers) will remain after him, Rawley decides to deduce the hiding place himself based on his dreams. He has one clue: a piece of paper on which is written the number “1133.” After checking out the local post office to see if it’s a P. O. box, Rawley and Peg realize it’s a check-in number for a series of lockers at Playland.

They recover the loot in a box of candy Rawley had bought Peg the night the cops busted him, and Charles moaned about one of his ongoing pet peeves about movies: the container the money is in simply isn’t big enough to hold $130,000. (He said the on-screen container would be big enough only if the money were in $500 bills, and since the loot came from a payroll robbery, it’s hardly likely a company in 1953 would have paid their employees so much it would be in $500 bills. We’d already had a warning that this would be the case when in a flashback scene depicting the robbery, the loot was in a small bag that, like the candy box, was way too tiny to hold that much money.) There’s an exciting, vertiginous scene on the roller-coaster in which Rawley tries to hide out from the gangsters by taking the ride, only to jump off and attempt to flee while clambering up and down the roller-coaster tracks and narrowly missing being run over by the roller coaster several times. (Edmond O’Brien’s stunt double, Paul Stader, certainly had a lot to do in this movie; knowing from Don Siegel, who directed O’Brien in another Columbia “B,” China Venture, that year, that O’Brien was virtually blind from cataracts and could not read his own scripts – he had to rely on his wife reading to him the pages he was going to shoot the next day – it was pretty obvious that O’Brien was being doubled through almost all the action scenes.) Ultimately Lefty and Cookle both die spectacular 3-D falls from the roller-coaster tracks, Arnie is arrested, and Peg, who’s decided she’s in love with the law-abiding “James Blake” incarnation of O’Brien’s character but can’t stand “Steve Rawley” anymore, threatens to leave Rawley if he tries to keep the loot. So he gives it to Jawald and he and Peg go off together, penniless but proud.

When I wrote about The Man Who Lived Twice on moviemagg, I called it “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in reverse” – in that version Rawley not only survived and lived a law-abiding rest of his life but he actually became a doctor by apprenticing to the surgeon that operated on him (maybe you could still do that in 1936, but that would have been an anachronistic plot point by 1953) – and Charles was a bit disappointed that Man in the Dark didn’t make more of the science-fictional elements of the tale. But I quite liked Man in the Dark; like The Man Who Lived Twice, it was a surprisingly good “B” that blessedly didn’t go too far overboard with the 3-D effects, and though O’Brien was hardly as challenged here as he was as the victim of a slow-acting poison determined to find his killer before he croaks in the original D.O.A. (1949), the title character in Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953) or as a Jimmy Hoffa-like union leader in Don Siegel’s The Hanged Man (1964), he nonetheless comes through and (like Bellamy in the original film) gives a surprisingly nuanced performance and turns a stick-figure character into a rich multidimensional creation.