Still image from Dark Interlude in Movie Makers, Dec. 1953, 320.
English
400 ft
16mm
Kodachrome
Silent
With sound on tape.
"Maxine Messner, who began her career before her uncle's camera in 1948 with Maxine's Big Moment, has very probably ended it in Dark Interlude. Well, it was a career which began happily — with the simple elation of a school girl's first formal date. And it is one which now ends happily — with marriage. But in the course of this final production it was touch and go whether our heroine would achieve this happiness. For in Dark Interlude William Messner has asked his niece to play a young lady struck down — only temporarily, as it turns out — by blindness. It is a role which she discharges with a moving simplicity and honesty — as, in fact, do those who play her father and her sweetheart. And Mr. Messner brings to their aid superb camera work and delicately luminous dramatic lighting. Unfortunately, however, the development of his basic theme does not match in simplicity and clarity either the film's playing or its production values." Movie Makers, Dec. 1953, 334.
The film won the IAC Challenge Trophy for Best Story in 1960 (see IAC Trophies). It also won the Harris B. Tuttle Trophy for Best Family Film at the PSA Convention of 1954 (The New York Times, Aug 15, 1954, 13).
The film was awarded third place in the Louisville Photographic Society's contest of 1954 (The Courier-Journal, April 17, 1955, 148).
This film is a part of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers Collection held by the East Anglian Film Archive.
Institute of Amateur Cinematographers Collection, East Anglian Film Archive
Amateur Cinema