The dark around a kiss

Ronald Reagan made several light romantic comedy programmers for Warner Bros. after returning from World War II. Another Warner Bros. movie in that genre that Reagan didn't make is A Kiss in the Dark.

David Niven plays the male lead, a concert pianist named Eric Phillips. He's gettin a bit neurotic, having been a pianist for ages and feeling like he can't remember any of his music and thus really can't go out there on stage. This is a prospect that frightens his manager, Peter Danilo (Joseph Buloff). Danilo is making good money off of running Phillips' career, and if he had to step away from that career for any period of time, well, who knows what would happen.

Danilo has also been getting his boss into things that Eric is being left more or less in the dark about. For example, Eric owns an apartment building. But the superintendent of the building, Horace Willoughby (Victor Moore) has been neglecting upkeep on the building, to the point that the building inspector has repeatedly issued code violations, and it to the point of putting out a warrant for the arrest of the building's owner if nothing is done to fix the violations.

Eric, realizing what a bad situation he's in, goes down to the apartment building to see what's up. What he finds is a series of quirky tenants. Most notably, there's Polly Haines (Jane Wyman), an advertising model whose usual photographer loves the piano music of one Eric Phillips. She's engaged to insurance salesman Bruce Arnold (Wayne Morris). There's also a tenant Mr. Botts (Broderick Crawford) who works an overnight shift and wants to sleep in the day, and thinks everybody is out to stop him from sleeping. So he harasses them to no end, nd all the other tenants want him out of the house.

Eric has some sympathy for most of the tenants, wants to fix up the building and put in all sorts of idiotic things there's no room for and that most of the tenants in real life would never wind up using, like a greenhouse. The one thing that's incredibly predictable is that Eric is going to fall in love with Polly, which is a problem since she's already got a fiancé. nd, of course, it's also going to be a problem for Danilo.

There are several movies that revolve around apartment buildings and the ensemble cast of tenants; Love Nest really came to mind while I was watching A Kiss in the Dark. However, I found A Kiss in the Dark to be a pale shadow of the other apartment movies, and the Ronald Reagan romantic comedies. Broderick Crawford is way too loud and obnoxious here; I'm not certain if it's the fault of the script or the director. Moore is someone you'd want to fire, and the whole interlude with the camping trip doesn't work in this movie. The one real bright spot in the movie is Maria Ouspenskaya, not long before her tragic death, as Eric's original piano teacher.

A Kiss in the Dark is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.