In movies and novels, which I know are not the most reliable of sources, we surely see torches lineing the corridors of ancient crypts and the stone hallways of massive keeps.
And there you have it. Movies in particular are just hopelessly unreliable examples of reality. Reality is that a 1 hour torch is pretty dang good. Reality also is that castles were NOT lit with torches down every long hallway and around the walls of every room. If you needed light you did what you needed to do during the day whene there WAS light. At night if you needed light you used a fire, brazier, torch or whatever but you used them in your immediate vicinity. You didn't light up the castle like the proverbial Christmas tree on the odd chance that someone might use a particular hallway or room. You lit the room you OCCUPIED at that moment. If you had to move somewhere else you did so in the dark or took a candle, lamp or whatever with you to dimly light your way.
How is it that those two aspects of the torch do not make sense?
Movies and books aren't meant to make particular sense. They're meant to evoke images and moods. Movies especially (as has been noted) have the further limitation that they need light. LOTS of light. WAY more light than normal lighting can possibly provide. In a movie a torchlit hallway is visually interesting. An UNLIT hallway with a character walking along carrying a candle provides a completely different center of interest and conveyence of mood.
In books... well it's not that much different than movies. A character moving in an unlit, dark room has to have the scene described much differently than a character who enters a well-lit room where he can see everyone and everything in it clearly. The author isn't worried about justifying HOW or WHY the room is lit - it is simply lit because the character needs it to be lit for the
author's purposes.
If you want reality, until the proliferation of gaslight, maybe with whale oil lamps, nighttime and unwindowed indoor locations were different experiences for people the world over than what modern man is used to. It is in some ways incomprehensible to us what life is like when even the home you live in is so dark at night. People may get more of an understanding of it when camping. Without a flashlight or lantern you have to walk by the moonlight or starlight when outdoors. Indoors you have a lantern on or hanging above/nearby your table - and that one light is your campsites sole light source. If you need to go into your tent or off to the campground lavatory then you need to grab your flashlight to light your way. Prior to light sources becoming a convenience fueled/powered by some modern infrastructure it was just a fact of life that the world was so often and so predominantly a dark, shadowy place.
Edit: wanted to add that when you are more familiar with doing so it is quite easy to function at night by moonlight. When your eyes are adjusted to lower light conditions it is surprising what you really CAN see. When you're moving from one pool of bright incandescant light to the next your eyes don't have time or ability to penetrate the shadows created. It is often easier to operate at night by the moon WITHOUT a flashlight than have to rely upon seeing only the what a flashlight can illuminate.
Take a torch into a dark cave and yeah, it's pretty crappy light - but even a little light will reveal a great deal especially in the close confines of the
typical real-world cavern. Most real-world caverns aren't like the Vault of the Drow. They're rough, narrow, cramped places where a 1000-watt lamp isn't
really going to do you any more good showing you the way than a weak torch.
