The Dark Corner

The Project

What Is This Site?

The Dark Corner is an encyclopedic reference dedicated to American and British film noir of the classical period — 1940 through 1959.

The site takes its name from the 1946 film directed by Henry Hathaway, starring Mark Stevens and Lucille Ball. It is not the most celebrated noir, but it is a precise one — cynical, sharply photographed, and fatalistic in exactly the right proportion. The title seemed apt.

The goal here is a serious, encyclopedic treatment of the classical noir canon: film entries with full cast and crew data, director profiles, location records linking filming sites to their present-day condition, and a reference section covering what noir is and where it came from. The voice is editorial and authoritative. There are no user reviews, no star ratings crowd-sourced from the internet, no algorithm-driven recommendations. Just the films, the people who made them, and the places where they were shot.

The scope is deliberately bounded: films released between 1940 and 1959, primarily American productions, with a selection of British noir. That boundary corresponds to the classical cycle as defined by the critics and scholars who established the field — from Huston's The Maltese Falcon through Welles's Touch of Evil. What came after is a different story.

Data & Imagery

Sources & Attribution

Film metadata — titles, release dates, cast, crew, synopses, posters, and backdrops — is sourced from The Movie Database (TMDB). TMDB is a community-maintained database available under a free API. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Ratings data — IMDb ratings, Rotten Tomatoes scores, and Metacritic scores — is provided by the Open Movie Database (OMDB API).

Film stills, lobby cards, and promotional photographs are drawn from Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive. Most American films from 1940–1959 and their associated promotional materials are in the public domain. All imagery used on this site has been verified as public domain or properly licensed prior to publication. Where copyright status is uncertain, images are not used.

A full list of data sources and their terms is maintained in the Sources section of the Resources page.

Technical

How It’s Built

The site is built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, hosted on Vercel. Film and people data is stored in a Supabase Postgres database, seeded from the TMDB API. The visual design draws on the cinematographic language of the films themselves: chiaroscuro contrast, venetian blind light patterns, and a palette confined to blacks, greys, and a single red accent.

The site is a personal project, currently under active development. The film archive, director profiles, and locations section are live. Streaming availability data and editorial ratings are planned for a future update.